Inside the Fight for the Ring of Fire
Coleen Moonias grew up in the 1980s in Lansdowne House, a tiny Ojibwe community in northwestern Ontario. In winter, when the temperature plunged to 50 below zero, the interior walls of her home glittered with frost. Her parents hung blankets as insulation. In summer she foraged with her cousins for berries, fending off swarms of mosquitoes that rose from the surrounding peatlands. The nearest neighbouring community was nearly 100 kilometres away; Coleen’s entire world was this small place bound by blood and marriage. But Lansdowne House was sinking into Attawapiskat Lake, and so, when Coleen was eight years old, its residents moved to a new location nearby, which became Neskantaga First Nation, home to about 400 people. During the move, Coleen flew to Thunder Bay to stay with her grandmother, where she saw white people and heard English for the first time. She even saw her first porcelain toilet bowl, which made a big impression on her.
In Neskantaga, her family lived in an insulated house, complete with electricity and plumbing. But as she got older, the contrast between her life and life in the south nagged at Coleen. In Neskantaga, people had to fight fires at the dump with buckets of water. Why didn’t they have their own fire truck? Why wasn’t there a high school, so families wouldn’t have to relocate or separate so their kids could be educated? And why couldn’t she drink the water? The community has been on a boil-water advisory for nearly 30 years, the longest in Canada; pallets of bottled water are flown in every week and stacked in living rooms and offices around the reserve. It creates the feeling of a never-ending crisis, as though a hurricane swept through years ago and never left.
Coleen, who is now a 39-year-old mother and grandmother, grew up and became a teacher in the community’s elementary school. Last year, a friend suggested she run for a vacant position on the band council. She looked around at her crumbling school, Neskantaga’s overcrowded housing and the decades-old boil-water advisory, and decided she wanted to try to fix things. Upon taking office she was put in charge of the community’s land and resources portfolio—and quickly found herself at the centre of a showdown with the provincial government that could radically transform resource exploration in Canada.
Neskantaga is one of nine communities comprising the Matawa Tribal Council, a coalition of First Nations whose territory and treaty lands overlap with the Ring of Fire: a 5,000-square-kilometre, crescent- shaped deposit of ancient volcanic rock. The area could be worth billions of dollars once the metals buried there—nickel, copper, platinum and others—are extracted to become EV batteries, wind turbines and semiconductors. The deposit has been heralded as Ontario’s answer to Alberta’s oilsands, a path to industrializing the north and the most promising mineral discovery in a century. But it’s all buried deep in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, one of the largest remaining roadless regions in North America. To get equipment in and ore out, permanent roads need to be built and connected to Ontario’s highway system.
Among the Matawa nations—and especially among the five remote fly-in communities, including Neskantaga, clustered nearest to the Ring of Fire—there are dramatically different perspectives on the merits of building roads and exploiting the region’s resources. Some worry about the potential effects of industrial pollution on water quality, or about disturbing peatlands where millennia’s worth of carbon is buried. Others are concerned about losing control over their fragile communities and land rights. At the most extreme end, people fear that their region could transform into another Thunder Bay or Timmins, displacing the Ojibwe way of life altogether.
So, since landing her new job last October, Coleen Moonias has stopped teaching Ojibwe to kids and started immersing herself in the economic and technical language of the global mining industry: what’s an equity lender? What does flow-through financing mean? What’s a base metal? To her, promises of economic salvation ring hollow. She recently attended a mining conference in Toronto, where she saw Indigenous people from Australia talk about the toll mining had taken on their land. “I could just feel the shame and the devastation and the hurt when they were talking,” she says. “And all for a buck.”
Neskantaga has emerged as the most vocally skeptical among the nine Matawa nations. Its leaders say that the provincial government has muscled their community and others out of negotiations, violated century-old treaty commitments and selectively picked more amenable First Nations as the Indigenous faces of the Ring of Fire—specifically Webequie and Marten Falls First Nations. Though they are grappling with essentially identical problems of poverty and isolation to those Neskantaga faces, their leaders hope development in the region could be an economic lifeline. The Ontario government has tasked those nations, at their request, with the responsibility of leading environmental assessments for a road project that will ultimately connect the Ring of Fire with Highway 11, hundreds of kilometres to the south.
The battle is escalating. Last April, 10 Ontario First Nations, including Neskantaga, launched a $95-billion lawsuit against the federal and provincial governments, challenging their jurisdiction over Crown lands. If successful, it could derail the progress made toward developing the region to date and force the provincial government to reset its entire approach to the Ring of Fire.
Premier Doug Ford has said little about the lawsuit, except that he isn’t worried about it. The case will likely take years to work its way through the courts. So Neskantaga’s leadership, and a growing cohort of allied First Nations, are already considering direct action—including, if it comes to it, blockades and on-the-ground protests to slow or stop development. What’s at stake in the Ring of Fire depends on who you ask. The Ontario government sees the area as central to its plans to turn the province into a green-manufacturing powerhouse, anchoring a domestic supply chain supporting factories and jobs in the province’s south. To Neskantaga and allied First Nations, it represents political sovereignty—and a chance to right a century of wrongs.
The Ring of Fire has been enveloped in hype and myth since 2002, when the first deposits of copper and zinc were discovered by DeBeers, the South African diamond corporation. DeBeers abandoned the find—it was incidental to its quest for diamonds. But in 2007, a Toronto-based company called Noront Resources hit pay dirt, finding a high-grade deposit of nickel, copper and platinum it dubbed the Eagle’s Nest. Noront president Richard Nemis gave the Ring of Fire its name, inspired by the Johnny Cash song.
Word spread before Noront could even issue a press release touting its discovery. Lone-wolf prospectors and junior mining companies—small operations that often prospect before selling discoveries to bigger firms—were landing at the tiny airport in Webequie First Nation, buying all the food and fuel and booking up the sole motel. The rush was on; there were so many prospectors in the bush that they were literally bumping into one another. That was to be expected: they were following the centuries-old practice of free-entry mining, in which anyone can become a prospector and stake claims on Crown land. In only a few weeks in 2007, prospectors staked claims to tens of thousands of hectares of wilderness.
Estimates of the region’s untapped value from the provincial government have swelled as high as $1 trillion, though most private companies and mining experts have pegged it between $60 and $90 billion. Either way, a big payout will be necessary if development is to offset the extraordinary expense of building infrastructure and running roads through soupy peatlands that are as much water as solid ground. When Canada built railroads in the region 150 years ago, seemingly bottomless bogs were rumoured to swallow entire trains.
In the Ring of Fire’s early days, prospectors also began running up against the Matawa nations, who were suddenly dealing with an influx of outsiders tromping through their collective backyard without consultation. Tensions came to a head in 2010, when protesters from Marten Falls and Webequie blocked landing strips to prevent prospecting.
That dispute contained uneasy echoes of a previous conflict that both industry and the provincial government were keen to avoid repeating. In 2005, five First Nations had declared mining moratoriums on 50,000 square kilometres of Ontario’s north. That snowballed into protests and blockades, climaxing when one nation, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, evicted prospectors from its territory. The province ordered the nation to negotiate; instead, it walked away. The chief and five other members spent more than two months in jail for contempt of court.
Eager to avoid a similar blow-up, Ontario’s Liberal government, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, took a different tack toward the Ring of Fire, pursuing what it called a regional framework agreement. The idea was to model a new era in relations between government, industry and First Nations. All nine Matawa nations worked as partners, consulting with the government on how and where to build the multi-billion-dollar road needed to exploit the region’s riches.
Early discussions were promising. For the four most southerly Matawa nations, the question was already settled—they’d been linked to the provincial highway system for years. Leaders of the fly-in nations were not opposed to either mining or road-building, and there was both optimism and skepticism about whether a road could alleviate the worst aspects of remoteness. Some already had a glimpse of what life would be like with more permanent access, as temporary ice roads were built every winter to connect them to one another and to the highway system. The ice roads are visible from a plane window: thin, fragile white lines slicing through the muskeg. Building them is tough, dangerous work, mainly done by Indigenous crews wielding snow guns and driving grooming machines across frozen wetlands. Workers have died building them. But during the few months every year that they operate, cheaper groceries and gas arrive by truck, bringing the cost of living down, and there’s a psychological benefit for community members in knowing they can drive in and out. In Neskantaga and other fly-in nations, many band members live off-reserve, mostly in Thunder Bay, where teenagers attending high school and some Elders and the sick have to live for medical care.
For Neskantaga, however, the negotiations came at a difficult time. In 2013, the chief at the time declared a state of emergency after seven people died by suicide, and 27 more attempted it, in a single year. After each loss, Neskantaga closed down to grieve, the framework agreement consigned to the back burner. Another sore point for Neskantaga was the pace of prospecting by mining companies like Noront, which continued unabated. This was contrary to Neskantaga’s unique decision-making protocol, which requires developers to meet in person and garner consent from the entire community. Neskantaga sent cease-and-desist letters to Noront, which went unheeded.
By 2017, the regional framework was breaking down. Negotiations between the province and three nations—Marten Falls, Webequie and Nibinamik—were more advanced. As a provincial election loomed, the Wynne government released a proposal for an east-west road connecting those three nations to the highway system, on the way to the Ring of Fire itself. The two unconnected fly-in nations, Neskantaga and one called Eabametoong, were cut off. Eabemetoong’s chief called it a “betrayal.” As Wayne Moonias, then chief of Neskantaga (who is not related to Coleen Moonias) told CBC, “Nothing is happening without the free, prior and informed consent of our First Nations.”
After Doug Ford took power in 2018, he seized on the slow pace of negotiations as a sign of government ineptitude and promised a new jackhammer approach. (He even said he’d hop on a bulldozer and build the road to the Ring of Fire himself, echoing his brother, former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, known to promise to personally fill potholes.) Greg Rickford, the former MP for Kenora, who had until a few months prior served on Noront’s board of directors, became the new mining minister. The framework agreement was officially dead. When Rickford announced that the government would work bilaterally with First Nations who were willing to “move at the speed of business,” Marten Falls and Webequie stepped forward.
In March of 2020, Ford, Rickford and the chiefs of Marten Falls and Webequie stood shoulder to shoulder on a stage at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference in downtown Toronto—the largest mining industry event in the world. There they held up a signed agreement for an updated road project: the Northern Road Link, a north-south corridor linking Highway 11 to the Ring of Fire. Two offshoot roads would connect it to Marten Falls and Webequie. The province of Ontario pledged to fund the two nations as they led an environmental assessment on the Northern Link project. The days of blocking prospectors at landing strips were over
The new agreement between First Nations and the provincial government happened nearly concurrently with another game-changing development: a new online system for staking mining claims. It had first been launched in 2018 under Kathleen Wynne, and it quickly put the speculative, boom-and-bust nature of the mining business on steroids. Traditionally, prospectors had to physically venture onto remote lands and drive literal stakes into the ground to make their claims. After the online system was announced, anyone with an internet connection could do it in minutes. An exploration geologist at a junior mining company in Toronto could stake a sizable portion of northern Ontario before finishing their morning coffee.
The result was an explosion in new claims. First Nations are notified of claims if the province determines that exploration may have adverse effects on treaty rights. After the online system was introduced, former Neskantaga chief Wayne Moonias was overwhelmed by a firehose of claims and permits flooding his inbox. They would typically arrive in a big batch, 10 or 15 at a time, and at the end of the day or right before the weekend. “That was obviously a strategy,” he says. Each permit was a dense document outlining exploration activities like clearing topsoil, flying in drill pads, cutting through forest, pumping water from lakes or rivers and building temporary work camps.
The flood could hardly have come at a worse time. In early 2020, the staff member in charge of reviewing them was reassigned to the pandemic team as the band struggled to control outbreaks, limit visitors and manage quarantine. That October, the water supply shut down completely due to oil contamination, and some people decamped for Thunder Bay, crowding into a hotel with extended family. Neskantaga pleaded with the province to pause the online staking system until the crisis subsided—but the government had dubbed the mining industry an essential service, allowing it to continue operating.
Neskantaga has had some help from Dayna Nadine Scott, a professor of environmental law at York University in Toronto, who directs a legal clinic where she and a rotating group of students work with Neskantaga’s staff on their priorities. Responding to permits has become a major part of that work. (As of the end of 2023, there were more than 33,000 claims staked in the Ring of Fire at large, a 30 per cent increase in just 12 months.) Most of those responses have focused on environmental impacts. The Northern Link road will likely cross the Attawapiskat River at a narrow portage point with cultural significance for Neskantaga. As the only Matawa nation on the Attawapiskat watershed, that’s a major sticking point. There’s concern that construction and pollution there could endanger the Attawapiskat watershed and its wildlife, critical to Ojibwe diet, culture and tradition.
Beyond the localized impacts are the global ones. For centuries, the Hudson Bay Lowlands were dismissed as swampy, mosquito-ridden wastelands. As Lakehead University archaeologist Scott Hamilton described it to me, “You can’t sit down anywhere here without getting wet.” But it is the second-largest undisturbed area of peatlands on Earth. The Ring of Fire area alone contains about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon—10 times Ontario’s annual carbon emissions. Running a road through these sodden lands, or disturbing them for mining, could disrupt water flows, damage peat and release enormous amounts of buried carbon. Lorna Harris is a peatlands scientist who works with the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada. “If we go ahead with large-scale mining in the region, we’re not going to meet climate targets,” she says.
The irony, of course, is that the minerals within the region are key to the renewable-energy transition. Even as COVID cases soared in 2020, so did demand for what was buried in the Ring of Fire. “Please mine more nickel,” tweeted Tesla CEO Elon Musk in March of 2020, calling for more production of key ingredients in EV batteries.
Two companies, Australia’s Wyloo and Canada’s Juno Corp., took the lead in the Ring of Fire, buying and consolidating tens of thousands of claims between them. Today, Juno Corp. holds more than 17,000 claims in the Ring of Fire, more than any other company. It’s engaged in exploratory drilling and recently signed an agreement with Marten Falls First Nation to move forward with exploration on its lands. But Wyloo’s mining plans are more advanced. The company is owned by Andrew Forrest, one of Australia’s wealthiest people, who has spent the past few years reshaping his company into a renewable-energy giant. In 2021, Wyloo and BHP, the largest mining company in the world, entered into a bidding war over the rights to Noront’s Ring of Fire portfolio, driving its value from $133 million to $617 million over a few short months. By year’s end, Wyloo emerged victorious. It now plans to mine the Eagle’s Nest site for up to two decades, producing 15,000 tonnes of nickel every year—enough to build up to 250,000 EV batteries annually.
The company has also responded to concerns over Indigenous rights and environmental disturbances. The Eagle’s Nest mine is deep underground, which the company says will limit disturbance to approximately one square kilometre at the surface. It has also committed to ensuring a large part of its workforce is Indigenous and awarding $100 million in contracts to Indigenous businesses.
Of course, criticisms persist. Wyloo owner Andrew Forrest’s private investment group, Fortescue, is in the midst of a long-running lawsuit brought by the Yindjibarndi people in Australia over compensation for an iron ore mine. Rather than negotiating with the entire community, Fortescue signed an agreement with a breakaway group—a move that has divided the community and echoes rifts similar to those between the Matawa nations today. Kristan Straub, the CEO of Wyloo’s Canadian subsidiary, says the media is overly focused on this: “They don’t pick up on the other groups that are very satisfied with the training, education, business development and community uplift,” he says.
In Canada, Straub points to Marten Falls and Webequie as communities that may receive similar benefits. And indeed, in a fiery column for Northern Ontario Business magazine last year, Marten Falls Chief Bruce Achneepineskum called out resistant First Nations and southern activists as impediments to his own community’s ambitions. “[Marten Falls] feels that it is being subjected to a new form of paternalism, except this time it is coming from our Indigenous brothers and sisters and non-governmental organizations,” he wrote. He derided activists with comfortable, modern, urban lives bestowed in part by the mining industry: “I am glad to say that we do not suffer from the same cognitive dissonance.”
He echoed those comments to me. Isolation, he says, is a great hardship for his nation. The cost of living is high and opportunities are scarce. Easier and cheaper transportation of people and goods can only be a boon. “The Matawa communities don’t have infrastructure,” he says. “To the west of us, our Anishinaabe Nation brothers and sisters are being hooked up by transmission lines. They’re also planning roads. And to the east of us, the James Bay Cree communities are connected to transmission lines and they’re also talking about roads. This is very much now the norm.”
In early 2023, Neskantaga Chief Wayne Moonias was preparing to hand the reins to Chris Moonias, who’d been elected in that year’s band council elections. (The two are not related.) Wayne is a joker, full of jibes and playful banter, but Chris is the opposite: a large, quiet man who speaks sparingly and makes powerful declarations when he does. That March, he travelled to Toronto and confronted Doug Ford on the premier’s own turf. After Ford refused to meet, Moonias went to the public viewing gallery in the provincial legislature and bellowed, “No consent, no Ring of Fire!” It was a striking moment—and, says the chief, unplanned. Security escorted him out as Ford stared dead ahead.
The following month, Neskantaga and the leaders of nine other Ontario First Nations announced their $95-billion lawsuit against the federal and provincial governments. The suit was conceived as a response to development in the Ring of Fire, though its implications go far beyond the region. It is the brainchild of Kate Kempton, a B.C.-based lawyer with Woodward & Company, a firm that specializes in Indigenous law. She frequently litigates cases about treaty rights and development injunctions.
“It’s a treaty interpretation case, which sounds simple, but the implications are huge,” says Kempton. The suit alleges that both the federal and provincial governments routinely break Treaty 9, an agreement between the Crown and Indigenous communities signed in 1906 that covers more than 330,000 square kilometres of Ontario—most of the province’s land area north of the Great Lakes. Its central claim is that when the treaty was originally signed, Crown negotiators told First Nations leaders orally that they would retain the right to use their territories. But the text was written in English, which few Indigenous leaders of the time could read, and it does not reflect that promise. Instead, it says that the Crown can take control of land as it sees fit.
The suit’s ultimate aim is to create an entirely new system for managing resource extraction, including in the Ring of Fire. The details are not spelled out in the suit and would have to emerge from negotiations, but the goal is a shared jurisdiction that would accord far more power to First Nations than exists now. “I can’t imagine it wouldn’t domino across the numbered treaties across Canada if we succeed,” says Kempton.
In August, Kempton’s firm launched a second lawsuit—one that could also have enormous ramifications. Neskantaga is not involved but six other First Nations are: two other Matawa nations, Aroland and Ginoogaming, and four others besides. The suit takes aim at Ontario’s free-entry mining system. It claims the system violates First Nations’ constitutionally guaranteed right to be consulted on, and consent to, activities on treaty land. A similar challenge was brought in July by Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Ojibwe community near Kenora, Ontario, which hopes to invalidate more than 10,000 mining claims on its territory—the majority of which were created with the province’s online claims system. Both suits follow a successful legal challenge in British Columbia last year. “Establishing an online system allowing automatic registration of mineral claims in their territories, without creating a system for consultation, breaches the obligations of the Crown,” wrote the judge in that case. He gave the province 18 months to create a new system—though he did not cancel existing mining claims.
Both industry and province are proceeding today as if there are no impediments to developing the Ring of Fire. In June, Wyloo announced its intention to build a new battery-processing facility in Sudbury Bay that will take materials mined in the Ring of Fire for processing before sending them on to EV plants in southern Ontario. That announcement was criticized by Sonny Gagnon, chief of Aroland First Nation. “It’s shocking that Wyloo and other mining giants act as if the Ring of Fire mining is going ahead for sure despite the extreme level of harm it could cause to First Nations, climate change, the fragile environment and endangered species in the area,” he said in a media release. “Aroland stands to be really affected, because all of the traffic hauling all of that ore farther south will go right through our backyard.”
Weeks later, though, Aroland also announced that it was getting closer to an agreement on its stake in building roads to the Ring of Fire: “We’re living in Third World conditions,” said Gagnon, “and here’s an opportunity where we can manage to get out of these kinds of conditions and to be self-sustaining.”
After nearly two decades of discussion, there is enormous momentum behind the Ring of Fire, but that doesn’t mean shovels will necessarily hit the ground in northern Ontario any time soon. Kate Kempton sees the ongoing legal disputes as a foundation to seek injunctions against development. The prospect of more direct action looms as well—a blockade of road construction, for example. “I’m not ruling it out,” says Chris Moonias. “I’m not ruling anything out.” That includes, he adds, the possibility that Neskantaga could still say yes to a road and to mining. “But we have to be the ones deciding.”
Either way, Neskantaga will have plenty of support. Last year, a coalition of First Nations in Ontario formed a new entity called the Land Defence Alliance. The members include Neskantaga as well as Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, the nation whose leaders were arrested for protesting prospecting years ago. It also includes Grassy Narrows, which in 2002 began a blockade of a logging road on its traditional territory that continued for more than 20 years. “If it comes down to the ground, we will be helping them if they choose to blockade,” says Grassy Narrows Chief Rudy Turtle. “We will be sending people over there, actual people to go in and stand with them. It’s not just words only.”
One recent day after work, Coleen Moonias grabbed her drawstring bag of bingo dabbers and headed to Neskantaga’s community centre for a game. Inside, a mix of old and young band members were spread out at three long tables, dabbers and snacks at the ready. Coleen wove past the toddlers and grandparents to a big brass raffle wheel set up in front of the stage, where she put down $200 that she’d won in a snow-sculpting competition the week before.
That night’s bingo cards and raffle tickets were to support the Emergency Crisis Fund, which covers costs associated with airfare after a band member’s death. Last December, three Neskantaga members died within just a few weeks: a young woman killed herself, a high school student drowned suspiciously and Chief Moonias’s best friend died. All three lived in Thunder Bay. It typically costs about $15,000 to fly the body and family members to or from Neskantaga, as well as for the funeral and burial. This is one of the cruellest costs Neskantaga pays for its remoteness. A road would help alleviate that burden. But there is no telling what other impacts it may have. Coleen Moonias speaks with trepidation about making the right decisions today to safeguard the community tomorrow.
It wasn’t long ago that First Nations in Canada were often portrayed as unilaterally opposed to industrial and economic development. The reality was always more complicated, and that is more than ever the case today. The fractures within the Matawa nations testify to that. But those divisions feel far away in the north—more like drama stirred up elsewhere. Nothing illustrates that better than the plane ride that connects the Neskantaga and Webequie to Thunder Bay. Every day, members of the opposed nations share the same small space with one another, flying in and out of their two small communities. They have far more in common with each other than they do with the southerners pushing into the wilderness, hungry for metals.
This story appears in the October issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here, subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.
