Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects

ABSTRACT

Building on an analysis of the historical context of oil and gas extraction in the Athabasca region of Canada, and the white settler colonial policies, management, discourses and logics that enable it, this work examines the Canadian nation-state’s neoliberalisation, and the white settler state’s contemporary interrelationship to the transnational oil and gas industry in the region. This first point is addressed through a summary description of the emergence of neoliberalism in both the US and Canada – as these two contexts are deeply interrelated. The second half of the paper examines the contemporary context of the extractive oil and gas industry in the Athabasca region and its ties to contemporary white settler colonialism. Under the conditions of neoliberalism, I argue that these reconfigured relationships, while continuing trajectories of previous forms of white settler colonialism, represent a unique character transformation in the ways and means that both settler colonialism and white supremacy are executed and reproduced. This character change can best be described as a normalization process, whereby free market ideology deeply anchors settler claims to Indigenous lands in the rhetoric of individualism, private property and capital power that is state-supported. The racialised dynamics of accessing the cheap labour needed to expand the extractive industries in the region, and the immigration and labour policies needed to facilitate this will be briefly examined here alongside contemporary popular national discourses of the Alberta tar sands. These naturalizing discourses simultaneously attempt to present the Canadian nation as white, while erasing the existence of Indigenous peoples and discursively (and sometimes physically) ejecting non-white citizens from the settler nation-state’s claimed territories – territories that have been naturalized as falling under Canadian jurisdiction. Furthermore, addressing how concepts of race and realities of racism structure the Canadian nation-state and the extractive industries profiting from ongoing settler colonialism, I argue that racial extractivism, a concept introduced herein, works within and as part of racial capitalism in this neoliberal context. Indeed, race, racism and racialisation need to be analysed in relation to neoliberalism’s operation in settler colonial contexts as these continue to naturalize, order, enable and rationalize settler colonial violence and its extractive manifestations.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial extractivism
• tar sands
• neoliberalism
• White settler colonialism
• Canada
• racial capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jen Preston is a PhD Candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her work examines extractive industries in contemporary Canada and their relationships to ongoing processes of white settler colonialism.

Notes

1. What is commonly called Canada is a product of white settler state-craft, which does not represent or acknowledge Indigenous place names, nations, or their jurisdiction in relation to their traditional territories. While Turtle Island is often used by Indigenous scholars in reference to what European empires coined North America, Canada’s colonial boundaries and borders have sliced through Indigenous communities living in the border regions, disrupted their freedom of movement, Indigenous relations of kinship and trade, and ultimately attempted to make permanent the boundaries of a constructed state seeking the elimination of Indigenous ways of life.

2. ‘Natural resource’ is a concept deeply entrenched in the kinds of white settler entitlement and liberal modern epistemology that this paper discusses as it assumes that nature exists to be used by humans, to be re-imagined as commodity and as clearly distinct from and thus not directly interconnected to human life. I use it here to refer to those living histories of continuing colonialism.

3. See for instance: Lawrence (2004), Simpson and Smith (2014), Byrd (2011), Dunbar-Ortiz (2014), and Warrior (2003).

4. See for instance: Razack (2002), Thobani (2001), Rifkin (2010), (2013), Morgensen (2011), Wolfe (1999, 2006), Veracini (2010), and Dhamoon (2009).

5. These racial and colonial relations are also heteropatriarchal and necessarily intersect with the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality and kinship as many Indigenous, Black and women of colour scholars have argued (Maracle, 1996, Crenshaw, 1991, Collins, 200 0, Razack, 2002). Attention to these intersections has also come from queer Indigenous studies scholars (Driskill et. al. 2011, Rifkin 2011, Simpson and Smith 2014). It is however, beyond the scope of this paper to examine the multitude of intersecting forms of regulation which occur in as part of racial extractivism in the Athabasca context. Further work needs to be done in this area to reveal how contemporary white settler colonialism requires the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality and kinship in sites of ‘resource extraction’.