Repair and the 2014 Mount Polley Mine disaster: Antirelationality, constraint, and legacies of socio-ecological disruption in settler colonial British Columbia

Abstract

In this article I situate the 2014 Mount Polley Mine disaster within centuries-long relations of colonial-modernity in the region currently known as British Columbia, Canada. Guided by the work of Gilmore and Moten, I argue that repairing colonial systems of mass disruption and death requires attending to the logics that enable and normalize these systems of violence. To support this argument, I turn to British Columbia’s early settler colonial history—a violent and destructive history forged through mining—and outline large-scale socio-ecological violence that occurred throughout this period. By turning to this history, I show how these disruptions are connected to the Mount Polley Mine disaster through ongoing and pervasive logics that enable, and often even celebrate, these processes of violence and disruption.