This is a really heartfelt and heart wrenching look at life in that line of work but also a sharp condemnation of the misogyny that occurs there. A decade and a half later, Beaton has piled her memories of life in a camp in Alberta – built to exploit one of the world’s largest single oil deposits – into a chunky, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. She graduated from Mount Allison University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in history and anthropology. The tremendous number of old white guys wearing hardhats and safety vests - how come we can tell them apart? She and her few female colleagues learn to live with nicknames (“perky”, “ducky”, “little miss”, “cougar”), but intimidation is followed, with terrifying banality, by violence.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton | Goodreads

As Beaton stays in the oil sands, she begins to joke casually about what kind of cancer she’ll develop from their polluted air; she watches the wildlife driven out of its habitat. Fittingly, considering that this is a book about exploitation, Beaton borrows it from the Somali cab driver who gives her a lift to a job site. Saddled with an arts degree that leaves her feeling unemployable and a small mountain of student debt, Beaton leaves her beloved home of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, for the oil sands of Alberta, where work is plentiful and life is cheap. 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.When she arrives at one new camp, men line up around the building to get a look at her and loudly discuss their opinions of her body. It’s a soul-sapping environment, staffed mostly by out-of-state workers who, like the land, are a resource to be exploited.

Kate Beaton on ‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on

In April 2008, an international media storm erupted over the death of 1,600 ducks in a toxic pond in Alberta, Western Canada. I walked back into one that had good internet in your room at night, so I was making my comic online. Ducks is an autobiographical graphic novel that recounts author Kate Beaton's time spent working in the Alberta oil sands. The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things…The worst thing is that your heart breaks.The Trailbreaker 21:54 Graphic novelist Kate Beaton on her new book: "Ducks: two years in the oilsands" Featured Video"Ducks: Two Years in the Oil-sands.