The limits to extraction: mining and colonialism in Nunavut

Bernauer, Warren

doi:10.1080/02255189.2019.1629883

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The project's small size, combined with generous government subsidies, meant that Panarctic paid only small amounts of royalties and taxes for Bent Horn, which were primarily collected by the federal government (AMAP 2007). The project was therefore part of an internal‐colonial system whereby southern metropolitan regions benefitted at the expense of northern Indigenous peoples (Hall 2012; Bernauer 2019).…”

Section: Qikiqtani Communities Confront Hydrocarbon Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The project also resulted in the intensification of colonialism. The relationship between extraction and colonialism in the north is complex and multi‐faceted, involving questions of culture and identity (Coulthard 2014), dispossession (Hall 2012; Coulthard 2014; Keeling and Sandlos 2015), uneven development (Bernauer 2019), economic independence (Slowey 2008; Nuttall 2010), and jurisdiction and sovereignty (McCreary 2014; Pasternak 2017). Because the Bent Horn project was allowed to proceed before the completion of a land settlement, despite protests by Inuit organizations, it accelerated processes of colonial dispossession and reinforced colonial power dynamics.…”

Section: Conclusion: Environmental Assessment Capitalism and Colonmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

Bernauer¹

2020

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Key Messages • Environmental assessment played an important role in creating the conditions for Inuit to consent to hydrocarbon extraction in the 1980s. • Environmental assessment helped persuade Inuit to consent to extraction by imposing compromises between Inuit and extractive industries. • The extraction of oil before a land claim was settled undermined the ability of Inuit to capture economic benefits from extraction and negotiate ownership over offshore resources. There is now an extensive body of academic literature examining how the environmental movement contributed to the colonization of Indigenous peoples and development of capitalism in northern Canada. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering how environmental assessment (EA) helped enable hydrocarbon extraction in the Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) region of Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s. When exploration activities began to threaten the Inuit harvesting economy, communities protested with letters and petitions. The federal government responded to Inuit resistance by referring proposed exploratory drilling and extraction to its new EA process. While Inuit won significant victories during some assessments of proposed exploratory drilling and extraction, federal EA ultimately helped create the conditions for Inuit to consent to oil extraction. EA helped impose material compromises between Inuit and hydrocarbon industries, including preferential hiring of Inuit, a reduction in the scope of proposed extraction, and the rejection of especially controversial proposals for offshore drilling. These concessions, combined with a collapse in the market for sealskins due to international boycotts, persuaded several Qikiqtani communities to support oil extraction in the 1980s. The ensuing extraction and export of oil from the High Arctic accelerated processes of colonial dispossession and reinforced colonial political dynamics.

show abstract

Section: Qikiqtani Communities Confront Hydrocarbon Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Environmental Assessment Capitalism and Colonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

Bernauer¹

2020

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Scaling the $40 kg -1 country food value across the totality of wildlife harvests documented during the fiveyear NWHS indicates the Nunavut country food system harvests protein worth $198 million annually, dwarfing the $3.5 million annual valuation applied to the hunting, fishing, and trapping sector by the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics. GDP-based valuation of natural resource sectors emphasizes the contributions of mining and oil and gas (> $500 million in 2016, combined) to the Nunavut economy (GN, 2019), but the country food system may be more likely to generate wealth that stays in the territory and that is welldistributed across regions and households (Bernauer, 2019). Converting community-specific harvest data into nutrient yield indicates that the annual harvest of country food in Nunavut is sufficient to meet the RDA of protein for the entire population and about 50% of the population's energy requirements.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although country food has long been recognized and communicated by Nunavummiut as a made-in-Nunavut sustainability and food security solution, it has been marginalized and, in some cases, compromised by economic, food policy, and adaptation initiatives often envisioned and sometimes implemented from outside the region. Marginalization of local food systems may reflect broader and more complex dynamics rooted in legacies of colonialism, dispossession, a Eurocentric worldview, and modern power asymmetries (Caine and Krogman, 2010;Burow et al, 2018;Bernauer, 2019). In this context, the failure to quantify and communicate the value of local food systems may both arise from and contribute to their marginalization; a positive feedback loop that causes the system to be undervalued and underappreciated except by those directly involved in the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valuation of Country Food in Nunavut Based on Energy and Protein Replacement

Warltier¹,

Landry‐Cuerrier²,

Humphries³

2021

ARCTIC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Communicating value across the pluralities of Indigenous Peoples’ food systems requires attention to economy and environment, food and wildlife, and the health of the people and that of the land. Valuation of distinct entities is always difficult but often essential to describe collective wealth and well-being, to quantify trade-offs, and to consider compensation when one is compromised for another. Here we estimate the replacement value of Nunavut country food by combining information on the amount and nutritional composition of harvested country food with the nutritional content and local price of store-bought food. Comparing the five-year average of energy and protein available in reported harvest to recommended dietary allowances indicates that 17 of 21 Nunavut communities harvest enough country food to satisfy the protein requirements of all community members. Nunavut’s country food system annually harvests five million kg of protein-rich food from across the territory, which would cost $198 million to purchase as store-bought protein, with a replacement value between $13.19 and $39.67 per kg depending on energy versus protein replacement and the inclusion versus exclusion of store-bought food subsidies. These valuations are higher than most previous estimates of local food value because they are more reflective of the energy and nutrient richness of country food and the high price of store-bought food in northern communities. The country food system is priceless in many, profound ways; better awareness of its energy and protein cost of replacement, together with the breadth of its nutritional and cultural value, may help to ensure local food systems are prioritized in northern food security and economic development initiatives.

show abstract

“…They have continued to exploit surviving Indigenous nations well after their efforts at genocide began (e.g. Bernauer 2019;Cameron and Levitan 2014;INET 2017;Kuyek 2019). These efforts are by no means limited by the colonial border, either.…”

Section: Extraction In Technosciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Dis-origined Materials: The Role and Invisibilization of Extraction in Technoscience

McKay¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In new materialist STS, researchers recognize and investigate the liveliness, agency, and ongoing historicity of matter in the lab. Through the work of extraction studies, we know that much of this matter is violently pulled from the ground—the metals in electronic devices, for instance, were cut out of the earth. Previous work in new materialist STS has critiqued the construction of the ‘object’ as obscuring how things work and are made, yet the role of extraction in things has gone largely unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that extraction is a core element of contemporary technoscience. I define the term dis-origining to analytically describe the way that objects are made to seem as if they come from nowhere, within and far beyond the STS literature, comparing this term with related concepts including Haraway’s (1988) god-trick and Marx’s commodity fetish. Seeing extraction in the world around us and naming the ways that socio-ecologies have been invisibilized may help us address the immense violences wrought in making contemporary technosciences.

show abstract

The limits to extraction: mining and colonialism in Nunavut

Cited by 14 publications

References 51 publications

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

Valuation of Country Food in Nunavut Based on Energy and Protein Replacement

Dis-origined Materials: The Role and Invisibilization of Extraction in Technoscience

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About