First Nations are outraged at a report by Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan, which Athabasca Chipewyan elder Pat Marcel says labels natives as potential terrorists.

“It’s ridiculous,” Marcel says. “Who is Flanagan that he can lump all of us together and say we’re all possibly terrorists without even knowing how we operate with industry and government?”

The report identifies sources of “possible extra-legal and even violent resistance to industrial development” in northern Alberta, singling out individual saboteurs, eco-terrorists, mainstream environmentalists, First Nations and the Métis people.

The Pembina Institute is miffed to be named as a environmental group that is “opposing violence but indirectly lending support to extremism by endorsing its goals, if not its methods.”

“We totally reject that idea,” says Simon Dyer, oilsands program director for the Pembina Institute. “Saying that having concerns about oilsands development is not a legitimate position to hold is ridiculous.” The report, he says, is speculative, as there has been no history of violence in the oilsands.

Flanagan, who authored the report, based on a history of “oppositional activities in the north,” says he wanted to put the news reports of pipeline sabotage in perspective. He says the groups that are speaking out against the report have obviously not read it, because its conclusions are that organized sabotage is unlikely to occur.

“I never at any point never accused any native people of terrorist activity,” Flanagan says. “I specifically say they have no history of violence and they are unlike to get involved with sabotage or terrorists.”

Click here to open a PDF of the report.