Gendered carceral violence and struggles against environmental exploitation

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Ongoing conflict around expanding logging infrastructure at Ada'itsx/Fairy Creek in socalledBritish Columbia (BC), is a particularly relevant and pertinent site in which to explore theconceptual and methodological questions that interest me. Beginning around the Ada'itsx/FairyCreek watershed and spreading to nearby old growth sections of the rainforest, Indigenouscommunities and their allies have mobilized throughout the forests of Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht, andPacheedaht territory (what is known as Vancouver Island, British Columbia) since early 2020. Inresponse to increasing and expanding old-growth logging in these territories, organizers haveblockaded logging roads to protect ancient forests in the face of an aggressive para-militaryresponse (Meisner, 2021). Despite formal declarations from local First Nations asserting theirsovereign rights to governance of their homelands, Supreme Court precedent acknowledgingaboriginal title, evidence demonstrating the fragility of biodiversity and ancient forests in BC, andample 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 Joneslogging 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 contextto ground my study of the entangled relationships between logging development corporations,settler-state policy related to extraction and conservation, the disciplinary enforcement of thispolicy, and circuits of global flows of investment and finance capital in Canada's resourceextractive industry. This case also provides analytical space to query the history of extractiveinfrastructure development in the settler-Canadian project, as well as the spatial dimensions of thedisciplinary and criminalizing logics that are produced at extractive sites. Logging developmentand resistance to this development provides a prism through which to explore how resourceextractive infrastructures organize and are organized by logics of ongoing Indigenousdispossession and genocide, patriarchal domination, capitalist exploitation, and carceral statepower (Cowen, 2020). The Ada'isx/Fairy Creek conflict also provides a space to explore the wayscontemporary resistance movements draw the aforementioned connections and demand redress thataccounts for these interconnections.Finally, a central dispute at this site regarding jusridiction, with respect to conservation andenvironmental governance, is a generative case in which to study how colonial notions of propertyanimate 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, "butabout the creation of something called land that can then be stolen" (King et al., 2020, p.16). Thesethinkers draw connections between the history of colonial-capitalist conquest of land and naturalresources and the oppression, domination, and dehumanization of Black and Indigenous womenand gender queer communities in Canada (Simpson, 2014; Watts, 2015). This relationship in theliterature between heteropatriarchal oppression, ecological exploitation, and carceral state powerhighlights overlapping concerns between gender justice, abolition, land, and environmental justice.I want to think with these scholars, alongside critical Marxist, Black Studies, and climate justicescholars, to further explore how gendered logics of possession, ownership, and commodificationare embedded in and reproduced through extractive infrastructures, like those found at Ada'isx/Fairy Creek, driven by the aforementioned actors and processes to produce extractivelandscapes of gendered carceral domination (Todd, 2017; McKittrick, 2011).