I became very interested in “An Athabasca Story” mainly because I was confused on how Cariou wanted the last few paragraphs to be portrayed to the reader. I did a lot of research which I used for my close reading but I broke down almost every aspect of “An Athabasca Story” to be able to picture it better.

Cariou grew up in Saskatchewan and when he heard that his community and northern Alberta were under the threat of oil sands, he traveled to Alberta to create a documentary on the natives who have been dealing with these fears. While he was there, he spoke with an elder who told him some stores. Cariou said that his stories started to blend in with what he saw there(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmZ-ej_Sx5Q). I viewed Elder Brother as a Native American who lived off the land in the forest. There was some discussion in class on whether he was human or not but it stated that he wore moccasins, had fingers and toes, and spoke English.

When the dump truck driver mentioned Greenpeace, I looked up the definition and it is an “organization that stresses the need to maintain a balance between human progress and environmental conservation. Members take active but nonviolent measures against what are regarded as threats to environmental safety, such as the dumping of nuclear waste in the sea” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/greenpeace).This showed that there were protestors objecting to what the company was doing to the land before Elder Brother arrived.

Certain aspects led me to the conclusion that “An Athabasca Story” takes place in Canada in the actual Alberta wilderness. There was research done by Business Insider on the Canadian oil sands and it showed the massive Cat 797 dump trucks mashing up the earth, mentioned as “houses”, and the conveyor belts used to extract the oil and sand, which Elder Brother also referred to as the “big house.” The first step to obtaining the oil that the men in “An Athabasca Story” are going to use to burn and create fuel is they clear the trees from the land then the trucks come and scoop up the oil sand. This is the oil that Elder Brother started to dig up and became stuck in. Inside the conveyor belt refinery, “the conveyors take the sand to be conditioned — the first step in separating it from the oil Conditioning is just mixing the oil sand with water where the oil begins to part from the sand. It is then piped to containers where it separates into three parts: Oil froth on top — sand on the bottom — oil, sand, clay, and water in the middle. Then everything is exposed to hot, high pressure gas creating sulfur which is then sold” (http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-destructive-canada-oil-sands-2012-10?op=1). When Elder Brother was lifted from the sand, this was the substance he was mixed into and he became part of this process.

All the evidence and observations that Warren Cariou discovered are packed into this story and that is why I explained a few aspects that helped me visualize the plot. The message I took was that humans have caused irreversible changes to the earth and the oil companies are fixated on making money that they are blinded to the devastation that they have caused. As Elder Brother comes back to life as the fuel in the cars; it is a reminder to human kind that nature imprisoned and “trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out.”