Author ORCID Identifier

Dayna Nadine Scott: 0000-0003-3992-8642

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Source Publication

(2024) Journal of Law & Political Economy (forthcoming)

Keywords

extractivism; critical minerals; just transition; Indigenous resistance; settler colonialism; free-entry mining; dispossession; Indigenous dispossession; infrastructural (dis)entitlement

Abstract

The scramble for critical minerals to fuel the energy transition is driving new extractive frontiers across the globe. In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amidst a growing polarization in positions of Indigenous leadership. There is both a surging resistance to, and a resigned acceptance of, critical minerals mining by First Nations. Drawing on years of community-engaged research, I detail here the contemporary state tactics of infrastructural (dis)entitlement; infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is it politically or institutionally organized. But infrastructural entitlement is strategic and aggressive: Indigenous prosperity and inclusion are key elements of the contemporary justification for critical minerals extraction. Out of these dynamics, we can notice patterns of places towards which resources are flowing, and places out of which they are draining. The chronic lack of community-focused infrastructure in some remote First Nations – characterized as a form of ‘letting die’ -- creates an attritional force that means that their populations on the land are dwindling. In this context, debates about legal rights and entitlements in theory -- to consultation or even consent -- are secondary in importance to the actual capacity of Indigenous communities to deny access to the minerals on the ground. Presence on the landscape is thus a crucial factor in the struggle, and infrastructural (dis)entitlement is a key driver of ongoing dispossession.

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