Caring For and Living With the Legacies of Extractive Industries in Northern Canada

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - III

Abstract

This paper reflects on how experimental, strategic research for remediation can be done with impacted communities over extended periods of time, as communities plan for future landscapes that will need to be monitored and managed for generations after large scale mining operations have closed. We investigate the different kinds of creative and disruptive methods communities are using to not only re-claim post-industrial spaces, but to ensure that such spaces of contamination are cared for over coming generations. We reflect on our own participation as academic researchers, questioning how to best support community objectives and contribute to ongoing discussions about the meaning of remediation. Also, as settler researchers in Indigenous territories, how do we do this respectfully and in support of self-determination? Pulling together previous research at Giant Mine, Northwest Territories, Canada, and preliminary research at Faro Mine, Yukon and Raglan Mine, Nunavik, we approach these questions through three projects at different stages of planning for remediation. The Giant and Faro Mines are abandoned mine sites, now controlled by the federal government. In these cases, environmental assessments have become an important public avenue through which some of this experimentation takes place, both within and in resistance to settler state governance structures. At the operational Raglan Mine Closure, closure is not yet underway, therefore we discuss research strategies for structuring discussions and planning for the ‘far future’. As these sites are continually in flux, materially and symbolically, there is a need for more relational, experimental approaches to community-based, care centered research.

Authors

• Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Arn Keeling, Department of Geography, Memorial University