I have been covering Fort Chipewyan for years. I’ve flown over the Athabasca River, filmed it from the air — that vast, brown, silted water that flows from the oil sands down through this remote northern Alberta community and into the land, the animals, the fish, the people. I made a documentary, Killer Water, about what is happening there. I have interviewed community members, chiefs, doctors, scientists, elders. I’ve written stories that made people in power very uncomfortable. And every time, the response from the province has been some version of the same thing: the numbers are normal.
Last week, Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro stood inside Parliament Hill and delivered a warning to Canada. The community’s own independently commissioned health study — “Our Health, Our Future” — had found what the community has always known: between 1993 and 2022, 135 unique individuals across Fort Chipewyan-Mikisew Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Metis residents- were diagnosed with cancer across twenty-four different types. Fourteen of those individuals had multiple diagnoses, bringing the total number of cancer cases to 149. The rate of all cancers combined running approximately 25 percent above the provincial average. And those numbers are almost certainly an undercount.
Alberta’s response? The cancer rates are within normal range.
And then came the line that stopped me cold: the province said there are no reported cases of childhood cancer in Fort Chipewyan.
I knew that wasn’t true. I’d been hearing from families for years. What I didn’t know was whether they’d be willing to go on the record — to put their names, their children’s names, their suffering into print and face whatever came next. These communities have seen what happens to people who speak up. They’ve watched Dr. John O’Connor, the physician who first blew the whistle on elevated cancer rates in Fort Chip in 2006, face a complaint to his regulatory body. They’ve watched elders raise alarms for decades and be dismissed as anecdotal. They’ve watched chiefs deliver letters directly to prime ministers and receive polite acknowledgment followed by silence.
And yet — they decided enough was enough.
To Karyn Frank and Ava Tuccaro, to Lori and Derek Tourangeau and their daughter Athena, and to Janelle Vermillion: I want to begin by thanking you from the bottom of my heart. What you shared with me took courage, trust, and a love so fierce it pushed past every reason you had to stay quiet. You did not have to do this. You chose to. And I hope the world receives what you’ve given it with the weight it deserves.
These are not statistics. These are children. These are mothers who drove through the night. Fathers who beat cancer twice and watched their daughter get sick. Women who are signing their houses over to their kids because they’re scared they won’t be here long enough to pass them on any other way.
This is what normal looks like in Fort Chipewyan, according to the Province of Alberta.
“She’s No Longer a Fort Chip Resident”
It was 2023 when Karyn Frank’s world cracked open.
Karyn grew up in Fort Chipewyan. She’s a member of Pound Maker Cree Nation but spent most of her life in the community, and was working shift work in Fort McKay when her daughter Ava, seven years old, started complaining of back pain at her father’s home in Fort Chipewyan. They brought her to the nursing station — there’s no hospital in Fort Chipewyan, a detail worth noting — and were told it was a pulled muscle. Her parents had doubts. “A seven-year-old kid shouldn’t be at home for days complaining of headaches and back pain where she can’t go to school,” Karyn told me. She kept pushing from afar: just get blood work done, push for it. The response, again, was that there was no point.
She pushed once more. This time, the results came back so urgent that health workers went to Ava’s father’s house to wake him up. Within hours, Ava was medevaced to Edmonton. Karyn drove down to meet them — a long, fast drive she describes simply as “quick”. The kind of thing you say when adrenaline has compressed time.
At the Stollery Children’s Hospital, the diagnosis came swiftly: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. ALL. She was only seven years old.
“She had the most rare side effects,” Karyn told me. “Every rare complication from chemo — it was a bet that she would have it.” Strokes. Severe pancreatitis. The family spent more time in the hospital than out of it for those first brutal eight months, before the treatment tapered into something more manageable. Two and a half years in total.
Ava is twelve now and cancer-free. She’s still followed by neurology for the strokes, still followed by oncology, and will be for the rest of her life. “She’s doing great,” Karyn told me. “She’s doing amazing.”
When I asked Karyn what she made of the province’s statement that there are no cases of childhood cancer in Fort Chipewyan, she didn’t hesitate.
“I think it’s outrageous.”
Here is why the province can say what it says — and why it is a sleight of hand so brazen it should make every Canadian uncomfortable. When Ava got sick, she had to move out of Fort Chipewyan because she needed to be within thirty minutes of a hospital. Fort Chipewyan doesn’t have one. So in Alberta Health Services’ administrative records, tied as they are to a postal code, Ava is no longer a Fort Chipewyan resident. She doesn’t count.
“If she didn’t get cancer, would she still be from Fort Chip?” Karyn asked me. The answer is obvious. “She didn’t matter in that number. Her number didn’t matter.”
I asked about other cases in the community. “So many,” Karyn said quietly. “Many.”
Ava, who sat with us through most of our conversation, said she only remembers getting on the helicopter. She’s twelve now. She was seven then. She remembers the helicopter.
Athena’s Knees. And Everything After.
I was speaking with Lori and Derek Tourangeau in Edmonton, where they had driven in a panic from Fort McMurray the day before to get their daughter Athena to the Stollery Children’s Hospital.
Lori is a member of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and grew up in Fort Chipewyan on and off before settling there in 2014, when she met Derek. They had their daughter Athena in 2015, and almost from the start, Athena was a child of the land. Since she was seven months old, she ate traditional foods, says her mother Lori — duck soup to school, dry meat, moose, geese, the whole, living diet of a Dene/Cree child raised the way the land intended.
“We always thought she would be the healthiest,” Lori told me, “because she lived off the land.”
Nearly two years ago, when Athena was around eight, she started complaining of knee pain that wouldn’t quit. The clinic in Fort Chipewyan said it was growing pains. The family accepted that and watched and waited, but the knee persisted into the following year, and then more symptoms began layering in — shortness of breath, chest pain, stomach pain that worried Lori enough that she wondered about gallstones. Still, nothing pointed clearly toward something serious, and the clinic kept sending them home.
Then in January 2026, everything escalated. Athena came in with the butterfly rash — that distinctive flush across the cheeks and bridge of the nose associated with lupus — alongside a mild fever and a knee so swollen and painful she could barely bear weight. The clinic in Fort Chipewyan looked at her and said the fever wasn’t high enough to be concerned about- they suggested she might just be getting sick from the cold. Her parents made the decision to move to Fort McKay because Athena’s symptoms kept worsening. At the hospital in Fort McMurray, hospital staff x-rayed Athena’s knee and told them again it looked like a torn tendon. They told her to stay off of it, no more running, handed them crutches and sent them home.
By the beginning of March, Lori called 911. Athena couldn’t move. Her fingertips had gone blue. Her lips had gone blue. She could barely breathe, barely form words. Her feet were turning blue and her legs were retaining water. During the hospital stay that followed, the same symptoms kept cycling back — the blueness, the weakness, the inability to walk, a loss of vision that had started happening at night and was now occurring in the day. Two pediatricians at the Fort McMurray hospital finally said what the family had been circling around for months. “They told me they do believe it could potentially be lupus,” Lori said, “but ‘we’re not safe to say so until she sees a rheumatologist.’”
SLE — Systemic Lupus Erythematosus — attacking her joints and potentially her organs: her kidneys, her heart, possibly her lungs, possibly her vision. “She can’t really shower on her own or stand up for too long,” Lori told me. “One day she’ll say, mom, I can go play today, and then she comes inside and lays down, and then she has the butterfly rash, she can’t see, she loses her vision. And then a few days later she’ll be okay, and we’re like, oh, we’re gonna have a good day.” Athena was ten years old when we spoke, fighting for a diagnosis that still hadn’t been made official because the specialist appointment hadn’t come through yet, her parents keeping a walker ready for her worst days. Her pediatric doctor’s instruction had been direct: Take her to the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton. Do not wait. I believe this is lupus attacking her healthy organs, Lori told me.
This isn’t a question that exists in a vacuum. Published research has found that environmental exposures — including heavy metals, air pollution, industrial contaminants, and persistent organic pollutants that bioaccumulate in the food chain — are linked to an increased risk of developing SLE. Studies have found that nearly 60 percent of SLE risk may be attributable to environmental factors, and researchers have specifically identified mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals as capable of triggering autoimmunity. Fort Chipewyan sits at the end of a long river that carries whatever flows into it from one of the largest industrial operations on earth.
I asked Lori whether she believed there was an environmental connection. She had done the research herself, done the math herself, and what she found stayed with her.
“I looked at the last two spills of contaminants from the oil sands that reached the Athabasca River,” she told me. “There was five to ten million litres spilled into our water system. And there’s only one part per million of mercury in a litre. That may seem small, but that’s five to ten tons — one ton per million — and one ton is the size of a small Toyota Corolla. That’s five to ten cars of mercury alone being let out into the water. We’re consistently living off the land. The animals are eating it. The fish are eating it. Everything in that water, everything.”
“We wanted our children to live off the land,” she said, holding back tears. “We wanted to instill what was taken from us in residential schools — brought back, for future generations.”
She paused.
“And then our daughter is sick.”
Derek Tourangeau, Athena’s father, has survived cancer twice. The first time, in 2020, was colon cancer — months of going to the clinic in Fort Chipewyan with symptoms that were explained away as bacterial growth, then irritable bowel syndrome, then a dietary problem. He lost thirty pounds in a month. He finally pushed hard enough for a colonoscopy. The results confirmed what the clinic had refused to consider: cancer. He went through one round of chemotherapy and had to stop — it was destroying him, leaving him bedridden, unable to eat, unable to function. He reached out for traditional help instead, and healers took him to their home territory for four days of ceremony and put him on traditional medicines for a year. At his follow-up, his oncologist said: “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” It was gone.
In 2023, stomach cancer. Another year of fighting, more traditional healing, more medicine. In November 2024, confirmed clear again.
Two cancers, both survived, through a combination of his own persistence and traditional knowledge the medical system wasn’t offering. Now watching his daughter fight something that in traditional teaching carries no easy cure. When it came to what needs to change, Derek didn’t hold back — and he was speaking from a place of having lived every failure in that system himself. “A full-time doctor in the community — not someone on a phone relay through a nurse, a doctor who’s actually there — that’s the biggest thing,” he said. “Because a doctor can’t see you through the phone. They can’t assess what’s actually happening with your body from a description relayed through a nurse. That’s what we have in Fort Chip, and it’s not enough.” He spoke about the need for housing in Fort McMurray and Edmonton for community members who have to leave for treatment, a medical liaison who can bridge Western medicine and traditional healing, financial support programs that don’t run dry after a thousand dollars when a hotel room alone costs four hundred a night. “There needs to be a program in place for when people get sick, so they can go get the treatments they need — because people are dealing with bills and it’s another burden. It’s another weight you can’t deal with. And somebody needs to take accountability.”
“The almighty dollar ruins everything,” he said. “Everybody’s getting paid to be quiet.”
He said he went for a job interview not long ago with a company that works in tailings ponds. During the interview, they explained they puncture the lining of the pond to take samples. He asked the question directly: so there is seepage? “Next question”, they said. He didn’t take the job.
“My Mom Was Gone in Twelve Days”
Janelle Vermillion has lived in Fort Chipewyan her whole life. She works in compassion and bereavement for the Mikisew Cree Nation — when someone in the community passes away or needs care, she is among the first to know.
When Mikisew Cree commissioned the “Our Health, Our Future” study, part of Janelle’s role was to compile a list of community members who had been diagnosed with cancer. She had two weeks to do it.
“It was horrible,” she told me. “I almost quit my job. I had to go through counseling right after,” she said. “It still affects me. I still don’t want to deal with any of it.”
The number that came out of that process — 149 Mikisew Cree members diagnosed with cancer between 1993 and 2022 — was already, she says, grotesquely below what she knows the true count to be. That 149 represents all residents of Fort Chipewyan across the full investigation period. And even then, Janelle says, it is grotesquely below the true count. She estimates the real number approaches 600.
She sat in her grandmother’s house as we spoke — the house she grew up in, where every Sunday fifteen to twenty people would gather around the table. She thought through the people at that table alone and what had happened to them. Her mother died of lung cancer. Both of her mother’s parents died of cancer. At least five or six of her mother’s siblings developed cancer. Her uncle survived cancer — and his granddaughter later had childhood leukemia and survived. That same uncle was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and so was a cousin who lived on the same street at the same time, in the 2000s. Two ALS cases. One street.
The community knew long before any study confirmed it. There is a word in Cree for cancer — mancos — and an elder had used it generations ago to warn his son that it was coming, that many people were going to die, she told me. The son thought he was speaking in the old way, in metaphor. He wasn’t.
“Those elders are speaking to us now through the numbers of people who passed away,” Janelle told me. “They were the same elders who were the first to go for treatment. And nobody listened.”
About a year ago, she started getting lumps on her body. The first appeared on her leg. She thought immediately of a friend from school — one of Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro’s closest friends — who died of a rare bile duct cancer that had announced itself the same way, with lumps appearing on the body. “That’s the first thing I thought of,” she said. “And then it started happening on my body. So I was like — this is not right.” She went to the clinic. It’s nothing, they told her. Whatever, she said. She’d heard that before. Over the following months, more lumps appeared — on her leg, on her breast, at her cervix — and she found herself waiting on a biopsy, already three screenings in, telling herself not to read too far ahead.
She has a five-year-old daughter. She is 46 years old.
Her mother had gone in for what seemed like a routine checkup. She called Janelle shortly after. Twelve days later, she was dead of lung cancer.
“I’m sitting here signing my house over to my kid,” Janelle told me, crying, “because I might be gone in twelve days like my mom.”
She isn’t being dramatic. She is doing what any person does when they have watched their family die fast and are now staring down the same hallway.
“My five-year-old knows about cancer,” Janelle said. “She woke me up one night crying because she thought I was gonna die from cancer. I told her I wasn’t. And I felt like I was lying to her.”
She is 46 years old. She has a granddaughter who has just started walking.
What the Province Doesn’t Want to Count
Here’s the official position of Alberta Health Services and the Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services, issued in response to Mikisew Cree’s study: cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan are “within normal range”. There are no reported incidents of childhood cancer.
I asked Arrowsmith Gold Inc. — the community health and safety firm that has been supporting Mikisew Cree with the “Our Health, Our Future” initiative— to answer directly for the record on the childhood cancer question and on the data the province withheld. They were candid.
On the question of childhood cancer, I asked: Alberta says there are none. Your study found something different. What happened?
Their answer: “In the report provided to Mikisew by Alberta Health Services, no pediatric cancers were identified. This is contradictory to evidence our team gathered through qualitative interviews, and reiterated during knowledge sharing of the findings at community events.”
They provided some theories as to why this might be. Individuals who changed their address around the time of diagnosis may not have been captured in AHS’s administrative records. The Fort Chipewyan postal code was the only tool available to identify Fort Chipewyan residents in provincial data. If you left, you disappeared from the count. Arrowsmith Gold confirmed plainly: “The rates noted in the report were likely underrepresented.”
I also asked what data the province had withheld from Mikisew Cree. The list is staggering. The community had requested cancer mortality outcomes, stage at diagnosis, rates of cancer screening, whether patients received timely and appropriate care, whether patients survived. Almost none of it was provided. What Mikisew Cree did receive, after at least three requests, was age-standardized cancer incidence rates broken down by cancer type, year of diagnosis, and sex. That’s it.
“The absence of the requested data limited the interpretation of the report specifically to the rates of cancer in Fort Chipewyan relative to Alberta provincial rates,” the company told me. “We were unable to describe the severity of disease at diagnosis, which is an important indicator of access to care and health system functioning.”
And then this: “Access to the withheld data would likely increase concern regarding the burden of cancer in Fort Chipewyan.”
The province handed back an incomplete picture, after more than one year since Mikisew made the initial data request, then used that picture to declare there was no crisis. Call it policy. Call it protocol. Call it whatever makes it easier to sleep at night. The province withheld the data that would show whether people were dying earlier, being diagnosed at later stages, whether cancer screening is even happening — and then used the hole where that data should have been as evidence there was nothing to find.
That is not a gap in data collection. That is a choice.
The Community Responds.
There’s a pattern here that anyone who has spent time in Indigenous communities will recognize. The community raises the alarm. They are told their numbers are wrong, their methods are flawed, their conclusions are overreach. They commission their own study with internationally credentialed researchers. They present findings at Parliament Hill. And the province issues its statement — not to the community first, not after speaking with anyone who lives there, but straight to the media — dismissing the findings before the community has even landed back home from Ottawa.
Mikisew Cree’s technical team described the province’s response to me as “tone deaf.” One official said it plainly: the same lines, the same rhetoric, year after year.
Let’s be clear about who conducted this study. Arrowsmith Gold’s team holds PhDs from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, Simon Fraser, Queen’s, and the University of Victoria. Their oncology specialist received doctoral training from Queen’s in cancer epidemiology and additional training at the International Agency for Research on Cancer — a specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization — and has 29 peer-reviewed publications to his name. The peer reviewers include a clinical toxicologist who helped develop the WHO’s human health risk assessment toolkit, and a senior environmental health specialist who, in her last role, held the environment, climate change and health portfolio for the World Health Organization across 38 countries of the Asia Pacific region. These are scientists who have worked in over thirty countries and reviewed major industrial development projects for the World Bank Group, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations.
They found 25 percent elevated cancer rates. They found the numbers are rising — 30 new cases between 2013 and 2017, climbing to 38 between 2018 and 2022. They found the province withheld the data that would tell us how much worse it really is.
And Alberta says: within normal range.
What They Are Asking For
I know there are people in Fort Chipewyan who wanted to speak and couldn’t. People who have had cancer and told me so directly, but who work for industry and are terrified of losing their jobs if they go public. I have heard from them in the background, off the record, in messages they ask me not to attribute. The silence around this story is not natural. It is manufactured, and it costs people.
I know there are many more cases. Hundreds.
These families are asking for accountability — real accountability, from the governments and the industry that have looked away for decades while a community got sick. They are asking that when a child from Fort Chipewyan gets sick and has to leave home to survive, she still counts as being from Fort Chipewyan.
Karyn Frank said it plainly: “Everybody matters. Our children matter. My child matters. And everybody downriver matters.”
They Have Had Enough.
Now it is not hush hush. Now the families have had enough.
The province can keep insisting the numbers are fine. It can keep losing people in postal codes when they have to leave home to survive. It can keep withholding data and using the resulting silence as proof of normalcy.
But there is a twelve-year-old girl named Ava who got on a helicopter when she was seven. There is a ten-year-old named Athena who carried duck soup to school her whole life and now can’t stand long enough to shower. There is a forty-six-year-old woman named Janelle who is signing her house over to her daughter, just in case. There is a man named Derek who beat cancer twice and is now watching his firstborn fight an illness the traditional knowledge of his people calls the disease with no cure.
And there are hundreds more in that community whose names I don’t have. Yet.
Ask them if it’s normal.
Brandi Morin is an award-winning Cree and Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. Her documentary Killer Water, investigating the oil sands’ impact on Fort Chipewyan, won the 2024 Canadian Hillman Prize. She is the founder of Indigenous Insider.
Sources:
PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH ON SLE AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE
• Parks, C.G. et al. — “Environmental Exposures and the Development of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,” PMC/NCBI
• Woo, J.M.P. & Parks, C.G. — “The role of environmental exposures and gene–environment interactions in the etiology of systemic lupus erythematosus,” Journal of Internal Medicine, 2022
• “Understanding the role of environmental factors in the development of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,” PMC/NCBI
• “Environmental Influences on Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Expression,” PMC/NCBI
• “Environmental risk factors of systemic lupus erythematosus: a case-control study,” Scientific Reports / Nature, 2023
• Gulati, G. — “Environmental factors may trigger lupus onset, progression,” University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, via ScienceDaily
• Kim et al. — “Environmental Risk Factors for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Through the Lens of Social Determinants of Health,” Arthritis Care & Research, 2025
Infuriating, soul-crushing; yet beautifully written, this piece is incredible.
I worked for a cancer screening program that went to Ft Chip years ago. The first year that women were screened for breast cancer, half the people screened had a suspicious mammogram, and several of those had advanced cancers. When I asked how this was possible, I was told the cancer rates were within normal limits. The government is using science selectively here, and it's bullshit. Way, way, way more needs to be done, not only for Ft Chip but every Indigenous community, especially ones close to industry. Thanks for reporting on this, great article.