![]() The incident also seems to spark Beaton’s own interest in the bigger picture, prompting her to consider extraction’s impact on Indigenous communities and nature, as well as how the oil companies have structured their workers’ lives and relationships. It was one of the first times that national attention turned toward the sands before a broader awareness of its environmental cost emerged. ![]() ![]() Noting how insulated the workers up north were from the news (she was there between 20), she reproduces a CBC news piece about 1,500 birds trapped in toxic tailings. She’s showing us how their non-stop casual sexism has been honed by loneliness, sharpened and made dangerous by months isolated from their family, friends, and other tethers to the outside world. In spite of the damage they sometimes cause, though, these men aren’t really the targets of Beaton’s ire. We see men losing their sense of the men they had been among their own people.Īt times, it’s a pretty unrelenting tour of the infinite petty humiliations of being one of the few women in a cold, barren, remote, and homosocial place. ![]() Ducks Two Years in the Oil Sands Kate Beatonĭrawn & Quarterly $39.95 cloth 436pp 9781770462892In a place where the male-to-female gender ratio is around 50:1, a lot of what we see in Ducks is men – men asking invasive questions, men spreading rumours, men making lewd jokes, men jiggling their coworkers’ dormitory door handles at night on the off chance that some unsuspecting newb might have forgotten to lock hers. ![]()
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