Mining settles on Indigenous lands: Paul J. White, ‘Mining Life Cycles and Indigenous Land Dispossession in North America: A View from the American West’, in Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, The Global Life of Mines, Berghahn Books, 2024, pp. 113-139 | settler colonial studies blog

Mining settles on Indigenous lands: Paul J. White, ‘Mining Life Cycles and Indigenous Land Dispossession in North America: A View from the American West’, in Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, The Global Life of Mines, Berghahn Books, 2024, pp. 113-139

11Jul24

Excerpt: A notable consistency in the history of Western mining is how often mineral extraction has been conducted with limited regard to the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples. In North America, the westward expansion of Euro-American enterprise during the nine-teenth century was intimately associated with the forced displacement of Native American and First Nation peoples from their land base. The general pattern remains evident today on the North American continent, as well as in interactions between Western mining enter-prises and indigenous peoples globally. Land loss has nevertheless taken many forms. Dispossession resulted from violent encounters as well as from the provisions of resource laws and global initiatives, and all of which have differed in their effects over time and space. This is to say that dispossession is perhaps best framed as an unfolding process rather than as an event with inevitable, evenly distributed impacts.Despite a robust and growing literature on the topic, historical treatments of interactions between miners and Native Americans occurring between the initial discovery rushes and the present day remain rare. An unintended consequence of this bifurcation in inter-est is that the discussion of mining heritage becomes similarly segre-gated into rush-era and post-rush era periods.

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