Suchergebnisse

This report documents the work of the Communication with Future Generations (CFG) Working Group formed in Yellowknife. The CFG group is a multi-stakeholder group that is considering how to communicate the long-term arsenic hazard at Giant Mine to future generations. The CFG group is made up of representatives from government, First Nations, Métis, mining heritage advocates, environmental/social justices NGOs, and universities.

Historians often study the history of conservation within the confines of national borders, concentrating on the bureaucratic and political manifestations of policy within individual governments. Even studies of the popular expression of conservationist ideas are generally limited to the national or sub-national (province, state, etc.) scale. This paper suggests that conservationist discourse, policy and practice in Canada and the USA were the products of a significant cross-border movement of ideas and initiatives derived from common European sources. In addition, the historical development of common approaches to conservation in North America suggests, contrary to common assumptions, that Canada did not always lag behind the USA in terms of policy innovation. The basic tenets of conservation (i.e. state control over resource, class-based disdain for subsistence hunters and utilitarian approaches to resource management) have instead developed at similar time periods and along parallel ideological paths in Canada and the USA.

Recent studies in the field of Canadian environmental history have suggested that early state wildlife conservation programs in northern Canadawere closely tied tobroader efforts to colonize the social and economic lives of the region's Aboriginal people. Although it is tempting to draw a sharp distinction between the "bad old days" of autocratic conservation and the more inclusive approaches of the enlightened present such as co-management and the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) into wildlife management decision-making, this paper will argue that many conflicts associated with the older colonial conservation regime have survived to the present day. Recent anthropological literature has suggested that traditional environmental knowledge is often marginalized in wildlife decision making bodies when juxtaposed with scientific expertise or bureaucratic priorities. Aboriginal people may now be recognized as formal participants in the management of wildlife and protected areas, but this tentative shift in political power represents an incomplete attempt to decolonize wildlife management practices in the North. The paper concludes with policy recommendations that might further apportion power over northern wildlife and protected areas to Aboriginal people.

There is a long tradition in the Canadian North of outsiders imagining the region in accordance with their own cultural assumptions. At the turn of the century, naturalists, hunters, and explorers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Caspar Whitney, and G. H. Blanchet began to describe the North as a last wilderness frontier that was teeming with vast herds of caribou. Many of their narratives also described native hunters as "wanton" killers of wildlife who threatened the sanctity of the Northern wilderness; they argued for increased government legislative controls and, paradoxically, the controlled exploitation of caribou in ranches or organized hunts. This article argues that all of these images of the Northern caribou had a profound influence on the federal government's wildlife policy in the region through the early part of the 20th century. Indeed, the federal government's restriction of native hunting rights through legislative reform and their tentative efforts to establish reindeer and caribou ranches can be traced directly to the cultural representations of the Northern landscape that appeared in the earliest natural history surveys of the Canadian North.

Examines the human relationship to the western coyote in the 20th century, when the emerging conservation movement elicited the systematic hunting of the coyote in a process controlled & directed by the centralized state. This policy was driven by a productionist ideology that interpreted the coyote as a significant challenge to the agroindustrial & sport hunting potential of the western landscape. During this period, the coyote came to embody the worst aspects of predatory capitalism, which per force required rational regulation & administration to control its worst effects. In contrast, the men who killed the coyote represented the best of human values. The result of this ideology was the development of a savage field for the coyote in which the forces of civilization set about to rationally decimate a wild species. D. Ryfe

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. Mining and Communities in Northern Canada examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-Sébastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winton

This article addresses the often ignored history of Indigenous responses to environmental pollution. Focusing on resistance to arsenic pollution from Giant Mine in Canada's Northwest Territories, Sandlos and Keeling explore how Indigenous communities mobilized knowledge around environmental pollution, conducting their own studies when government research minimized or ignored their concerns about the health impacts of pollution, participating in public hearings, and continuing to push for research into the long-term health effects even after the mine closed. The authors show how this resistance to environmental racism is connected to other Indigenous struggles over industrial development and to issues such as land claims, sovereignty, and colonial dispossession.

For fifty years (1949–99) the now-abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife emitted arsenic air and water pollution into the surrounding environment. Arsenic pollution from Giant Mine had particularly acute health impacts on the nearby Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN), who were reliant on local lakes, rivers, and streams for their drinking water, in addition to frequent use of local berries, garden produce, and medicine plants. Currently, the Canadian government is undertaking a remediation project at Giant Mine to clean up contaminated soils and tailings on the surface and contain 237,000 tonnes of arsenic dust that are stored underground at the Giant Mine. Using documentary sources and statements of Yellowknives Dene members before various public hearings on the arsenic issue, this paper examines the history of arsenic pollution at Giant Mine as a form of "slow violence," a concept that reconfigures the arsenic issue not simply as a technical problem, but as a historical agent of colonial dispossession that alienated an Indigenous group from their traditional territory. The long-term storage of arsenic at the former mine site means the effects of this slow violence are not merely historical, but extend to the potentially far distant future.

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. This collection examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-Sébastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winton ; The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ; Yes

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. This collection examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions.

In humanity's relentless search for the industrial minerals that undergird our modern technology and economy, we have extensively and comprehensively ravaged natural landscapes. Sites like the Berkeley Pit in Montana or Western Australia's Kalgoorlie Super Pit exemplify the awesome scale of these transformations. Indeed, as an industry quip has it, mining is primarily a waste management business. Mineral solid waste accounts for the largest proportion of total global industrial waste production, and mining often generates toxic by-products ranging from heavy metals to process chemicals like cyanide. The effects of these wastes may persist long after mine closure and abandonment, requiring long-term care and maintenance. Under pressure from governments and environmental groups in recent decades, the industry has begun to address these considerable and controversial legacies of extractive development.

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.