Red Nation Rising by Brandon Benallie

Author:Brandon Benallie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Resource Colonization

Colonization is nothing if not about the extraction of mineral wealth and the exploitation of people. All of this is about resources, particularly what the settler calls natural resources. But beware of some who write about resource colonization. At its best, work on resource colonialism demonstrates the profound destruction at the heart of settler colonialism. At its worst, however, it is a phrase that limits a discussion or analysis of settler colonialism by an abstraction called “resources.” Resource colonialism, rendered this way, directs our attention away from histories and contemporary practices and patterns of settler colonialism and instead places its focus on a very limited—and abstract—set of concerns. It is the corporations and non-Native political and economic elites, along with their Native collaborators, and the way these people and institutions conspire to remove authority over the use of something called “resources” from Native people that are of interest to “resource colonization.”

There is a very specific political and material effect that follows when we modify “colonization” by the adjective “resource.” If the problem is “resource colonization” and not simply “colonization,” then the solution is a resolution to the problems defined by the adjective “resource,” not one defined by “colonization” more generally. Let’s say we’re talking about the exploitation of oil and gas or coal or uranium on Native land. Resource colonization draws attention to the non-Native corporations accommodated by the settler state that control and profit from the extraction of oil and gas or coal or uranium. The solution to this problem is not the restoration of Native sovereignty and the abolition of extraction and exploitation and the environmental destruction that follows these processes but, rather, the abolition of the non-Native control of this exploitation. This is not to say that a challenge to the non-Native control of Native land does not constitute a problem for the settler state, rather, it is to say that the phrase resource colonization confronts the settler state on its own terms and in ways the settler state is fully equipped to respond to. Consider the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. It has an office of Indian Energy and Economic Development in its Native American Business Development division. What is this if not a way to resolve the central critique of “resource colonization”—that exploitation isn’t controlled by Native people or institutions?

But what good can come from a critique of the phrase resource colonization? After all, resource colonization defines a history in which persistent underdevelopment came to those tribal nations targeted by resource extraction firms, whether for their water, timber, oil and gas, or uranium. The benefits of this extraction have been enjoyed by the firms that control it and the white settlements that convert these resources into energy. Resource colonization names a version of Native sovereignty now permanently dependent on a resource economy based on exploitation. One genealogy of the phrase resource colonialism emerges from this history.

The phrase resource colonization depicts extraction as the source of underdevelopment. This implies that decolonization struggles should focus on the abolition of resource colonization to make Native development possible.

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