“War and Natural Resources in History: Introduction”
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
Longley traces how geographic and cartographic knowledge of the Athabasca region, Alberta, Canada, colonized the region in the southern imagination long before the oil sands industry began extraction there. The practices of exploration, surveying, and documentation mapped the Athabasca region in terms of its rich bitumen deposits, obscuring the histories of Indigenous people. The south gained political and economic control of the region, although this process is incomplete and contested.
Once a denuded gold mining landscape, now a National Heritage Park, this place is site of emerging environmental histories of post-colonizing, post-mining lands.
Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, and Mindy Blaise edit and introduce a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism.” The three essays that follow ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognizant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
João Afonso Baptista uses an ethnographic approach to analyze ecological knowledge in Angolan forests as shaped by local dwellers and represented by (neo)colonial processes of distinction and separation, namely the external knower and the object known.
This article explores the prospects and politics of indigenous participation in multi-sector conservation, using the case of the Boreal Leadership Council (BLC) in Canada. It concludes that multi-sector conservation creates both new possibilities for indigenous empowerment and new forms of marginalization through the reproduction of a (post)colonial geography of exclusion.
This article shows how rural collective action in tropical Australia transformed plantations into small farms in the late nineteenth century.
Adam Paterson and Chris Wilson consider Ngarrindjeri contributions to Southern Australia’s nineteenth-century whaling industry.