Extracting Home in the Oil Sands: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada

by Clinton N. Westman (Editor), Tara L. Joly (Editor), Lena Gross (Editor)

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.

225 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 6, 2019

Reviews

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of essays that come from many different angles to explore the impact of extractive industries on place and how one makes home amidst such extraction. The authors do a good job to represent the nuance and complexities of the area, never demonizing the individuals, but critical of the system as a whole. Recommend!