Welfare Mines

QC 20240515

Abstract

The role of extractive industries in development outcomes is a contested matter. The unresolved, provocative nature of modern mines, and in particular, of the industry’s self-positioning as an engine of local or regional improvement raises difficult problems for territorial, political, economic, cultural, and ontological sovereignty, in part because of the deeply hegemonic position it has assumed. This thesis broadly examines the interaction between two distinct but interrelating areas of development – resources extraction and human welfare – in northern Canada since the postwar period. I examine this question by following ideas and politics governing peoples and mines, and I explain how theories and practices of development evolved and intervened via industrial mining and the labour of Indigenous miners in northern Canada from 1945 up to the present. I present the results as a historical geography of state policy where mineral exploitation and human development intersect.

Through a historical analysis grounded in a critical review of literature and the archival record, I consider economic progress and the closely linked mineral frontier advancement within Canada’s Arctic and subarctic regions, according to five periods: I Necessary interventions (1948–57); II Program for human betterment (1957–62); III Alternative development (1959–67); IV The dual economy (1968–84); and V Towards sustainable mines (1982–2005). Throughout this study, I adopt a comparative method in which I select multiple case examples that can, as a cumulative force, yield explanatory power. I do not conceive of the chosen industrial or mine sites as in-depth studies in their own right, but instead as part of a constellation of places that can serve to zoom in and out in order to cover a larger geographic unit spanning the Canadian north.

A historical reconceptualization and a historicization of northern mines as locales of welfare making has revealed their ambiguous potential in bringing forth a radical transformation of peoples, lands, and societies in Canada. The pledge to improve societies based on the profitable exploitation of mineral resources arguably worked in lockstep with the delivery of large-scale mining to northern Canada; a double program I have come to view as the building of welfare mines. This thesis demonstrates that the welfare mines remain important sites where the apparent tension between money and peoples is used productively by the state. They are real-world places, material holes in the ground where mineral wealth is extracted but also where humans are reshaped, where both phenomena are inextricably woven within the overall rubric of development finally used to serve colonial governments. Welfare, insofar as it interacts with industrial development, participates, enables, is how mining capitalism works – welfare and exploitation necessarily coexist at northern mines. The welfare mines not only opened new possibilities in the north, they also served to foreclose other paths, thereby benefiting the mines in a self-reinforcing cycle. It is an all-embracing force that was not meant to be contained or to coincide with diverse modes of production or means of living. This is the power of welfare mines, a social power that illuminates the broader welfare mechanics of colonial power in northern Canada, and beyond.

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