Journal of Law and Political Economy

In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community-engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is it politically or institutionally organized. But infrastructural entitlement is strategic and aggressive: Indigenous prosperity and inclusion are key elements of the contemporary liberal justification for critical minerals extraction. From this, a pattern emerges of places toward which resources are flowing and places out of which they are draining. The chronic lack of community-focused infrastructure in some remote First Nations—characterized as a form of “letting die”—creates an attritional force that undermines the communities’ capacity to defend their homelands, to the advantage of the settler state and extractive firms.