Remediating Trails.

The Northern Transportation Route is an ongoing remediation project conducted by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories that aims to clean up contaminations of water and land trails from transportation of pitchblende (a radioactive, uranium-rich mineral) on between the 1930s and 1960s in the Northwest Territories and Alberta, Canada. Parallel to this project, a Dene First Nation (Alberta, Canada) is leading its own community-based environmental monitoring to verify and assess past reports on contamination on its reserves. The portage trails along which pitchblende was transported hold a special place in the region, as crucial land trails connecting river routes. These traditional land routes were appropriated by companies and governments to support industrial and imperialist projects. Expansion of the fur trade, mining rush and the development of settler state transformed Indigenous land and water trails to support the transportation of extracted resources from the North to the South. In this paper, I examine the intersections and superpositions of Indigenous and imperial/ industrial transportation infrastructure. How did Indigenous infrastructures get enmeshed into industrial and imperial project and become toxic? How are these relations remembered and re-negotiated by inhabitants around those toxicities? What does it mean to remediate toxicities for local Dene communities? I consider portage trails, part of Indigenous infrastructures built on close relations between humans and non-humans, within the larger history of land appropriation and contamination by colonial projects with their toxic infrastructures of expansion (Armstrong et al., 2023). Following Cowen's division of infrastructure anchored in ontologies of supply (by state) and care (by Indigenous people) (in Pasternak et al., 2023), I examine the contaminated portage trails as coexisting, entangled infrastructures of care and toxicity, and the spilled uranium-ore as part of the expected failures and violence of infrastructure of transportation (Spice, 2018) affecting local Indigenous communities.