Abitibi-Témiscamingue, a region of nearly 60,000 square kilometers in the near-north of Québec, Canada, is experiencing the early stages of an extractive buzz around lithium and other ‘critical and strategic’ minerals. Federal and provincial authorities have situated the region as a resource frontier for its established and exploited reserves of lithium, as well as copper, nickel, and rare earth elements as they seek to capitalize on decarbonization's emerging global supply chains. This latest buzz is occurring in an established extractive zone. Centuries of industrial forestry, gold mines, and colonization complicate the local uptake of discourses around transitions, frontiers, mining, and development that link extraction with transformation and growth. Controversies surrounding the proposed Authier lithium mine highlight the complicated nature of resource frontier formation and energy transitions across global and local scales. Drawing from stakeholder interviews with community members, elected officials, industry representatives, and civil society groups across the extractivist landscapes of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, this article explores ways in which competing and overlapping self-understandings of what it means to be a ‘mining region’ contribute to and shape energy transitions. Interviewees and government reports have been unanimous in asserting extractive industries’ centrality to the identity, economy, and politics of the region. However, the meaning of ‘we are a mining region’ varies widely among stakeholders along a spectrum from optimism to despair. In this light, the lithium frontier should not be understood as a new source of conflicts, subject positions, and interests. It is, rather, an evolving articulation of pre-existing anxieties and anticipations around extractivism that encompass the economic, social, political, and ecological life of the region.