Author ORCID Identifier

Dayna Nadine Scott: 0000-0003-3992-8642

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Source Publication

Scott, D. N. (2025). Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier. Journal of Law and Political Economy, 5(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/LP65164812 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m10m2r6

Keywords

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

Abstract

In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, 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 liberal justification for critical minerals extraction. From this, a pattern emerges of places toward 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 undermines the communities’ capacity to defend their homelands, to the advantage of the settler state and extractive firms.

Comments

"Copyright 2025 by the author(s). This work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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