Commodified Underworlds: Geological Survey of Canada’s Mineral Sets

• In Event: Racial Capitalism, Scientific Infrastructure and the North American Mineralogical Frontier, 1850-1920

Abstract

Founded in 1842 with the mission to acquire, interpret and make available a comprehensive knowledge of geoscience, the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) is considered Canada's first scientific agency and one of its oldest government organizations. Geologist and GSC founder William Logan put together the first significant collection of Canadian mineral samples displayed at the 1851 and 1855 World Fairs in London and Paris. In 1856, the Geological Survey of Canada established a Geological Museum in Montreal before moving to Ottawa in 1881. In the 1870s, the GSC started producing and distributing travelling cabinets that could hold and display mineral specimens from various geographies across Canada; a program that ran until 1996 and distributed more than 10,000 mineral sets annually at its peak.

This paper explores the circulation and display of geological knowledge in Canada during the first decades of its inception to demonstrate how institutions such as the GSC is constitutive in the commodification of land and the history of racial capitalism in Canada. The presentation delves into the displays of scientific knowledge that categorized matter, rationalized geographies and rendered geology legible to settler audiences. Moving between the mineral sets and their accompanying reports, this paper probes how the dissemination efforts of the GSC were instrumental in shaping Canadians as geological constituents of a liberal, scientifically organized society; while articulating the relationship between the settler state, capitalist landowners, and the exploitation of mining laborers and Indigenous peoples. It looks into the production of those mineral sets, including the labor of surveyors that relied on Indigenous knowledge while simultaneously disregarding existing land relationships and mining practices. Tracing the circulation and transformation of geology, this paper ponders on how the mineral sets employed the underworld to envision of a technologically and scientifically organized settler colonial society.

Author

• Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Dalhousie University