Diamond Mining in Canada's Northwest Territories: A Colonial Continuity

Abstract

The Canadian diamond industry has been lauded as a new approach to resource extraction, one whose institutions are characterized by a greater attention to Indigenous rights and the environment. However, an institutional analysis obfuscates the terrain of unequal relations that is the context for the Canadian diamond boom; an analysis of the effectiveness of social and environmental policies in relation to the extraction of diamonds in the Canadian North suggests that there is an intent on the part of those instigating this extraction (that is, the Canadian state, Canadian capitalist interests and international capitalist interests) to protect the Northern environment and to provide economic benefits to Northern Indigenous communities. This piece argues, instead, that this assumption is erroneous and that the Northern mining industry is part of Canada's project of internal colonization of Indigenous communities, a project that has intensified and expanded in the neoliberal era.

Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

“…We contend that the current legislative and legal regime operates to facilitate industry access to Indigenous lands. Rather than regarding the NTA as a recognition of Indigenous rights, we argue it is a technique of government that facilitates accumulation via dispossession (Hall , ). We demonstrate this through the following empirical discussion of the historically consistent pattern of the Australian state privileging the interests of mining companies and capital, over the rights and interests of Indigenous Australians in Queensland, traced from the case of the Century mine in the 1990s, through to the case of the proposed Adani mine today.…”

Sub‐surface Property, Free‐entry Mineral Staking and Settler Colonialism in Canada

“…This paper is also in response to Rebecca Hall's () analysis of diamond mining in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Hall argues that diamond mining in the Northwest Territories is a “colonial continuity”.…”

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

“…Indigenous citizens received no compensation for lost hunting, trapping, and fishing resources, nor for the adverse personal consequences they and their families suffered. While planning for diamond mines has gathered Indigenous leaders and multinational mining representatives around negotiating tables to debate impacts and benefits, critics claim that these negotiations retain the asymmetrical structure of colonial extractivism: with no option to refuse mining altogether and dominant decision makers valuing economic gain above all else, political scientist Rebecca Hall argues that northern mining represents a capitalist "continuity of internal colonization" ( [60], p. 385). Canadian diamond companies work hard to brand their products as socially responsible and conflict-free, yet this characterization ignores ongoing environmental degradation and sociocultural upheaval and is valid only relative to the horrors of historical northern gold and uranium mining.…”