Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier

By: Dayna Nadine Scott, [York University, Canada]

This post is an excerpt from [Scott, Dayna Nadine. “Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier.” Journal of Law and Political Economy 38 (2025): 38–73.]. Click here to view the full article.

The remote Indigenous communities of Ontario’s boreal north have been hovering on the edge of a new extractive frontier for more than a decade. As often is the case when extractive capital moves onto new ground (Frederiksen and Himley 2020), the small, remote Anishinaabe and Anishini communities across the peatlands of Treaty No. 9 have been both dreading and inviting transformative changes to their lands, lifeways, and livelihoods. In recent years, the most prominent “imaginaries of prosperity” (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022) have featured critical minerals mining to support battery manufacture for the electric vehicle (EV) value chain (Scott 2021a). State actors say they want to create opportunities for Indigenous communities to prosper from resource development and supply chain “opportunities” in relation to the green energy transition. They promise a “brighter and nicer new life” (Larkin 2013).

Despite being promoted as climate mitigation, the switch to EVs across the global North is predicted to be extremely mineral intensive (World Bank Group 2020). The potential impact on the boreal peatlands is enormous. Out of the thirty-five minerals that the US considers “critical ,” six are prominent in Ontario’s “Ring of Fire” mineral belt, including chromium and nickel (Gruske 2021; Burton 2022). Ontario’s Minister of Mines states that “[t]he Ring of Fire has the critical minerals we need to build our manufacturing supply chain, including nickel for electric vehicles and chromite for clean steel . . . Our government’s investments in innovation and infrastructure are creating jobs across the entire province, including northern and Indigenous communities” (Ontario Newsroom 2023).

Similarly, in announcing the terms for the environmental assessment of the proposed all-season road that is the infrastructural linchpin of the whole plan, the Ontario Minister of Northern Development/Indigenous Affairs explained that this is a step toward “unlocking the corridor to prosperity” (ibid.). He noted further that “working with Indigenous partners, we have a tremendous opportunity for a corridor that can supply energy and leverage health, economic and social benefits, while unlocking significant economic growth” (ibid.). In the energy transition, access to critical minerals is positioned as the bottom line: According to the Minister of Mines, “you can’t be green without mining. You can’t develop as Ontario wants, and transform the economy into a green economy, without accessing critical minerals out of the Ring of Fire” (Butler 2023). In other words, the future of Treaty No. 9 is taken for granted: It is an extractive landscape, and the so-called “transition minerals” will be at the forefront (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022). Critical minerals, apparently, are minerals that must be mined.

In 2022, the CEO of Wyloo Metals, the company with the most advanced mining interests in the Ring of Fire, stated the following in his opening pitch to the Chiefs of the nine First Nations in the Matawa Tribal Council, Indigenous stewards of the lands since time immemorial: “The Ring of Fire is home to expansive deposits of these [future-facing] metals, making this a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be part of the green revolution. Working hand-in-hand with First Nation and regional partners, we’ll develop the Ring of Fire into one of Ontario’s great mineral districts that will be pivotal in the world’s transition to a lower carbon future” (Giancovazzi 2022). But a few communities in the heart of the Attawapiskat River watershed object. Neskantaga First Nation, for example, a tiny Anishinaabe community of about three hundred people living on a remote reserve, is stubbornly clinging to a different notion of their people’s futures on the land, their legal obligations to protect the river and its lake sturgeon, and their political authority to decide (Porter 2016; Turner 2022).

In this article, I draw on insights gained from empirical observations over many years of community-engaged research. I am a settler scholar and law professor who lives in Tkaronto, and since 2015, I have been working alongside the leadership of Neskantaga First Nation on action research related to the Ring of Fire. The collaboration began with a long period of relationship building and includes community focus groups, workshops, interviews, strategy sessions, legal research and support, and time together on the land. It also involves participant observation at court appearances, press conferences, rallies, marches, and other events. I have ethics approval from York University and permission from Chief and Council to draw on these experiences in my writings. My strategy is to be both embedded and accountable; our collaborations operate according to an ethic of accountability and mutual aid, transparent exchange of information, knowledge and practice, and a tentative, contingent solidarity that is oriented toward building strength, capacity, and connection.

In the Ring of Fire, the extraction that communities like Neskantaga oppose—mining for “critical minerals”—is promoted and state sanctioned in climate justice terms. In what Thea Riofrancos describes as an emerging security-sustainability nexus, there is a clear alignment between state and corporate interests in making the green case for onshoring or reshoring the extraction of battery metals to North America (Riofrancos 2023). In other words, this is not merely a situation of Indigenous peoples fighting a mine—easily framed as an environmental burden in the classic “sacrifice zone” sense—but rather one in which what is at stake is, ostensibly, solving the climate crisis (Scott and Smith 2017). Accordingly, resisting communities have to navigate not just a renewed and open enthusiasm for mining, but also the deliberate “fast tracking” of this extraction in pursuit of the public good (Potkins 2022).

In the far north of Ontario, in line with global trends, the settler state is actively engaged in a push to develop a domestic critical mineral supply chain and Wyloo Metals is promoting its plans for a “netzero” mine in the Ring of Fire (Wyloo 2024; Riofrancos 2023; Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022; Dorn et al. 2022; Scott 2021a; Pasternak et al. 2023). From Neskantaga’s perspective, however, the critical minerals angle is just the latest in a long chain of rationales that have been strung out to justify extraction in their homelands. In recent memory, for instance, it was chromite and not nickel that was billed as “critical,” rare, and in strategic demand (Chong 2014; Sudol 2013). Community leaders say that various tactics are used to gain access to their lands for settler purposes and justified in whatever language current politics demands. From this vantage point, the push for critical minerals, though cloaked as a climate measure, is perhaps just another instance of the dispossessive imperative of the settler colonial state (Coulthard 2014).

This article contributes to scholarship employing sociolegal perspectives on green extractivism, connecting political ecology with the critical geography of infrastructure and with settler colonial theorization of ongoing dispossession. Cole Harris’s influential 2004 contribution considers how colonialism in Canada historically dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and governing authority. Harris concluded that “the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state” (Harris 2004, 179). My interest is in how the settler state continues to dispossess today. What tactics are employed? How do they work?

Critical geographer Deborah Cowen, a central theorist of infrastructure in the settler colonial context, sees infrastructure as critical not only to the movement of workers and commodities for enabling capital flows, but also to “the motion of daily and intergenerational life, the circulation of desire, the possibility of collective movement” (in Pasternak et al. 2023, 2). On the ground in Treaty No. 9, both the miners and the members of the remote Indigenous communities desire and depend on infrastructure, of different types. But infrastructure is also being deployed as a tool to maintain and gain ground. As I will demonstrate, the stance of the settler state is “passive-aggressive” in this respect: It is “passive” in that the infrastructural disentitlement that Neskantaga experiences is effected largely through state neglect, and it is “aggressive” in that the state vigorously pursues the physical infrastructure necessary for extraction.

The extension of the extractive frontier into remote places, as Tia Dafnos says, simultaneously “demands [its] taming through construction of new infrastructures” (2020, 115). In the case of the Ring of Fire, the infrastructural linchpin is a major new industrial all-season road for getting ore to refining. In order to secure this crucial piece of infrastructure, firms and state actors are engaged in what I characterize as coordinated tactics for “gaining ground.” My argument is that the effect of these tactics operating together is coercive dispossession through infrastructural (dis)entitlement. In the dynamic I describe here, infrastructure is assembled in such a way that needs are both met and denied, differentially.

Cowen, drawing on Audra Simpson, says we can also conceive of infrastructures as a “site, circuit and means of struggle over sovereignty and jurisdiction” (in Pasternak et al. 2023, 3). Here, I attempt to make sense of the passive, but chronic, denial of basic community infrastructures to support life on reserve, such as safe drinking water and adequate housing, alongside the aggressive provision of entitlements to fuel the invading extractive infrastructures; further, I juxtapose both against conceptions of infrastructure otherwise, encompassing the vital infrastructures of Indigenous lifeways and laws (Spice, in Pasternak et al. 2023; see also Cowen 2019). In this struggle for control at the frontier, as Nick Estes says, the “infrastructures of Indigenous resistance” are constantly confronting the “infrastructures of settler colonialism” (2018, 7).

The applicable legal relations governing mining, including the settler state’s “free-entry” mineral staking regime, on the surface, are about property rights and ownership of the subsurface. These are layered with constitutional rights to consultation and accommodation, and notions of free, prior, and informed consent deriving from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The terrain of struggle, however, reveals that as much as the legal rules are contested, the prize is actually access and not rights. In this way, the deadly conditions of everyday life in the remote communities contribute to the coercion of infrastructural (dis)entitlement. As I demonstrate, those conditions are undermining First Nations’ capacity to deny access to the minerals and are thus fueling ongoing Indigenous dispossession.

For the critical-minerals-value-chain industrial profit dream to be realized in Ontario, the Anishinaabe people of the Attawapiskat River watershed must be separated from their existing systems of social and ecological reproduction. But obtaining this separation is complex work, and activates a different, conception of infrastructure: Indigenous lifeways and laws that are “vital,” generative , and enable community survivance (Starblanket and Stark 2018; Stark 2023; Cowen 2017a; Spice 2018; Pasternak et al. 2023). Central to ongoing Indigenous dispossession across Treaty No. 9 territory today is a battle over infrastructure in its community, extractive, and “vital” forms. Who is entitled and disentitled to it? And how does that infrastructural (dis)entitlement fuel ongoing dispossession?

This post is an excerpt from [Scott, Dayna Nadine. “Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier.” Journal of Law and Political Economy 38 (2025): 38–73.]. Click here to view the full article.

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