Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North
© 2021
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, diamonds have been lauded as a "glistening" driver of the northern Canadian economy. Canadian diamonds are cast with an imagined purity as though they had emerged by magic. However, these diamonds are mined on Dene land, extracted by people who fly in from afar, separated from their families for long periods of time.
Adopting a decolonizing and feminist approach to political economy, Refracted Economies analyses the impact of diamond mining in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. The book centres Indigenous women’s social reproduction labour – both at the mine sites and at sites of community, home, and care – as a means of understanding the diffuse impacts of the diamond mines. Grounded in ethnographic work, the narratives of northern Indigenous women’s multiple labours offer unique insight into the gendered ways northern land and livelihoods have been restructured by the diamond industry.
Rebecca Jane Hall draws on documentary analysis, interviews, and talking circles in order to understand and appreciate the – often unseen – labour performed by Indigenous women. Placing this day-to-day labour at the heart of her analysis, Hall shows that it both reproduces the mixed economy and resists the gendered violence of settler colonialism as exemplified by extractive capitalism.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 288 pages
- Illustrations: 3
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 1.0in x 9.0in
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Author Information
Rebecca Jane Hall is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University. -
Table of contents
1. Introduction
Part One: Theorizing the Northern Mixed Economy
2. An Expanded Approach to Production
3. Wıìlıìdeh’s Mixed EconomyPart Two: The Political Economy of Diamonds
4. The Global Political Economy of Canadian Diamonds
5. The Northwest Territories Diamond-Mining RegimePart Three: Indigenous Women’s Labour and the Diamond Mines
6. Time, Place, and the Diamond-Mining Regime
7. Social Reproduction and the Diamond-Mining Regime
8. Diamonds, Subsistence, and Resistance9. Conclusion
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Subjects and Courses
