Critical Technological Analysis of Infrastructural Colonialism: Learning from 50 Years of James Bay Hydroelectric Projects

• In Event: Settler Colonialism and Scalable Scholarship: Studying Up on The Technopolitics of Indigenous Displacement and Dispossession - I

Abstract

Historically, the arc of infrastructure moves from proposals through robust debate, displacement and impact, to dependence on these projects accompanied by a form of disappearance into the background of attention (cf. Goffman 1973). Exemplified by one of the world's largest hydroelectric river diversions and series of dams, Great Whale or Grande Baleine in Northern Quebec Canada, such projects never fully
disappear. They materially transform the landscape, ecology and society's relation to them in an irrevocable manner. Rivers as routes, resources, and power have lead North American dispossession. Their infrastructures are central to the displacement of local and Indigenous
residents such as the James Bay Cree, realizing the rhetorical aims of colonialism including in the present day. At the same time that these projects are both lauded and feared based on historical experience, opposing voices are dismissed as illegitimate and opportunities
to thoroughly examine infrastructure options – globally all the more so outside of liberal democracies -- are disappearing as energy, exports, and infrastructure are deemed critical and are placed under a cloak of militarized security. The Cree's 50 year experience of the graduate development of Grande Baleine provides an insight into Indigenous resilience and adaptation to the elimination of the subsistence economy once based on the Boreal Forest environment. It provides a basis for a Critical Technology Analysis (CTA) of more recent infrastructure projects and technological systems.

Author

• Rob Shields, University of Alberta