By Dayna Nadine Scott, Associate Professor & York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy, York University.

A quiet struggle has been playing out in Ontario’s far north as a wave of Indigenous cultural and political resurgence collides with a renewed push to extend the extractive frontier into the vast, swampy boreal forest. Centered around the much-hyped “Ring of Fire” mineral deposits and the resistance of remote Anishinaabe and Anishini communities that depend on the cultural and ecological integrity of the Attawapiskat river watershed, the stakes in this struggle are high. The social, political, and ecological changes that will come with the extraction of minerals in the Ring of Fire are irreversible, and the resources in contention include so-called “critical minerals” — those that have been deemed necessary for the very transition from fossil fuels that climate justice demands.

In following this struggle over the past five years, I have come to understand it as a microcosm for how the contemporary settler state primes an extractive frontier, even into the so-called ‘post-extractive’ moment.

Header image credit: Allan Lissner, PraxisPictures. Source: Neskantaga: We Love Our Land — PraxisPictures