Mining sick

Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry, environment, extraction, and the health geographies of rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Bibliographic Data

ID8423636
AuthorsTerri‐Leigh Aldred (University of British Columbia), Charis Alderfer‐Mumma (University of Northern British Columbia), De Leeuw (0000-0003-3837-9784, University of British Columbia, corresponding author), Sarah De Leeuw, May Farrales (0009-0004-0513-9594, University of Northern British Columbia), Margo Greenwood (University of Northern British Columbia), Dawn Hoogeveen (0000-0002-6475-9986, University of Northern British Columbia), Ryan O’Toole (University of Northern British Columbia), Margot W Parkes (0000-0003-1967-2977, University of Northern British Columbia), Vanessa Sloan Morgan (University of Northern British Columbia)
Year2021
Volume65
Issue1
Pages82-96
Publication date2021-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-3658 • E-ISSN: 1541-0064
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/cag.12660
PMID33888912
OpenAlexW3112617122
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited37

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment

Colonialism · Indigenous · Narrative · Political science · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · Ecology · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Gender Studies · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · Mining and Resource Management

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