Zine: Canadian Mining Impacts and Resistance Movements

This zine is the collective effort of the 2019’s Geography 495: “Social Movements in the Americas: The politics of North-South solidarity in theory & practice” class taught by Dr. Juanita Sundberg. Throughout the course of a few months, we learned about “extractivismo or the (re)turn to resource extraction as development and its accompanying conflicts” (Sundberg). We also learned about extractavist paradigms of colonialism capitalism that create “extractive zones” (Gómez-Barris), the violent commodification and reorganization of Indigenous territories across the Americas. We interrogated the idea of the “resource” as a particularly colonial capitalist way of seeing the non-human as well as the human and began the journey of opening up our sensorium to the presence of multiple ontologies and ways of being, perceiving, and living.

As students who attend the University of British Columbia (unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory), and whose campus is permeated with the presence of extractive corporations, we wanted to enter the conversation of Northern extractivist projects to interrogate where we stand.

From this booklet:
1)   We ask that you reflect on your own positioning in relation to the Indigenous land we stand on, and the advancement of Canada’s settler colonial project through mining.
2)   We call those who work or are considering working in extractive industries to consider how their work invests in the permanence of a nation-state that denies the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.

We hope that our booklet will provide readers with critical questions, expose the violence of Canadian mining practices in Latin America, and highlight mining resistors.