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Paper short abstract

This paper develops infrastructural sovereignty as an anthropological concept for analysing how communities enact self-determination through everyday infrastructural practices, drawing on Indigenous-led digital and transport systems in northern Ontario and Manitoba, Canada.

Paper long abstract

Infrastructural sovereignty is an anthropological concept for understanding how communities enact self-determination through infrastructural practices. Based on ethnographic research in northwestern Ontario and northern Manitoba, Canada, the paper examines how Indigenous and northern communities build, own, maintain, and govern essential infrastructures shaped by state neglect, market withdrawal, and settler-colonial histories.

In Ontario, the First Nations–owned KO-KNET broadband network shows how digital infrastructure becomes a site of collective care, coordination, and governance through practices of maintenance, organisational work, and local decision-making. In Manitoba, the Arctic Gateway Group—a consortium of Indigenous and northern communities—illustrates a parallel process in the transport sector through the community-led operation of the Hudson Bay Railway and the Port of Churchill. Despite their different forms, both cases demonstrate how infrastructures become arenas where communities negotiate responsibility, sustain everyday life, and imagine shared futures.

Rather than treating infrastructure as a technical backdrop or sovereignty as a legal status, the study approaches both ethnographically. Infrastructural sovereignty is conceptualised as a practice-based process that takes shape through mundane work such as repair, coordination, and adaptation, and through the social relations that infrastructure both depends on and produces. Seen this way, infrastructures are not simply objects of governance but ongoing collective achievements.

By foregrounding infrastructural practice, this contribution engages anthropological debates on infrastructure and sovereignty. It shows how infrastructural sovereignty offers a comparative lens for analysing how communities in marginalised regions enact self-determination through the work of keeping infrastructures going and of projecting collective futures under conditions of uncertainty.