Indigeneity, gender and class in decision-making about risks from resource extraction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Proposed copper-nickel mines in Northern Minnesota are an emblematic case of participatory environmental justice dynamics in contested decision-making processes around new risky forms and sites of resource extraction. The mines have been embroiled in an over-decade long review process and pose a threat to popular waterways as well as natural resources that are protected by treaties with Ojibwe tribes. I examine how various actors engage in decision-making processes, and how risks and benefits are assessed in ways shaped by intersectional dynamics of power. What voices and knowledges are privileged and silenced? Whose bodies and livelihoods are privileged? Through discourse analysis of public documents and observations at public hearings, I find intersectional health risks from pollution are overlooked while the rhetoric of economic benefits privileges white male workers. Native American tribes have a formal role in the environmental review process, which provides them with visibility and legitimacy, but indigenous concerns are articulated through the discourse of science and expertise, and still bracketed from major conclusions. I contribute to environmental justice scholarship by applying an intersectional framework toward gender, whiteness and indigeneity in decision-making about environmental risks, and how the politics of knowledge effects procedural environmental justice.