Inuit hunters from a small community in Nunavut are demanding a reassessment of a proposed expansion to an iron ore mine. Baffinland Iron Mines intends to build a port and railway to Steensby Inlet, near the Inuit community of Igloolik, as part of a plan to quadruple production at its Mary River Mine. The port and railway were originally approved by the Government of Canada in 2012.

On November 28, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) announced it had selected Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the municipality of Ignace as “host communities” for all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste. Yet the extent to which the people of northwestern Ontario consent to the proposed waste repository is, at best, unclear.

Indigenous communities have always been at the forefront of struggles against the nuclear industry on Turtle Island. The current battles against nuclear waste disposal in northwestern Ontario are no different. If Canada is to have a just transition away from fossil fuels, then it cannot be based on nuclear power.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party campaigned on the promise of a “renewed, nation-to-nation relationship” between the government and Indigenous communities. Trudeau promised the Assembly of First Nations that he would govern “not only in accordance with constitutional obligations, but also with those enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Struggles over mining in caribou calving grounds make clear that extraction proposals are moving forward despite cases of clear community opposition and that key community concerns are being ignored in decision-making processes. In the cases of uranium mining and mining in caribou calving grounds, there is an appearance that the struggles over extraction and underdevelopment are internal to Nunavut.

Since the late 1960s, Inuit in Baker Lake have been contending with uranium exploration, and the possibility of uranium mining, near their community. After more than three decades of resistance to uranium exploration and mining proposals, Baker Lake is faced with a proposal by the French state-owned multinational AREVA to construct a uranium mine upstream from the community’s water supply and in sensitive caribou habitat.