Paper short abstract:

Oil sands companies in Canada are required to reclaim disturbed land by rebuilding the productivity of a landscape. This paper traces settler narratives of reclamation to demonstrate how localized characteristics of settler colonialism are enacted through construction of post-extraction landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

In the Athabasca region of subarctic Canada, oil companies are required by the Alberta government to reclaim land disturbed by their extractive activities. By policy definition, reclamation is achieved by establishing “equivalent capability” of land use, or rebuilding the productivity of a landscape. With shifting definitions of “productive” land, either economic, ecological, or somewhere in-between, reclamation practices in Alberta evolved from creating cattle ranches and agricultural lands to constructing muskeg, reflecting changing human values in the environment. Often, rifts erupt between those values in the land held by oil companies, bureaucrats, scientists, and Indigenous communities. For whom is the landscape being reclaimed? In this paper, based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, I trace settler narratives of mine reclamation from the 1960s to demonstrate the localized characteristics of settler colonialism that are enacted through the construction of post-mining or post-extraction landscapes. Here, land reclamation becomes another activity entangled in settler attempts to justify resource extraction, undermine and erase Indigenous rights and sovereignty, and create settler/extractive space.