Extracting Home in the Oil Sands

Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada, 1st Edition

Edited by Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, Lena Gross

Description

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Zoe Todd

Preface

List of Contributors

Introduction: At Home in the Oil Sands

Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, and Lena Gross

Chapter 1

Uncertain Sovereignty: Treaty 8, Bitumen, and Land Claims in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region Hereward Longley

Chapter 2

Living and Dying through Oil’s Promise: The Invisibility of Contamination and Power in Alberta’s Peace River Country Tristan Lee-Jones

Chapter 3

Northern Respectability: Whiteness and Improvement in Fort McMurray Sam Spady

Chapter 4

Wastelanding the Bodies, Wastelanding the Land: Accidents as Evidence in the Albertan Oil Sands Lena Gross

Chapter 5

Wildfire Politics: The Role of a Natural Disaster in Indigenous–State Relations Tarje I. Wanvik

Chapter 6

Bear Stories in the Berry Patch: Caring for Boreal Forest Fire Cycles of Respect Janelle Marie Baker

Chapter 7

Urban Buffalo: Métis–Bison Relations and Oil Sands Extraction in Northeastern Alberta

Tara L. Joly

Chapter 8

Reclaiming Nature? Watery Transformations and Mitigation Landscapes in the Oil Sands Region Katherine Wheatley and Clinton N. Westman

Conclusion: Studying the Social and Cultural Impacts of “Extreme Extraction” in Northern Alberta

Patricia A. McCormack

Index