Gendered carceral violence and struggles against environmental exploitation

Ongoing conflict around expanding logging infrastructure at Ada'itsx/Fairy Creek in socalled
British Columbia (BC), is a particularly relevant and pertinent site in which to explore the
conceptual and methodological questions that interest me. Beginning around the Ada'itsx/Fairy
Creek watershed and spreading to nearby old growth sections of the rainforest, Indigenous
communities and their allies have mobilized throughout the forests of Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht, and
Pacheedaht territory (what is known as Vancouver Island, British Columbia) since early 2020. In
response to increasing and expanding old-growth logging in these territories, organizers have
blockaded logging roads to protect ancient forests in the face of an aggressive para-military
response (Meisner, 2021). Despite formal declarations from local First Nations asserting their
sovereign rights to governance of their homelands, Supreme Court precedent acknowledging
aboriginal title, evidence demonstrating the fragility of biodiversity and ancient forests in BC, and
ample evidence of the correlation between the presence of industrial labour housing facilities or
'man camps' and increased violence against Indigenous women in nearby communities, Teal Jones
logging company has been granted a court injunction to continue development (Meisner, 2021;
MMIWG Report, 2019).
Extractive development and mobilization at Ada'itsx/Fairy Creek provides a rich context
to ground my study of the entangled relationships between logging development corporations,
settler-state policy related to extraction and conservation, the disciplinary enforcement of this
policy, and circuits of global flows of investment and finance capital in Canada's resource
extractive industry. This case also provides analytical space to query the history of extractive
infrastructure development in the settler-Canadian project, as well as the spatial dimensions of the
disciplinary and criminalizing logics that are produced at extractive sites. Logging development
and resistance to this development provides a prism through which to explore how resource
extractive infrastructures organize and are organized by logics of ongoing Indigenous
dispossession and genocide, patriarchal domination, capitalist exploitation, and carceral state
power (Cowen, 2020). The Ada'isx/Fairy Creek conflict also provides a space to explore the ways
contemporary resistance movements draw the aforementioned connections and demand redress that
accounts for these interconnections.
Finally, a central dispute at this site regarding jusridiction, with respect to conservation and
environmental governance, is a generative case in which to study how colonial notions of property
animate disputes at sites of contestation to extraction and shape the criminalization of resistance.
Indigenous feminist thinkers remind me that colonization is not simply about stolen land, "but
about the creation of something called land that can then be stolen" (King et al., 2020, p.16). These
thinkers draw connections between the history of colonial-capitalist conquest of land and natural
resources and the oppression, domination, and dehumanization of Black and Indigenous women
and gender queer communities in Canada (Simpson, 2014; Watts, 2015). This relationship in the
literature between heteropatriarchal oppression, ecological exploitation, and carceral state power
highlights overlapping concerns between gender justice, abolition, land, and environmental justice.
I want to think with these scholars, alongside critical Marxist, Black Studies, and climate justice
scholars, to further explore how gendered logics of possession, ownership, and commodification
are embedded in and reproduced through extractive infrastructures, like those found at Ada'isx/Fairy Creek, driven by the aforementioned actors and processes to produce extractive
landscapes of gendered carceral domination (Todd, 2017; McKittrick, 2011).