Aboriginal Support for BC Mining

From the Associated Press comes a review of several mining projects supported by BC First Nations communities. In brief:

Mining companies and aboriginal nations across British Columbia are looking more like business partners than long-standing adversaries traditionally at home running bulldozers and setting up blockades.

This article refers to mining in northern British Columbia and agreements with Tahltan-speaking peoples. The article notes, for example, extensive consultation between Nova Gold and Tahltans before establishing the Galore Creek mine site. The article continues, however, by discussing the complicated situation at Iskut, BC, where protests over bcMetals’s work to open up the Red Chris mine site continue. Despite the visible and audible resistance to mining in Iskut, the article also mentions support for mining by some Iskut people. The role of environmentalists in monitoring and criticizing mining activities in BC is also raised. Thus, embedded in a story about cooperative relations between mining companies and First Nations are hints that conflicts exist.

My interest in all of this continues to be the multivocalic nature of the debates over mining. Certainly mining protests by aboriginal people catch my attention (and that of news agencies), but the voices of mining supporters (less audible as they may be in many cases) demand attention too. Attending to the wider debates may, in fact, open up new research avenues into the dynamics of aboriginal communities and their (assumed?) connections to environmental movements.

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