Extracting home in the oil sands : settler colonialism and environmental change in subarctic Canada / edited by Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, and Lena Gross.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Westman, Clinton, 1971- editor.

Joly, Tara L., editor.

Gross, Lena, editor.

Series:

Arctic Worlds

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

environmental change.

klimaforandringer.

olie.

olieudvinding.

indigenous people.

indfødte folk.

kolonialisme.

politics.

politik.

Oil sands.

Physical Description:

230 pages

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, c2020.

Summary:

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world's most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.

Contents:

Intro

Half Title

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Zoe Todd

References

Preface

List of Contributors

Introduction: At Home in the Oil Sands

"Perhaps the Most Interesting Region in all the North"

Settler Colonialism, Extraction, and Multilocal/Multivocal Landscapes

Notes

1 Uncertain Sovereignty: Treaty 8, Bitumen, and Land Claims in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region

Introduction

Extending Sovereignty

Treaty 8

Alberta and the NRTA

Land Claims and Energy Politics in the 1970s

Mikisew Cree First Nation's TLE Claim

Settlement and New Lawsuits

Conclusion

2 Living and Dying through Oil's Promise: The Invisibility of Contamination and Power in Alberta's Peace River Country

Day One: Carmen

Day Two: Chief Isaac

Looking Ahead

Acknowledgements

3 Northern Respectability: Whiteness and Improvement in Fort McMurray

1 Introduction

2 Opportunity on the Frontier

3 Petro-Nationalism and Corporate Social Responsibility

4 Improvement

4 Wastelanding the Bodies, Wastelanding the Land: Accidents as Evidence in the Albertan Oil Sands

Accidents at Work

Accidents, Spills, and Contamination of the Land and Its Inhabitants

The 2013-2014 Canadian Natural Resources Limited Primrose Incident

Wastelanding and the Background of Settler Colonialism

Wastelanding the Northern Boreal Forest

Accidents as Evidence and the Refusal of Being Wastelanded

5 Wildfire Politics: The Role of a Natural Disaster in Indigenous-State Relations

Contextual Framing: Actors and Communities

Theoretical Framing: Oil Sands Region as Carbonscape.

Landscape Instability

Governance Instability

Power Instability

Métis Mobilization of Resources

Disaster and Crisis as Catalytic Assemblage Converter

Wildfire Impacts

Red Hot Politics

6 Bear Stories in the Berry Patch: Caring for Boreal Forest Fire Cycles of Respect

Grandfather Fire

Grandmother Bear

Cycles of Respect

7 Urban Buffalo: Métis-Bison Relations and Oil Sands Extraction in Northeastern Alberta

Métis Space and Legal Orders

"Urban Buffalo": Syncrude's Beaver Creek Wood Bison Ranch

Managing Bison and People in WBNP

"It's Only A Buffalo": The RLB and Oil Sands Extraction

Discussion

8 Reclaiming Nature? Watery Transformations and Mitigation Landscapes in the Oil Sands Region

Second Nature and the Mitigation Landscape: Water in Anthropocene Futures

Reclamation in the Oil Sands

Tailings Ponds: Reclamation and Risk

End Pit Lakes: A Grand Experiment

Planning for Post-Industrial Landscapes

9 Conclusion: Studying the Social and Cultural Impacts of "Extreme Extraction" in Northern Alberta

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-351-12743-8

1-351-12744-6

1-351-12746-2

9781351127462

OCLC:

1130007923