If You Don’t Use It, You Lose It: Negotiating Land Use on Métis Traplines in the Athabasca Oil Sands, Canada (original) (raw)

2017

Abstract

Land use is a key concept guiding environmental management in the Athabasca oil sands region in subarctic Canada. Land use planning compartmentalises activities into a variety of spatially-bound categories, including extractive or traditional use areas. Indigenous land rights also hinge upon demonstrating evidence of site-specific land use and occupancy in Traditional Land Use assessments. As a Fort McMurray Métis elder explained, “If you don’t use it, you lose it”. This paper is a reflection on this statement, exploring how the Métis, government, and oil companies define land use and how use is connected to multiplicities of loss on traplines. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Fort McMurray, Alberta, I compare settler colonial definitions of land use that stem from John Locke’s labour theory of property with Métis legal orders that are rooted in notions of sharing, respect, and reciprocity. I explore a case of competing land uses on an ancestral Métis trapline to outline how these multiple definitions of use converge and compete in practice. Performing land use according to rigid regulatory definitions has high stakes for the actors involved, as territorial, economic, ecological, or relational losses proliferate. I conclude by suggesting that indigenous peoples like the McMurray Métis are actively and creatively adapting their performances of land use to assert sovereignty and remain in dialogue with a powerful state.

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