Indigenous women show the way for banks to divest from fossil fuels
"We face the Kinder Morgan pipeline not in our backyard, but in our kitchen. We were once able to harvest more than 90 percent of our diet from our land and waters — but we haven't been able to harvest any food since 1972."
Charlene Aleck from the indigenous Tsleil-Waututh Nation in Canada has traveled to Germany and Switzerland to tell bank managers how a big oil project they are financing is destroying her home.
Since 1953, the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline has traced over 1,150 km (710 miles) of Canadian land, from Alberta to the west coast of British Columbia, carrying 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day straight through the homeland of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation.
Kinder Morgan is proposing to build a new pipeline alongside this existing one, in order to triple the amount of crude oil being transported. The project was initially approved by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016, but ongoing protests and lawsuits have temporarily put a hold on the construction.
Aleck and four other indigenous women from North America who are all affected by big oil projects were in Frankfurt, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland, to meet face-to-face with managers from Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and UBS.
