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Fire An aerial view of the Attawapiskat River. Photo by Allan Lissner/Neskantaga First Nation.

What is the Ring of Fire?

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By: Saima Desai | In the far north of what’s currently known as Ontario, in an area covered by Treaty No. 9, lies the Hudson Bay Lowlands, an area roughly the size of Germany speckled with ponds, lakes, and rivers. Over thousands of years, plants growing in the waterlogged earth would die, never fully decomposing and instead becoming part of a rich, spongy layer of peat. Local First Nations call it the “breathing lands,” referring to the immense amounts of carbon that the peatlands absorb from the air. Rare and threatened plants and animals call the lowlands home: caribou, wolverine, and lake sturgeon.

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What's inside an EV battery, image by Lisa Ferguson

EV Batteries 101 and the Use of Nickel

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By: Isaac Thornley | While the anode is mostly made from graphite, the cathode comprises a range of minerals such as lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathode contains the greatest variety of minerals, is the most valuable part of the battery, and is a major determinant in the performance of the battery—including the energy storage capacity, duration of charge, and battery lifespan.

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Former Chief of Neskantaga First Nation, Peter Moonias, stands next to a declaration of Neskantaga’s homelands, which community members have posted throughout their traditional territory to advise prospectors and mining companies. Photo by Allan Lissner/Neskantaga First Nation.

The Biggest Gap in Ontario’s EV Battery Supply Chain: Indigenous Jurisdiction

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By: Isaac Thornley | In 2023, the federal and Ontario governments pledged historic subsidies to automakers—up to $13.2 billion to Volkswagen, $15 billion to Stellantis—to build EV battery plants in Canada. While the subsidies show a commitment to secure a fully domestic supply chain for EV batteries, there remain significant gaps. These include a lack of mineral refining capacity in Canada, a lack of infrastructure in mineral-rich regions (such as the Ring of Fire), and, in particular, a lack of recognition of the jurisdiction of Indigenous peoples and their capacity to provide or withhold consent. 

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Photograph of Neskantaga Territory by Allan Lissner

NEW REPORT: Greenwashing the Ring of Fire

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By: Saima Desai and Isaac Thornley | The Ontario government is positioning the province as the home of a continuous supply chain for EV batteries. Their hope is that by securing Indigenous consent for mining in the North and massively subsidizing battery factories in the South, the difficult and dirty middle links of the supply chain—like extraction, transportation, and refining—will become inevitable.

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Wild blueberries

Settler colonial infrastructures and infrastructure otherwise

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By: Deborah Cowen | What is infrastructure? I think about infrastructure as matter that shapes motion itself. Brian Larkin (2013) suggests that infrastructures “comprise the architecture for circulation.” Infrastructure can underpin and sustain motion and circulation, but it can also inhibit, disrupt or foreclose motion.

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(Ben den Engelsen/Unsplash)

Infrastructure in the service of future imaginaries

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By: Anne Spice | The reclamation and appropriation of the terminology of “infrastructure” challenges the state’s weaponization of that language. It is a reclamation and transformation of Canadian legal language that reifies and legitimizes forms of material invasion, among them colonial materializations like pipelines that are being built through unceded Indigenous territories.

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Bruno Ramos / Unsplash

Jurisdiction beyond space, toward time

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By: Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark | While Anishinaabe understandings of creation have largely shaped and shifted my understandings of sovereignty and its relationship to jurisdiction, I find that my understandings of jurisdiction have been largely contoured by examinations of state assertions of sovereignty. Furthermore, the failure of the conceptual work of sovereignty to ground political authority in a meaningful way for many people has necessitated a shift of our attention to jurisdiction.

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Freda Huson is arrested on Wet'suwet'en Territory by RCMP enforcing an injunction sought by Coastal GasLink. Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Policing Jurisdiction

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By: Shiri Pasternak | Jurisdiction offers a rich framework for understanding the terrain of struggle upon which colonial theft is fought in Canada. In my work, I argue that while settler law is asserted as a universal system applied evenly within the boundaries of the nation state, it is in fact a politically and spatially contested claim against Indigenous laws of territorial belonging.

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Liam Riby - Scotland - Torpedo testing Facility - Cropped

What does it mean to let nature take its course?

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By: Tiffany Joseph | There are a number of things we could experience or be born into within that the colonial Western mindset that would render us “damaged goods” that are not worth our investment. So, what is the value or importance of healing? And how are we reframing minds, and ways of thinking, that reflect the holistic ways of thinking within our cultures?

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Lithium mine at Bolivia´s Uyuni Salt Flat. Oton Barros / Wikimedia Commons

Extractivism: The post-extractivist future is a decolonial future

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By: Dayna Scott | Scholars have long emphasized how violent the classic extractivist economy is in generating benefits for distant peoples and economies to the detriment of local peoples and ecosystems. This obvious imbalance, or non-reciprocity, is a defining characteristic of the relation. Extractivism is also oriented to the short rather than long term and is organized around external demands and priorities. In other words, the need for the taking comes from somewhere else.

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