Climate change has created the conditions for a renewed interest for the Arctic’s onshore and offshore hydrocarbon resources. In the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories, Indigenous communities are facing increasing geopolitical challenges linked to the commodification of their traditional lands. More than 20 years after the implementation of a hybrid EuroCanadian-Indigenous resource governance framework following the signature of a comprehensive land claims settlement agreement with the...

In the Canadian High North, the exploitation of natural resources has continued unabated since the period of first contact. This, along with the implementation, since the 1990s, of several land claims settlement agreements, have slowly eroded the traditional land use practices of indigenous communities. Symbolic interactionism argues that objects are 'human constructs […] whose nature is dependent on the orientation and action of people toward them'. In the indigenous North, natural resources...

In this paper, I consider the relationships between geopolitics, spatial formations, human existence and colonialism. Drawing from the work of Latin American decolonial scholars and the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, I develop a definition of geopower that can apply in the indigenous context. I use the ethnographic data I collected during my period of fieldwork in the Dene community of Tulita in the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories to substantiate my analysis. I show in particula...

This paper presents an ethnographic case-study of resource politics in the settlement of Tulita informed by the conceptual repertoire of literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. It focusses on the ways in which indigenous peoples are marginalised in corporate-community interactions via a pervasive ‘narrative of progress’ that equates the extraction of natural resources to economic and social development. It argues that indigenous modes of speaking and thinking need to be accommodat...