Unearthing the discursive politics of mining on Indigenous lands: knowledge, health, contestation, and power in contemporary Canadian regulatory infrastructures

Mining projects have the potential to significantly affect Indigenous Peoples and their health in myriad ways, both in the short term and across generations. During the approval stage for new extractive sites, a projects’ anticipated impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ health and wellbeing are evaluated using a process called environmental assessment (EA). However, EA is a technocratic process that relies on and advances a very specific and narrow understanding of health— one based in Western colonial cultural understandings and assumptions that can be inappropriate and even harmful for Indigenous communities.This thesis sought to answer two key research questions: how can extractive projects affect Indigenous Peoples’ health, and how is Indigenous Peoples’ health represented in environmental assessment? My methods to answer these questions included a scoping review of the literature on extraction and Indigenous Peoples’ health, as well as a qualitative document analysis of the final environmental assessment reports for 28 mining projects in Canada. I then interpreted the results of these analyses using critical framing techniques borrowed from infrastructure studies to unpack the broader political implications of EA and the kind of knowledge it contains and perpetuates. In the scoping review, I identified a set of mechanisms with the capacity to be activated in an extraction context and produce health outcomes, including: engagement in assessment and consultation processes; interaction with government and industry officials; the presence and nature of new work and training opportunities; changes to the economy and an influx of new money; changing social structures and new inequalities; environmental degradation and dispossession; new and longstanding changes to the economy; and lasting effects on land. The variation in these mechanisms across space and time confirms that communities can be affected by resource projects via a wide range of pathways, which proves that a holistic perspective is necessary to adequately measure and understand effects on Indigenous Peoples’ health. However, the analysis of the EA reports showed that these varied pathways to health were often not included in the assessment process. And, when indicators related to Indigenous health were included, these methods of assessment were at odds with community health ontologies due to their narrow focus and their inability to consider the complexity and essentiality of human-non-human relations. The primary conclusion of this thesis is that EA is largely ineffective at fully or accurately assessing effects of extractive projects on Indigenous Peoples’ health. Beyond identifying a diverse set of fundamental issues with EA’s measurements, I also argue that the process itself leads to a furthering of colonial logics in the public sphere, which is harmful to communities and contributes to asymmetrical power dynamics between Indigenous Peoples and the Crown

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