Environmental Justice Goes Underground? Historical Notes from Canada's Northern Mining Frontier

Abstract

Industrial mining in Canada's territorial north has produced negative social, economic, and environmental consequences for aboriginal communities in the region since the early twentieth century. Many of these historical impacts persist: toxic sites associated with abandoned mines located within aboriginal traditional territories have become a source of great concern in recent years. It is difficult, however, to analyze historic mining activity within the traditional siting debate that has dominated the environmental justice movement in North America, as mining companies invariably locate where economic ore bodies exist. Instead, we argue that northern mining conflicts might best be understood through a productive alliance of North American environmental justice with insights from political ecology, a sub-discipline that has traditionally focused on environmental injustices in Third World settings, particularly local conflicts over access to resources that originate with colonialism and the expansion of global capital.