Indigenous ExtrACTIVISM in Boreal Canada: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Struggles and Sovereign Futures

Abstract

This article approaches contemporary extractivism as an environmentally and socially destructive extension of an enduring colonial societal structure. Manifested in massive hydroelectric developments, clearcut logging, mining, and unconventional oil and gas production, extractivism removes natural resources from their points of origin and dislocates the emplaced benefits they provide. Because externally imposed resource extraction threatens Indigenous peoples' land-based self-determination, industrial sites often become contested, politicized landscapes. Consequently, I also illuminate the struggles of those who strive to turn dreams for sovereign futures into reality through extrACTIVIST resistance to extractivist schemes. Presenting four case synopses-from across Canada's boreal forest and spanning a broad range of extractive undertakings-that highlight both sides of the extractivism/ACTIVISM formulation, this article exposes the political roots of resource-related conflicts and contributes to an emerging comparative political ecology of settler colonialism. While extractivism's environmental effects are immediate and arresting, these physical transformations have significant cultural consequences that are underlain by profound political inequities. I ultimately suggest that because extractivism is colonial in its causal logic, effective opposition cannot emerge from environmentalism alone, but will instead arise from movements that pose systemic challenges to conjoined processes of social, economic, and environmental injustice.

Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels

“…That said, other concerned groups may prefer to confront extraction with their own vocabularies and experiential knowledge, as recent actions taken by Native American communities make clear (e.g. Willow, 2016; Zalik, 2015a). It is in this regard that we can witness the influx of more original geo-expertise.…”

Politicizing the Body in the Anti-Mining Protest in Greece

“…Social movements have decried extractivism, which has been implemented extensively in poor but resource-rich Latin American and other developing countries (Horowitz, 2017;Jenkins, 2014;Jenkins & Rondón, 2015;Lahiri-Dutt, 2012). Yet new 'cost-effective' methods have enabled extractive industries to expand from the global South to the North, particularly to sparsely populated areas inhabited by indigenous populations (Sjöstedt-Landén & Fotaki, 2018;Willow, 2016), to poorer ex-communist members of the European Union (e.g. Romania; see Velicu, 2015) and to indebted Eurozone countries such as Greece, where attracting foreign investment is a priority (Tsavdaroglou, Petrakos, & Makrygianni, 2017).…”

The Exhaustion of Wood Buffalo National Park

“…(p. 47) In many ways Treaty 8 differed from the other "numbered treaties" signed in Western Canada at the time. With the exception of the economy that had grown around the fur trade, the Cree and Dene largely lived a subsistence lifestyle revolving around hunting, fishing, and gathering (Willow, 2016). Neither group was optimistic about the prospect of a treaty because they feared that they would be forced to settle on small reserves and abandon their ways of life.…”

“…Moreover, tailings lakes have become deathbeds for countless migratory birds. The transformation of the ecosystem within the Peace-Athabasca Delta has also had dramatic consequences for Indigenous people's ways of life and cultural traditions (McLachlan, 2014;Willow, 2016), showing how the exhaustion of wild lands is inseparable from the exhaustion of a whole way of life. While many of them continue to hunt, fish, and trap, the frequency of these practices is decreasing sharply, and so is the amount of country foods that families are able to safely obtain from the land each year (McLachlan, 2014).…”

“…Humans have always taken from the earth, of course, but in the time of colonial capitalism taking from the earth means turning the earth into a massive inventory of resources. These resources are then separated from the relations they have with each other and removed from wherever they may originate (Willow, 2016).…”