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.

Sustaining arctic/subarctic ecosystems and the livelihoods of northern Indigenous peoples is an immense challenge amid increasing resource development. The paper describes a “tragedy of open access” occurring in Canada’s north as governments open up new areas of sensitive barren-ground caribou habitat to mineral resource development. Once numbering in the millions, barren-ground caribou populations (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus/Rangifer tarandus granti) have declined over 70% in northern Canada over the last two decades in a cycle well understood by northern Indigenous peoples and scientists. However, as some herds reach critically low population levels, the impacts of human disturbance have become a major focus of debate in the north and elsewhere. A growing body of science and traditional knowledge research points to the adverse impacts of resource development; however, management efforts have been almost exclusively focused on controlling the subsistence harvest of northern Indigenous peoples. These efforts to control Indigenous harvesting parallel management practices during previous periods of caribou population decline (for example, 1950s) during which time governments also lacked evidence and appeared motivated by other values and interests in northern lands and resources. As mineral resource development advances in northern Canada and elsewhere, addressing this “science-policy gap” problem is critical to the sustainability of both caribou and people.

The Northern Review 42 (2016): 7–21 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.

This paper explores the history of economic, social and environmental change associated with the Pine Point lead-zinc mine, a now-abandoned industrial site and town in the Northwest Territories. Recent perspectives in cultural geography and environmental history have sought to rehabilitate mining landscapes from their reputation as places of degradation and exploitation - the so-called 'mining imaginary'. We argue that the landscapes of Pine Point epitomise the failures and contradictions of mega-project resource development in the north. While the mine and planned town built to service it flourished for nearly a quarter century, the larger goals of modernisation, industrial development and Aboriginal assimilation were unrealised. Ultimately, the mine's closure in 1988 resulted in the town's abandonment and the removal of the rail link, leaving behind a legacy of environmental destruction that remains unremediated. At Pine Point, the forces of mega-project development joined with modern mining's technologies of 'mass destruction' to produce a deeply scarred and problematic landscape that failed in its quest to bring modern industrialism to the Canadian sub-Arctic.

Ecological imperialism is one of the most enduring models of past global environmental change. This essay argues that the application of ecological imperialism as an explanation for New World environmental change should not be limited to temperate regions where the process was so spectacularly successful. Using the Canadian North as a broad regional template, our analysis suggests that consideration of both the failures and the limited successes of ecological imperialism are critical to a more complete understanding of global colonialism. Although the Canadian North was never subject to the broad ecological transformation that occurred further to the south, attempts to colonize particular regions did occur in tandem with the successful introduction of alien species. Ecological imperialism need not be conceptualized solely as an all-encompassing process of biological transformation. Instead, efforts to colonize peripheral nontemperate regions can be understood as a product of a limited application of ecological imperialism in a New World environment.