Damming Colonial Evasion

An Accounting of the Unaccountable in the Mount Polley Mine Disaster

Abstract

This article discusses the 2014 Mount Polley Mine Disaster that occurred in central British Columbia, Canada, through a close analysis of reports generated in the months and years following the Tailings Storage Facility (TSF) breach. The six reports consulted for this investigation were compiled by the Canadian Government, the B.C. Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), the Wilderness Committee, the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA), Amnesty International, and the Corporate Mapping Project. This article aims to identify and analyze the state sponsored narrative that emerges from these reports – a narrative that specifically emphasizes the importance of state and corporate accountability – to then shift the problem towards specific technical or human made failures that led to the breach. 

Drawing on Traci Brynne Volyes’ wastelanding, this article elucidates how the disaster narrative is deliberately constructed to remove both, corporate and government, obligation to Indigenous communities whose lands they occupy and pollute. Highlighted throughout this research article proposal are the ways in which Indigenous communities of various nations had their ways of life altered in perpetuity as a result of the disaster and the overt lack of legal redress they experienced in the time following.