After graduating from Mount Allison in 2005 Beaton worked at an oil sands mining project in Fort McMurray to pay off her student loans. [6] [7] An ambitiously complex graphic narrative of a Nova Scotian woman’s experience working in the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alberta. On her way to a better paying job at an OPTI-Nexen camp, where workers stay 24/7, Kate’s Somali taxi driver tells her: “You be careful, young girl. You live here, they don’t. Do you know how people treat a place where they don’t live?” To be honest, I think the author was possibly TOO kind, in her approach. As far as I can tell, she can't easily be accused of telling an unbalanced story. A graphic memoir recounting 2 years Beaton spent working at the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, far from her eastern coastal home of Nova Scotia.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands eBook : Beaton, Kate

Canada Reads winner Kate Beaton wins 2023 Eisner Awards for best writer/artist and best graphic memoir". CBC. 2023-07-25 . Retrieved 2023-07-26. As soon as I heard Kate Beaton was working on a memoir detailing her time in Northern Alberta, I was counting down the days until I could read it. While I do not know Kate personally, we’re the same age, we are both from Cape Breton and we were both in Fort McMurray around the same time (I arrived in 2007 and left in 2009). The oil sands operate on stolen lands. Their pollution, work camps, and ever-growing settler populations continue to have serious social, economic, cultural, environmental, and health consequences for the indigenous communities in the region. a b c Armitstead, Claire (2022-09-15). " 'We had to leave home for a better future': Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug-filled reality of life in an oil camp". the Guardian . Retrieved 2022-11-07.Beth Dunn. "Interview with Kate Beaton". Bethdunn.org. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013 . Retrieved 17 February 2012. Best Books 2022: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved 24 October 2022. Top 25 Female Comic Book Artists #15-11 - Comics Should Be Good @ CBR". 25 March 2015 . Retrieved 20 August 2016. a b c d "Doug Wright Awards: Past Winners". Archived from the original on 23 October 2020 . Retrieved 18 July 2021.

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Known primarily as the creator of the web-based comic series “Hark! A Vagrant,” Beaton moves to memoir with this examination of the two years she spent working in the oil sands to pay off her student loans. The author begins with an introduction to her home in Cape Breton, where the people have “a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently they will have to leave it to find work somewhere else. This push and pull defines us. It’s all over our music, our literature, our art, and our understanding of our place in the world.” On the surface, the book is a chronicle of the three years following the author’s college graduation (she also spent a year working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia), but Beaton captures much more than her personal story. She delves deep into the milieu of Fort McMurray, highlighting the complex relationships among the work camps, the oil companies, and the people living and working there. As the author recounts her time through several jobs, companies, and locations, she alternates the narration between the daily grind of the workers and the vistas of startling beauty surrounding them. She introduces each section by location and includes a list of the characters by job and home province, and she is careful to incorporate issues related to the local Indigenous peoples. After all, she writes, “the oil sands operate on stolen land.” Beaton captures numerous poignant, sometimes heartbreaking moments throughout the book, but the cumulative effect of her many stories is even more impressive. She creates an indelible portrait of environmental degradation, fraught interpersonal relationships among a workforce largely disconnected from home, and greedy corporations that seem only vaguely aware of the difficult work’s effect on their employees.

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The book is about big, complicated issues: economic exploitation, misogyny, the abuse and disregard of Indigenous land and people, class, education, upward mobility, labor, environmental destruction, sexual harassment and assault, toxic industrial waste, power, history, complicity, identity, loss, sacrifice, family, home. The ground the book covers is far too broad and in-depth to go into in one review. But Beaton touches on these myriad complex subjects gently. Everything is told through conversations she had or overheard. It's never didactic or ponderous. She lets us make the connections ourselves. She wonders whether, if her father had needed to support his family by working on the oil sands, he would have found himself resocialized into one of the leering men who surround her, or whether he would have been one of the quiet ones who keeps his head down and says nothing. Given the right stimulus, it could probably have happened to almost anyone, she thinks. The run turned Roach from a recent University of Toronto grad and aspiring law student into a household name in Canada. The horrible part is how most of the men don’t see their actions as anything other than “how guys are” and find her frustration to be playful instead of actual disgust. Yet it is damaging and takes a huge toll. As Beaton writes in the afterword about the sexual assault that occurs ‘ I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.’

Ducks by Kate Beaton review – bad boys from the blackstuff

Her insistence on presenting her experiences as complicated and sometimes contradictory is one of the book's most compelling features. The people doing this environmentally devastating work aren't evil villains; they too are being exploited by the oil companies and have few other options for supporting themselves as blue collar workers. The men Beaton works with are suffering from isolation, terrible mental health conditions, the absolute jokes of workplace safety policies, and subsequent drug and alcohol (ab)use. Some of them are also perpetrators of rape, assault, and harassment. She is haunted by the uncertainty of how men she knows and loves would act trapped in such a toxic environment for so long. All these things are true at the same time. This was a completely unique graphic novel for me—as strong in its narrative as it is in its artwork. The graphics… OMG….. it almost doesn’t even need to be said how incredibly talented Kate Beaton is as an artist too. Filled with expressions and emotions!! a b c d Salkowitz, Rob (2022-09-27). "Kate Beaton's New Masterpiece Just Rewrote The Standard For Graphic Memoirs". Forbes . Retrieved 2022-11-07. Her central thesis is that the oil business is damaging to almost everyone involved. Particularly the workers who travel from all over Canada (and the world) to work in these remote locations in harsh conditions, all because the pay’s so good and there aren’t any lucrative jobs anywhere else. What’s not considered is the psychological impact of being separated from civilisation and loved ones, leading to extensive substance abuse, loneliness, mental health problems, and broken homes.Though the book is entirely from Beaton's perspective, there is significant subtext throughout, [4] and many moments in the story reflect larger movements in Canada around the environment, politics, culture, and economics surrounding the oil sands. [6] Beaton is a migrant worker; growing up in an economically depressed part of Canada, she understood that she would have to leave home to make money and repay her student debt. [2] She and many other workers are forced to take on difficult and undesirable jobs, and there are undertones of class resentment towards those who chastise oil sands workers while their economic standing shields them from making such a difficult compromise. [4] [2] Most of the other workers are men, outnumbering women 50-to-1. [7] Beaton is subjected to frequent sexual harassment, but because of her need to pay off her debt, she does not report others and continues to work. [4] [8] The author and illustrator, Kate Beaton, who hails from Nova Scotia, worked for two years in the Northern Alberta oil sands to pay off her student loans from college. While there, she worked in a remote setting, “where men outnumber[ed] women by as much as fifty to one.” Sadly, I don't know a single woman currently over the age of 25 who could read this graphic novel without shaking her head in sadness or groaning with a great sense of solidarity and understanding of the circumstances described here. It is such a tragic and relatable story… I don’t think I will be able to stop thinking about it for a long time. I need to tell you this--there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.’