Manufacturing border landscapes [A Manual]

Kait McGeary + Dana Salama

This work took place as part of Professor Fionn Byrne’s landscape option studio: “The Ring of Fire: Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance” in 2017.

In Canada, there is a history of Indigenous rights being ignored once infrastructural and extraction projects are underway. Manufacturing Border Landscapes [A Manual] addresses this reality within the context of the Ring of Fire—a rich mineral deposit in Northern Ontario that could become the second largest resource extraction site in Canada after the Athabasca tar sands. The Manual is designed to be an downloadable resource for indigenous communities who wish to make their voices heard within a proposed reality in which the future road to the Ring of Fire is designed with indigenous interests in mind.

Three modular and scalable border interventions occur at the intersection of the road and a series of First Nations boundaries are designed to give impacted communities spatial control. The three border scales are: Matawa First Nations boundary, First Nations Reserve boundary and within the communities themselves. For each of the interventions four conditions are explored: Normal operation, small protest, large protest, and celebration. Webequie, the closest community to the Ring of Fire was used to demonstrate each Action.