The Northern Bureau for Subsurficial Instrument Analysis (NBSIA) makes legible the tools of settler-extractive verticality which measure, visualize, and enclose while tracking time (capital/nation-state/deep) at mineral, property, territorial, and planetary scales. 

At the NBSIA we work with an understanding that Canada derives its statehood through subsurface dispossessions; the Canadian state has been formed through the deliberate dispossession of Indigenous people from their land for the purposes of mineral development. To do so, new technologies have been intentionally employed to enact a mode of disposessive verticality: the separation of surface from subsurface (mineral) rights rationalizes and entrenches a set of settler-colonial norms, policies and tools. Taken together, these instruments of underground dispossession constitute a toolkit that industry and the settler state alike appeal to in order to engage a continuous mining regime based on conceptions of property born from the western Imperial imaginary. The NBSIA is an independent research bureau with a mandate to document and offer analysis of these heterogeneous instruments with origins from legal, scientific, and military sources.

Canada, as a “mining country” [1], depends on a separation between surface rights and subsurface, or mineral, rights. The property conflicts that arise from this severance is a continuation of an entire regime of land-based removal, a continuation of the Victorian project of extractivism. Today, Canada ranks in the top five mineral producing countries and mining is a main sources of GDP [2]. Though property owners generally hold surface rights, mineral rights are usually owned by provincial governments. And while precise policies vary, these subsurficial deposits of bitumen, oil, gas, rare earths, gold, silver, potash, and other minerals, are staked by exploration companies operating under a “free-entry” system, a regime leftover from the days of frontier homesteaders and pioneering prospectors. 

The infrastructure of this regime takes on many forms but remains largely hidden. The spectacle of Canadian nationalism centres liberal imaginaries instead on multiculturalism and environmentalism from “coast to coast to coast”, yet the environmental violence enacted to entrench settler supremacy remains directed at Indigenous lands and communities. It enacts this violence through technocratic expertise and bureaucracy. Through the development of polices and tools – spectrometers and drill bits, winter tires and geological section mapping, the stakes, the core samples, the stratigraphic visualizations, the state-sponsored industry conferences: These all amount to a toolkit that understands the multi-dimensional, or volumetric, characteristics of territory [3] (indeed to enclose the subsurface has required as well technologies that measure from high above) while simultaneously withholding it from public consciousness.

Resource dependent, Canadian settler-colonialism benefits from what legal scholar Monika Ehrman calls “resource blindness”,  or an inability to see resources. This “blindness” impacts our collective ability to manage and conserve them. Ehrman argues that “resource sight” then can contribute to an improved property rights framework. We take Ehrman’s premise but extend it, suggesting that revealing the tools and instruments that render technical the subsurface makes it more possible to build resistances around them. Despite its expertise at enacting multi-dimensional verticality, the settler state produces environmental narratives where static and flat portrayals flourish. “Resource sight” allows for an understanding of minerals and resources as fluid and contested. As Ehrman suggests, “Because of their geologic interconnectivity, subsurface resources encounter both vertical and lateral conflicts.” [4]

To “render technical”, a term coined by anthropologist Tania Li, implies a political framing where solutions lend themselves to technological positivism, ignoring structural causes. The tools included in the NBSIA repository do just that: they render technical the subsurface, and erase ways of knowing the subsurface that were practiced since before the arrival of Europeans. For instance the Memengweshiwuk are spirit beings which instruct humans how to work with stone, and remain part of Algonquin-speaking cultural landscapes. Such a reading confirms the subsurface as relational and living, echoed by Mike Pinay of the Peepeekeesis First Nation, who suggests that, “Minerals continues to grow. They are just very slow.” [5]

Spatial research has long attempted to make environmental complexities legible, from W.E.B DuBois’ data portraits of the Jim Crow south, to Kevin Lynch’s iconic Image of the City. The effort of diagramming –rendering a schematic that distills function to its simplest terms– allows both an ability to make complexities legible while also refusing the fetishization of artifacts themselves. We begin this deconstruction in our NBSIA logo: Derived from the Canadian Land Directorate, the NBSIA logo hacks the prior graphics, removing structural elements that call attention to settler logic. Each entry into this database will be treated with similar graphic intention: To make legible its function and service to vertical dispossession, in effect making visible the violent technical operations of vertical dispossession.

The NBSIA is as a response to Yummy Colours’ concept of the year (COY) 2021. 

[1] Government of Canada. “Minerals and the economy”. From: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/minerals-and-the-economy/20529
[2] Further to this, in Canada in 2016, 200 mines and 7,000 quarries produced more than 60 minerals and metals worth $41 billion. See the Canadian Minerals and Metals Plan, Natural Resources Canada. From: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/CMMP/CMMP_The_Plan-EN.pdf
[3] For an introduction to the “volumetric” rather than “area” see: Stuart Elden. (2103) Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power, Political Geography, Volume 34: 35-51. 
[4] Monika Ehrman, 2020. Application of Natural Resources Property Theory to Hidden Resources. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1): 630.
[5] Andrew M. Miller and Evelyn Seigfried. (2017). Traditional Knowledge of Minerals in Canada. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, XXXVII(2): 41.