ABSTRACT
Indigenous Peoples have distinct health ontologies that extend beyond biomedical paradigms and draw instead on a broader perspective of health, including emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental health. Consequently, mining projects can significantly affect Indigenous Peoples and their health in myriad ways through various complex social-ecological pathways. Potential impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ health are evaluated using a tool called environmental assessment (EA). However, EA is a technocratic process that relies on and advances a very specific and narrow understanding of health—one based in Western, colonial cultural understandings and assumptions that can be inappropriate and even harmful for Indigenous communities. This chapter frames EA as a knowledge infrastructure and explores the broader political implications of this process using an approach called “infrastructural inversion.” While EA’s critical importance and weight are sometimes overlooked relative to the physical prominence of other material and technological infrastructures, this chapter posits that EA itself is politically significant, playing a key role in directing, containing, managing, and reducing the unruly politics and contestation centered at sites of invasion, including mining projects. It ultimately characterizes EA as a knowledge infrastructure that seeks to enable and support extraction, the material infrastructures that accomplish it, and the colonial and racial dynamics that imbue it.
