Just Don’t Eat the Fish: State-Corporate Ecocide in Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation

Indigenous communities across Canada struggle with various outcomes of industrial activity in their territories including water contamination, clear-cutting, and more. Throughout the 1960s, Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation (AFN) experienced this struggle when Dryden Paper Company dumped 10,000kg of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River, which they relied upon for food, water, and employment. Since then, little has been done to remediate the river and attend to the health and social issues that arose in the community as a result. Taking Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation as a case study, this thesis employs Marxist Critical Discourse analysis to examine the ideologies that underpinned and influenced the state’s response (or lack thereof) to the disaster, and why the state continues to permit and encourage further industrial activity in the territory. In so doing, this study found that dominant capitalist-centric discourses overcame counter-hegemonic claims in shaping how the state reacted to the mercury crisis. Of note is how the state relied on racial and colonial ideologies to justify its inadequate measures to restore AFN’s traditional food system and aid them in addressing the negative health outcomes associated with the mercury disaster. Furthermore, discourses surrounding the domination, control, and value of nature were used to rationalize the state’s continuous reluctance to clean up the English-Wabigoon River and encourage further extractivism in the territory. This study concludes that to properly understand the issue of corporate ecocide in Canada, theoretical frameworks need to contemplate the economic and non-economic underpinnings of capitalism.