The environmental effects of mining in the North

Ashley Cummings was born in Nunavut and now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where the mining industry is booming.

Despite the harm caused to Indigenous communities and lands, mining activity in the territory continues to thrive and grow. In 2021, mining, quarrying and oil-and-gas extraction accounted for 15.5 per cent of the province’s gross domestic product. In that same year, the value of mineral exports from Yukon more than doubled, and minerals accounted for 96.7 per cent of its domestic exports.

Canadian mining companies, which have operations around the world, are notorious for abusing human rights and harming the environment. They’re also known to skirt their obligations to consult with Indigenous communities, which contravenes Canada’s commitments to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Below, Ashley talks about the devastation to the lands as a result of heavy industry, in both Nunavut and Yukon.

Ashley Cummings

My name is Ashley Cummings. I’m living in Whitehorse, Yukon, right now. And my pronouns are she and her.

One of the stressful parts of environmental racism is just how different BIPOC experience it. You know, my culture and when I was growing up in Nunavut, there was so much richness. We went caribou hunting, we went fishing and clam digging. But when seasons become so erratic …. there was one winter where the sea ice didn’t form until almost November. Normally it starts forming in September, and it’s pretty much formed by mid-October. Having that sudden change in something that’s been happening since time immemorial — having the sea ice and using it as a form of transportation, whether we’re going over it with ski-doos, to go fishing in a lake. There’s an incredible loss of culture in that. And that’s not the fault of Inuit. That is the fault of massive corporations polluting our planet. And mismanaged policy.

Mining is a really big part of the industry here. And that directly harms the traditional lands of so many different Yukon First Nations. Mining is pure destruction to our land. And I feel that’s a big part of it, especially when sacred lands come into question. Jjust looking at our percentage of land owned by Yukon First Nations, I think it’s around 12 per cent in the whole territory. That’s 12 per cent more than we had pre-Umbrella Final Agreement. But it still doesn’t take away the sacredness of the land that these people have been living on since time immemorial. 

It’s an incredible part of their culture and their stories and seeing it being destroyed is heart-wrenching.

The further north you get in Yukon, the more expensive the grocery prices get. And that being said, we’re pretty lucky to have the Alaska Highway even though that’s another example of environmental racism with so many Yukon First Nations being displaced as that was being built over World War Two. And yet we’re lucky to have it because that puts us on a main line of so many amenities. 

But the further north you get, the further you are away from the Alaska Highway. And then, you know, similarly with Nunavut, these grocery store foods deteriorate as they go further north and they start going bad, then the grocery prices go up. And it’s hard to access hunting, especially, to be within the season, in order to hunt certain things.

It’s so frustrating to see these foods being subsidized when really the money would best be put towards hunters, whether it’s helping buy gas or bullets so that they can go out on the land and sustainably harvest as we’ve been doing for, thousands of years and having these forced upon us and perpetuating a lot of poverty, especially when there aren’t any investments being made into infrastructure in the North.

There are so many ways that Inuit can be supported sustainably but, with capitalism and with colonization and environmental racism and systemic racism, it really continues to knock us down.