Jeremy Schmidt on The Price of Gold

“The Price of Gold tells a story that is vital to understanding how extractive economies are formed and contested, and how they can remain environmentally and economically corrosive long after the fraction of natural resources valued by the market has been extricated and sold. It sets this narrative amid Indigenous struggles both in an everyday sense for environmental justice and within the on-going resistances and resurgences against settler colonialism in Canada. It also finds place for the labourers and miners who viscerally, at times violently, picketed and protested the mine owners. The solidarities that came and went across different constituencies tell something of the social and political complexity through which people are differentially positioned amid colonialism and circuits of global capitalism.

There is everything in a book like this that keeps you turning the pages: hidden reports of environmental harms; eye-watering statistics of toxic sludge dumped next to lakes for decades (∼30 000 tonnes); mobility patterns that shift because travel by dog sled too near to mines led to loss of fur on the paws of animals; Indigenous efforts to do their own testing after being told not to believe their own experiences of illness were connected to mining activities; and communities standing up to corporations that serve distant shareholders at their expense. The many kinds of evidence, however, are not merely devices for moving the story forward. They are part of a commitment by the authors to offer a narrative that is not the sort of ‘damage-centred’ account that Eve Tuck¹ called years ago for scholars to suspend; accounts, that is, that make harms the reference points of identity or relations. In this sense, the book consistently sets devastating facts astride the organising thread of response, determination, and commitment by those who, over the course of decades, rallied, rekindled, and redoubled their efforts to hold mining companies (ownership of the mine changed over the years) and governments to account. This is, I think, an admirable ethos for any book but one not often achieved as consistently as it is in this book.”