Burnt Creek: Experimental audiovisual approaches to indigeneity and more-than-human ontological assemblages in northern Québec mining territories (working title)

This project takes place in the mining town of Schefferville and the adjacent Innu and Naskapi indigenous communities of Matimekush and Kawawachikamach, Northern Québec. Its main focus is the impact that extractive industries had and still has on the territory itself and on the life of the indigenous people inhabiting it. Transnational mining corporations, iron ore, caribous, toxic water basins, Innu and Naskapi communities, railways, bears, hydroelectric infrastructures …How to propose an analysis sensitive to this complex natureculture assemblage of becomings located the very periphery of capitalist production, yet integrated into the global extractivist network that is Schefferville? How to explore and pursue an anthropological-based storytelling capable of translating the complexity of such assemblage while also carefully engaging with questions related to indigeneity, identity, colonialism, and resource exploitation?

The last decades have seen a growing interest for mining in anthropological research, particularly through the exploration of the changing human-environmental relations brought by mining development (Jacka, 2018). On one hand, mines seem to be the perfect metaphors for the contemporary age of post-industrialization, in that they represent the global expansion of capital and the rapacious absorption of natural resources (Nash, 1993; Jacka, ibid.). On the other, the novel processes that have arisen globally in the extraction of resources and the multiplication of the networks of production and consumption of mineral resources opened the way to what researchers define as “the mineral age “ (Jacka, ibid.; Arsel et al., 2016). In the wake of this new interest, some researchers (Acosta, 2013, Arsel et al., 2016) focused on the conceptualization of terms such as “the extractive imperative” and “extractivism”. as to define the 500-year colonial and imperialist history of a mode of accumulation whereby raw materials were removed from colonized landscapes to enrich the centres of the world economy.

Childs (2016) and Tsing (2005) stressed the new resource frontiers that mining creates in ever more marginal spaces globally, frontiers that often concerned the lands of indigenous groups living in remote areas of the worlds. Their perspective, based on a multispecies ethnography approach, resonate to those developed by mining ethnographers such as Kirsch (2006) and de la Cadena (2010). Kirsch engages with indigenous modes of analysis such as animism, totemism, sorcery practices, and attachment to place, to examine how people living nearby mines in Papua New Guinea respond to the transformation of their territories. In a parallel vein, de la Cadena documents the resurgence of “earth beings” into Andean political practices by Andean indigenous communities.