Refractive Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North

Abstract

The late twentieth century was an important period of transition for the economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada. The territory’s gold mines—a mainstay of the regional economy since the 1930s—ceased production. In their place, several diamond mines came online, ushering in a new regime of extraction. Unlike historic mines in the NWT, recent diamond mining operations have made a prolonged effort to incorporate Indigenous peoples into their labor forces, largely in response to Indigenous political organizing. In Refractive Economies, Rebecca Jane Hall examines the implications of these diamond mines for Indigenous Dene women. Drawing on academic fieldwork, document analysis, and her extensive experience working with Indigenous women’s organizations, Hall’s analysis focuses on how diamond mining has affected the social reproduction work performed by Dene women. Hall’s synthesis of feminist, Marxist, and Indigenous political economy, together with her keen attention to geographic concepts like space and scale, has resulted in a timely and important contribution to economic geography and Northern Studies in Canada. Clearly written and well argued, her book will be useful to scholars interested in the geography and political economy of extraction, settler colonialism, and violence against Indigenous women. Divided into three parts, Refracted Economies includes chapters pertaining to the application of ideas from feminist political economy (FPE) to northern mixed economies, the political economy of diamond mining, and the implications of diamond mines for Indigenous women’s labor. The relationship between diamond mining and violence is a prominent theme throughout. Hall examines both the growth of the Canadian diamond mining industry in the context of global discourses of blood diamonds as well as the relationship between diamond mining and violence against Indigenous women (both structural and embodied) in Northern Canada. One of Hall’s most notable contributions to economic geography is her application of concepts from FPE to fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) mining operations in Northern Canada. According to Hall, in FIFO operations, the division between capitalist production and social reproduction—an important topic of analysis and criticism within the field of FPE—manifests itself spatially. The sites of capitalist production (mines) are segregated from the sites of intergenerational social reproduction (Dene communities). Hall argues that this restructuring has intensified social reproduction in individual households while causing a decline in the interhousehold linkages that previously characterized the Dene mixed economy. However, Indigenous women frequently resist this atomization of their social reproduction labors by continuing to prioritize interhousehold linkages. Hall also explores FIFO’s implications for relationships between Indigenous men and women. She argues that FIFO has created new structural BO O K R EV EW