Care through closure: mine transitions in the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories, Canada

Abstract

This article, emerging from a community-university research partnership, examines community concerns around diamond mine closure in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and Dene visions of post-extractive futures. The Northwest Territories is a region of the sub-arctic characterized by a political economy that combines settler and Indigenous modes of governance, production, and social reproduction, with an outsized settler engagement in resource extraction. In this article, we turn our attention to the under-examined social processes of mine closure in this region. In taking a feminist political economy approach to mine closure, we attend to the multiple labours of the northern mixed economy. We aim to unsettle the settler preoccupation with the mine itself, and rather, to centre the social reproduction of mining affected communities. Responding to calls for greater attention to the social aspects of mine closure, this paper brings together feminist imaginaries of care and reproduction with place-based insights regarding the gender of settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s transgressive caring labours in northern Canada. It draws upon community-based interviews and talking circles, analyzing mine closure as both a site of ongoing settler colonial dispossession and as a space of resistance to ongoing colonialism through the assertion of Dene modes of life.