Preserving Wilderness or Protecting Homelands? Intersections and Divergences in Activist Discourses About Mining in Ontario’s Far North

ABSTRACT

Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire/Wawangajing controversy constitutes a complex site of debate about the risks and benefits of mining in an area of major ecological significance that is also the ancestral territory of nine First Nation communities. This paper investigates the rhetorical alignments and divergences in public calls by Matawa First Nations tribal council and the Ontario Wildlands League for stronger environmental assessment of mining projects than that favoured by the Canadian government. Tracing the terminologies each group uses to describe the affected region and its inhabitants in its activist rhetoric about EA offers insight into the contingent, shifting ways in which wilderness advocacy and Indigenous justice discourses may speak together yet distinctly within contemporary environmental-natural resource disputes.

KEYWORDS:

• Wilderness
• Indigenous peoples
• environmental controversy
• mining
• rhetorical criticism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ring of Fire is the name bestowed by the mining industry. Wawangajing is the Indigenous (Anishnaabemowin) name.

2. They form part of the larger Nishnawbe Aski Nation of Northern Ontario.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Laurentian University Research Funds [grant 41-1-6090550].