Gravel grabs: The rocky foundations of Indigenous geologic power in the Arctic

Abstract

Infrastructure development cannot take place without gravel, which is scarce in the North American Arctic. Conditioning where development can occur, the commodity has become the target of Indigenous actors seeking to secure land and resource bases and their material futures, too. In Alaska, decades of litigation pitting Indigenous surface versus subsurface corporate landholders has contested gravel's legal location. In Canada, contrastingly, Inuvialuit land claims negotiators successfully secured access to granular resources. In both locales, legal processes have resulted in certain Indigenous actors’ accumulation of geologic power. Rooted in the subterranean, this power enables them to transform the surface of the Earth. Contributing to research on geologic power and political geology and drawing on fieldwork and a review of court cases, policy documents and reports, this article critiques how gravel has become an Arctic resource lucrative to local communities rather than global markets and a key source of Indigenous political and economic agency. Going forward, struggles over Indigenous rights may concern securing ownership over not only the land base, but the land column.

Introduction

On a bone-chilling winter’s day on the outskirts of Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow), where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas wash up against Alaskan’s northern shores, dozens of people and I dressed in orange safety vests stood on land owned by the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation (UIC), a village corporation with surface title to 220 000 acres deeded by the United States federal government through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971 (Edwardsen 2007). As participants in the 2017 Indigenous Business Development Tour, we waited, shivering, for the clock to count down to zero. UIC had planted dynamite across several acres of its surface lands in preparation for mining. In the cold, still air, the yellow digits on the clock counted down at a glacial pace. Suddenly, a black mushroom cloud darkened the sky, strewing stones, pebbles, and dirt across the frozen white tundra. This granular debris was the desired end-product of the detonation: gravel (Fig. 1). Once we were back inside, a UIC representative remarked, “That’s 1.5 years of permitting that went up in a few seconds.” Another added, “Nothing in Barrow happens without a gravel source. They are the backbone and the heart of the community for any future development. They are a critical component to our future success” (Field notes, March 8, 2017).

Fig. 1.

The site of the gravel detonation outside Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Photo Author, March 2017

For thousands of years in northern Alaska and elsewhere across the Arctic, it was ice and not gravel, which undergirded habitation and movement. Frozen rivers supported travel, and still do, even though their seasons are shortening due to climate change (Gädeke et al. 2021). Icebergs offer platforms for whaling and sealing (Hovelsrud et al. 2008), while blocks of ice act as building material for igloos: sturdy constructions mathematically more complicated than the spherical domes Western societies have built since Roman times (Handy 1973). Indigenous Peoples have also traditionally relied on other materials, including gravel, to support their dwellings and structures as they sculpt the frozen environment into “alimentary infrastructures,” which sustain life, spirit, and social organization (LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Ice—the metaphorical infrastructure of Arctic ecosystems—also provides for social, cultural, and spiritual well-being, inspires art and creativity, and offers a feeling of home (Heyes 2011; Huntington et al. 2017). In short, solidified water forms a building block for many Arctic Indigenous societies, particularly those living on or near the coast (Krupnik et al. 2010; Gearheard 2013).

As industrialization made rapid inroads into the circumpolar north in the twentieth century, gravel replaced ice as the predominant material for infrastructure development. Under settler-colonialism, infrastructure shifted from being life-giving to life-taking. “Invasive infrastructures” such as pipelines, roads, and railroads—all of which require massive amounts of gravel—violated Indigenous lands (Spice 2018), paving the way for capitalist enclosure and extraction. In the gravel-scarce North American Arctic, the location of these infrastructures was heavily determined by the proximity of gravel sources, since the heavy, bulky commodity is not easily transportable across long distances.

While gravel’s geographic location has shaped the siting of infrastructure development, its stratigraphic location, or where it sits within the geologic column, has been legally indeterminate for decades, inflaming disputes between Indigenous landholders in Alaska. Following the United States’ violent wrestling of not just land, but the land column from Native peoples, the federal government moved to de- and re-stratify it. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1969 made the U.S. eager to settle Alaska Native land claims to create a stable legal foundation for extraction (Hirschfield 1991). Congress' passage of ANCSA in 1971 established village and regional corporations to manage the 44 million acres of land to which they were granted title out of the 360 million acres they had claimed.

ANCSA also imposed onto Alaska Native lands the alien categories of “surface” and “subsurface.” These vertical territorial categories had risen in importance throughout the twentieth century in the West in step with the emergence of geology and state interests in optimizing natural resources, particularly underground (Braun 2000). In 1958, a U.S. Department of Agriculture report entitled Land: The Yearbook of Agriculture explained, “Subsurface rights have become an important new factor in the valuation of farmland in some parts of the country. Increasing demands for oil and gas have extended explorations into areas that previously were believed to have little promise. Present and prospective owners consequently have become more conscious of the three-dimensional legal nature of land” (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1958, p. 188). A little over a decade later, newly propertied Alaska Native corporate landowners would realize the legal multidimensionality of their land—and its limits and potentials, too. The “politics of strata” that Clark (2017) examines at a planetary scale merit close examination in places whose undergrounds have been quickly and dramatically reorganized. Although all processes of human life, Clark (2017, p. 288) argues, are “in the midst of stratal formation and deformation,” these forces have penetrated Indigenous lands in the Arctic more rapidly than in many other places. ANCSA, as Eve Tuck (2014, p. 247) expounds in her examination of surface and subsurface rights, “did not just remake land into property, it capitalized the land, forcing a corporate structure and profit-making mandate upon its people.”

In a decision that set the stage for the litigation of the lithosphere, while village corporations were granted title to the surface of the lands they acquired, regional corporations were granted title to their subsurface—a Western term synonymous with subterranean resources, namely oil, gas, and minerals. Yet where the division between the surface and subsurface was drawn was unclear, as was whether gravel, a resource that was neither scarce nor lucrative to the congressmen from lower latitudes penning ANCSA, lay in the surface or subsurface. The indeterminancy of gravel’s location has spurred decades of courtroom clashes between Alaska Native corporations, which are for-profit entities arguably driven by market logics and neoliberal imperatives alongside traditional values (Ganapathy 2011). For decades, as I will explain, village and regional corporations have litigated the right to dig out the loose accumulations of rocks required to lay the foundations of fixed, earthen infrastructures ranging from food banks to all-weather highways, and from alimentary infrastructures (LaDuke and Cowen 2020) to the “infrastructures of internal colonialism” (Cowen 2020, p. 483).

The quest for gravel has also shaped land claims processes and patterns of development across the border in northern Canada. When the Inuvialuit settled their land claims with the Canadian government 13 years after ANCSA in 1984, they made sure to obtain clear legal title to gravel and sand resources. The Inuvialuit legally redefined the strata by securing access to gravel even on lands where they were not deeded the subsurface. This strategy has allowed them to amass geologic power and become a “restabilizing order,” to borrow a term from Elizabeth Grosz (Grosz et al. 2017, p. 140), resisting settler-colonial subdivisions of the land between multiple Indigenous actors. The Inuvialuit’s ability to ensure access to granular resources enabled them to exercise sufficient geologic power to advance the construction of the 138-km, all-weather Inuvik–Tuktoyaktuk Highway (ITH)—the first public highway in North America to the Arctic Ocean, built out of 9.25 million m³ of gravel largely sourced from Inuvialuit-owned lands (Terriplan Consultants 1999).

Drawing on research into geopower and geologic power, geosocial formations, and the reterritorialization of the Earth’s strata (Grosz 2008; Yusoff 2013, 2017; Clark 2017, 2021), I define geologic power as the legal and material capacity to delve into the subsurface and unlock its resources in order to transform the planet’s surface. This focus on the role of the subterranean in conditioning politics and social relations also connects to attention in geography to the volumetric, vertical, and subterranean (Elden 2013; Bridge 2013; Steinberg and Peters 2015; Dodds 2021), while contributing a new empirical focus to a growing number of studies within political geology (Bruun 2018; Bobbette and Donovan 2019, 2021; Quintana-Navarette 2022). Much of this work focuses on the role of technoscientific and geopolitical practices in operationalizing the Earth’s underground with less attention to the role of legal practices, which I seek to draw out.

This paper builds an account of Indigenous geologic power in the North American Arctic through two case studies in Alaska (U.S.) and in the Northwest Territories (Canada). I argue that the U.S. government’s efforts to impose a geological ordering on Alaska Native lands based on surface and subsurface lands with no mention of gravel dismissed its importance to Indigenous infrastructures, whether alimentary or extractive. The very attempt to vertically bound the land without respect to its messy contents also evinces a certain geologic hubris in assuming the ability to sort masses of pebbles physically and legally in the constantly shifting, freezing, and thawing Arctic. North of Alaska, the icily powerful Beaufort Sea has eroded entire islands formed of peaty Pleistocene sediments, “leaving only accumulations of sand and gravel” that continue to move westward and landward (Morack and Rogers 1981, p. 170). Ironically, these remnant islands, which are useful as drill pads for oil and gas exploration, have been “enlarged, raised, and possibly stabilized by the addition of gravel,” attesting to the commodity’s outsized importance in the north. Geology conditions Alaska Native and Inuvialuit politics, while equally, Indigenous actors can become geologic agents who rework the Earth’s subsurface and surface, turning the strata inside out (cf. Grosz et al. 2017).

This research is based on field observations and interviews drawn from two separate projects in which gravel repeatedly came up as a topic of discussion, but was not the immediate focus of the research. The first project examined the construction of the ITH in the Northwest Territories in 2016 and 2017, while the second investigated attitudes towards land rights and infrastructure development in Alaska’s North Slope in 2017 and 2020. For this article, I also reviewed court cases and scientific, government, and industrial reports. The politics of Indigenous land claims and Indigenous-led development, particularly by corporations, are complex. As a settler scholar working outside the Arctic, I seek to illuminate the intricacies of these processes while leaving normative evaluations in the hands of those who reside on the lands where I had the privilege to do research. At the same time, I acknowledge that my positionality as a female academic raised in and living in the settler-colonial society of the U.S. has influenced my access to the field, the people I was able to interview, and my interpretation of the empirics gathered.

In what follows, I first elucidate a political geology of gravel, focusing on the material’s geological origins and its relevance to permanent settlements and extractive economies. Second, I explore the lithological and litigatory dimensions of village and regional corporations’ quests to obtain control over granular resources in post-ANCSA Alaska. I focus on gravel disputes between two types of Indigenous corporate landholders: the ~ 220 village corporations such as UIC, which hold surface title to ~ 22 million acres of land, and the 12 regional corporations, which hold the subsurface title to these same lands. This vertical bounding has resulted in the legally complex category of “dually owned lands”1 and decades of court cases seeking to resolve whether gravel legally resides in the surface or subsurface. Third, I analyze the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation’s (IRC) securing of significant gravel resources through the land claims negotiation process with the Canadian government and the IRC’s exercise of its resultant geologic power, exemplified by the 138-km highway from Inuvik to the Arctic Ocean. I conclude that for Indigenous Peoples, particularly those that seek to become agents of development, securing not just the land base but the land column is crucial to their fight for self-determination.

Gravel origin stories: Political and politicized geology

Despite gravel’s political–geological and economic importance, the ways in which the lowly material has shaped property and infrastructural regimes across the Arctic are little interrogated. One important recent exception is anthropologist Franz Krause’s (2022) study of river ice, permafrost, and gravel in the Mackenzie Delta centered on the hamlet of Aklavik. He argues, “Gravel…has become perhaps the most conspicuous of all materials that speak of the liquefying ground in the Mackenzie Delta and people’s awareness of this process. It seems that the more unreliable the frozen mud becomes, the more inhabitants and decision-makers trust in gravel and its promise of stability” (p. 44). Evidencing growing focus on mundane yet consequential resources in the Arctic, another granular commodity, sand, has received attention in Greenland, whose glacially fed deposits could become a globally significant resource (Bendixen et al. 2019; Jungsberg 2022). Yet whereas sand is in short supply in much of the world, including quickly urbanizing regions like Southeast Asia (Woon and Dodds 2022; Jamieson 2022), gravel is globally abundant, meaning it will likely remain only a locally significant resource in the Arctic.

Worldwide, gravel tends to be found in glacial deposits, river channels, and river flood plains (U.S. Geological Survey 2022). In such locations, the relentless grinding of ice and water over millions of years has weathered the bedrock into a fine substance 2–80 mm in size. Gravel deposits are often located where rapid river currents have washed away sand, leaving only heavier pebbles in their turbid wake, or found on raised beaches where previously higher seas pummeled the shore. In temperate latitudes, gravel can be dug out of the ground once the topsoil has been removed. In 2021 in the U.S., the world’s largest producer and consumer of sand and gravel, every single state produced the two commodities, and construction aggregates (sand, gravel, and crushed stone) accounted for $29.2 billion, or slightly more than half the total value of industrial minerals production ($56.6 billion) (U.S. Geological Survey 2022). Similarly, in Canada as of 2022, there were 6500 sand, stone, and gravel quarries compared to 200 mineral and metal mines (NRCan 2022). In the Arctic, however, gravel is hard to come by, and it often remains frozen in place. As one engineering guide notes, “To say that frozen gravel is difficult to excavate may well be the understatement of the year. It also does not tell the whole story” (McFadden and Bennett 1992, p. 167). The story of gravel—and, more specifically, the haphazard delineation of the commodity along stratigraphic lines and the litigation of the lithosphere that has followed—is what I aim to unearth.

Land in the North American Arctic comprises a shifting amalgamation of vegetation, gravel, silt, sand, clay, permafrost, and ice. The seasonal morphing of this amalgamation, sometimes frozen and sometimes thawed, makes the ground unsuited for the concretized infrastructures of fossil capitalism. In contrast, the infrastructure traditionally built by Arctic Indigenous Peoples has been able to withstand the ground’s oscillations while occasionally comprising gravel, too. In seventeenth-century Labrador, three large sod houses were found built on a gravel beach, which served as their foundation. Flagstone flooring had even been laid inside one of them (Cilley 1895; see also Jordan 1978). Gravel was used as a roofing material, scattered over wet moss draped atop bark (Burch 2006). Along the raised gravel beds found along many an Arctic river, many communities hoisted their fish drying racks (Schwatka 1885). Demonstrating the relevance of gravel to Iñupiaq earthworks, in the Inuit dialect of northern Alaska, the verb iyaq means “to build up gravel in an area that was once free of rocks or gravel” (Seiler 2012, p. 97). Lastly, the fine pebbles—so inert and abiotic in Western imaginaries—were the favored spawning habitat of sockeye salmon in the Aleutian Islands. Each spring, the fish swim upstream to the mouths of small tributaries, where they flow out from lakes. They dart and wriggle rapidly over the fine gravel covering the lake bottom to create a current that clears the small pebbles of any moss, mud, and slime before laying their eggs. At these locations where fish pop up each May, Indigenous peoples erect a weir to collect salmon for sustenance (Turner 1886). Gravel is thus part and parcel of the Arctic's lively infrastructures in ways that transcend roads and runways.

When prospectors arrived in Alaska and Canada in the late 1800s, they saw gravel as an obstacle to their fortune rather than something useful or lucrative, let alone life-sustaining. Certain gravel beds, such as those along the tributaries of the Yukon River, were auriferous (Spurr and Goodrich 1898). These gold-bearing riverbanks attracted “lawyers, doctors, merchants, bankers, farmers and city men” alike to “‘wash’ a fortune out of the frozen Alaskan gravel” (Harris 1897, p. 51). Yet the land they encountered, in descriptions that depart markedly from Anthropocene laments of a liquefying Earth, was “so hard that you can not drive a pick into it. It must be mined with an acetylene torch or steam pipe” (U.S. Congress 1925, p. 2585). Miners hydraulically blasted the overburden with warm water to reach the gravel and its possible hidden treasures, which often lay up to 200 ft. below. Even then, “if the gravel is broken off and moved to the sluice in frozen chunks it can not be washed nor can the gold be extracted from it” (Purington 1905, p. 137). Pressurized water and the sun were the most effective tools for thawing the frozen material to access placer gold. One video produced by a local Alaskan television station in 1981 claims the excess gravel was used as the bed of the highway to Anchorage (KUAC-TV 1981), turning wasterock into a useful commodity.

Over time, miners’ gold-flecked fever dreams gave way to governments’ grayscale visions of a modernized, industrialized Arctic. Yet infrastructure development could not take place just anywhere: it could only happen where there was gravel. Illustrating how yesterday’s cast-off-rocks have become today’s bonanza, in one interview, an individual working for a municipal government in the North Slope proclaimed, “Gravel is gold” (Interview, February 5, 2020). Gravel provides a firm and stable foundation for infrastructure from buildings and roads to oil and gas drilling pads and camp pads—the literal foundations of the fossil fuel economy in northern Alaska (Johnson 1987).

Alaska Native leaders recognized gravel’s importance from an early stage. When the North Slope Borough, whose leaders led the Alaska Native land claims movement in the 1960s, was selecting its lands in the oil-producing area of Prudhoe Bay (in a process separate from ANCSA), Billy Neakok, Director of Conservation and Environmental Security for the North Slope Borough, recounted in a memo to Eben Hopson, then the borough mayor:

Our first selections in 1973 under this entitlement were made to enable our government to control the use of gravel at Prudhoe Bay. It is our policy to regard gravel as a surface estate and as a critically important environmental factor. Unfortunately, this initial effort to assert local control over the environment was opposed by the State of Alaska and resulted in litigation that continues (Morehouse and Leask 1978, p. 224).

Although this initial effort may have been stymied, given that neoliberalism rewards Indigenous actors who adopt its tenets with greater political power (Hale 2004), the early recognition of the concepts of the surface and subsurface was both strategic and potentially lucrative.

Gravel is also geopolitically strategic for national governments. The aforementioned North Slope municipal official stated, “The Feds are very secretive about gravel. They built the DEW Line2 near gravel sources” (Interview, February 5, 2020). Demonstrating the enormity of such megaproject’s gravel needs, the DEW Line’s construction generated 9.6 million yd³ of gravel—“enough to build two replicas of the Great Pyramid” (Contenta 2012). Arctic military and extractive infrastructure require far more gravel than residential needs. In 1972, the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline was estimated to require 46.5 million yd³ of gravel for construction (U.S. Federal Task Force on Alaskan Oil Development 1972). In contrast, in the 1980s, the Northwest Territories town of Inuvik (population 3000–4000) was estimated to have a 20-year gravel demand of 234 123 yd³ for local capital projects and maintenance of community facilities (EBA Engineering Consultants 1987) (Fig. 1). The scale of megaprojects—some of which, as I will show with the IRC, are now being pursued by Indigenous geologic agents—vastly outstrips community needs.

Extracting gravel requires removing vegetation and topsoil, digging pits, establishing dredging operations, and, if needed, constructing roads. In the former Soviet Union, for every one-hectare gravel pit, six additional hectares were disturbed (Komarov 1980). Once gravel is mined and refined, it is transported to nearby infrastructure development sites. As a result, when considering the impact of the construction of modern infrastructure in the Arctic, not only should its footprint be considered: so, too, should the gravel pits and their unsettled surroundings, both superficial and subterranean.

Finally, it is worth noting that gravel is unevenly distributed across the Arctic. Ample natural stores of gravel exist in the Fennoscandian Arctic. Each year, Finland and Norway produce 16 million tons of aggregates (crushed rock, sand, and gravel) per capita—one of the highest levels in the world (Aggregates Business 2013) (Fig. 2). Contrastingly, in the North American Arctic (Alaska and northern Canada), gravel is in short supply. Compounding this scarcity is the existence of permafrost under much of the region, which typically covers gravel sources, making them more difficult to mine. To protect permafrost from thawing, thick gravel pads must be laid to maintain the ground’s thermal and physical stability before carrying out construction on top. Moreover, since the vegetative layer atop permafrost must be removed before construction and because gravel has weaker insulative properties than vegetation, the gravel pad must be thicker than the vegetative layer it is replacing (Woodward-Clyde Consultants 1980). In the Arctic, gravel pads up to 1.5 m deep can be required, and in permafrost-laden areas of the milder Subarctic, pads may need to be up to 4 m deep (Johnson 1987). As climate change accelerates and warms the Arctic four times faster than the global average (Rantanen et al. 2022), it is undermining the icy building blocks of Indigenous societies. In turn, more gravel will be needed to build thicker pads to protect what remains of thawing permafrost, replace diminishing ice roads, and buttress eroding shorelines.

Fig. 2.

Gravel is an ample commodity in northern Fennoscandia. Here, piles of gravel of different grades sit on the side of a highway south of Tromsø, Norway. Photo Author, August 2022

Litigating the lithosphere in Alaska

With the centrality of gravel to settler-colonial infrastructures in mind—even more so with climate change—I now turn to the legal disputes over the resource’s location. As noted in the introduction, this is not so much a question of where gravel is located physically, but rather legally. Settler-colonialism is often criticized for imposing a homogenizing, Cartesian logic upon the land. Yet it is precisely the vagaries and complexities of ANCSA, specifically its failure to define surface versus subsurface and its establishment of dually owned lands, which have driven decades of litigation by Indigenous actors seeking to secure gravel. As such, examining the “socialization of geologic forces of the substratum into political relations on the surface” (Clark 2017, p. 108) can offer insights into Indigenous power struggles, particularly if attention is paid to tensions between the strata—or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 502) call “inter-stratic phenomena: transcodings and passages between milieus, intermixings.” These intermixings are both geologic and social and open the potential for new limitations to and expressions of Indigenous geologic power.

After the discovery of oil in the 1960s and the U.S. federal government’s eagerness to resolve disputes over land ownership in Alaska, many Alaska Natives saw opportunities for long-denied recognition of their land claims, political empowerment, and economic development (Hensley 2009). As just one example of Indigenous disenfranchisement relating to gravel, the representative of the Eklutna Reserve outside Anchorage wrote in 1966 in evidence submitted to the U.S. Senate during hearings on the Alaska Native land claims that the reserve was able to approve sand and gravel permits to the State of Alaska but was not allowed to receive compensation (U.S. Senate 1968). Indicating the dire conditions of many Alaska Natives, in southwest Alaska in 1964, infant mortality rate was 67 for every 1000 births (U.S. Senate 1968)—equivalent to present-day Chad and Lesotho (World Bank 2022). In testimony to the U.S. Congress, Charlie Franz, President of the Alaska Peninsula Native Association, offered, “I would submit that it is the moral duty of every Aleut, Indian, and Eskimo in the State of Alaska to fight for legislation that would guarantee our children and their children an opportunity to become strong enough in the future so that what has happened in the past will never again be possible” (U.S. Senate 1968, p. 276). Securing their land base through land tenure formed a massive part of this fight. Yet this also necessitated adopting Western views of land, property, and geology, which divided the surface and subsurface.

With ANCSA, the federal government granted Alaska Natives 44 million acres of land from the federal government and $962.5 million in compensation for the 316 million acres to which their claims were extinguished. The lands and monies were transferred to 12 newly created regional corporations and 220 village corporations. Village corporations selected 18.5 million acres of lands in the townships surrounding their villages plus an additional 3.5 million acres in the surrounding regions, thus receiving surface title to a total 22 million acres. Meanwhile, regional corporations received the subsurface title to these same lands, creating the vertically complex category of “dually owned lands” (Lindsay 1999). However, ANCSA mandated that “the right to explore, develop, or remove minerals from the subsurface estate in the lands within the boundaries of any Native village shall be subject to the consent of the Village Corporation” (U.S. Congress 1971) setting the stage for intra-Indigenous litigation and draining time and resources from Alaska Native corporations.

Despite ANCSA’s complexities, basic definitions for “surface” and “subsurface” are lacking (Jones 1981). Stratigraphic disputes over where to draw the line between the surface and subsurface catalyzed multiple court cases beginning in 1976. Aleut Corporation v. Arctic Slope, a case initially brought by several regional corporations against several others, considered whether sand and gravel would be considered subsurface resources on lands solely owned by regional corporations, and therefore subject to profit-sharing. The District Court of Alaska decided that sand and gravel formed part of the subsurface when wholly owned by regional corporations and part of the surface on dually owned lands, therefore belonging to village corporations. Chief Judge Von der Heydt offered the following reasoning:

As to the land to which the dual ownership applied a grant to the subsurface owner of the sand and gravel would leave the surface owner with a worthless holding. It is common knowledge that sand and gravel only can be extracted through open pit mining which totally destroys the surface. To construe the subsurface owner as the sand and gravel owner would in effect leave the villages, who have selected most of their land for economic potential, with nothing (Aleut Corp. v. Arctic Slope Regional Corp., 1976)

This decision born out of Western ontology of land—seeing it as worthless unless it generated gravel, and making the resource’s geo-legal location contingent upon the landholder—was appealed by a village corporation in 1979. Tried in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Chugach v. Doyon pitted a village corporation against a regional corporation. Concluding that the subsurface estate cannot mean two different things, the court ruled that sand and gravel form part of the subsurface even on dually owned lands.3,4 This decision, which benefited the regional corporations, was upheld by Tyonek Native Corp. v. Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (1988), which ruled that village corporations lack the right to commercially extract and sell such aggregates.

Six years later, a concession was granted to the village corporations, offering them a glimmer of geologic power. In Koniag, Inc. v. Koncor Forest Resource (1994), the Ninth Circuit concluded “that when there is no other practical source for these materials, the subsurface owner on these dually owned lands may not unreasonably deny the surface owner access to rock, sand, and gravel necessary for surface development.” The court added, “Apart from Koniag’s rock, there are no practical sources of rock for development of Koncor’s surface estate, consistent with the intent of ANCSA. Therefore, Koncor, as surface owner, has a right not to be unreasonably denied use of rock from Koniag’s subsurface estate. The benefits and burdens of this servitude run with the respective estates.” In essence, surface owners (village corporations) should be able to access gravel, but they are still beholden to the subsurface owner: the regional corporation. ANCSA thus imposed a political geology on the landscape which gave rise to a new political hierarchy within Alaska Native society. In this altered politico-geological ordering, geologic power is amassed by those who own the subsurface, which contains the materials needed to develop the surface.

Over time, court rulings evinced the U.S. government’s growing appreciation of the importance of gravel for development on Alaska Native lands, whether belonging to village or regional corporations. This shift marks a difference with Congressional discussions regarding ANCSA before the settlement was passed. In deciding Aleut Corp. v. Arctic Slope Regional Corp. (1976), the U.S. District Court of Alaska found that earlier Congressional discussions had considered granting regional corporations “all minerals covered by mining and mineral leasing laws” rather than the subterranean estate per se. Still, at the time, such laws did not apply to sand and gravel because they were not considered valuable. Congressional vagaries, disregard for the value of gravel to Alaska Native communities—specifically in relation to villages and local infrastructure development—and a desire to concentrate large-scale resource development and economic decision-making in regional corporations rather than in the villages around which Alaska Native society was traditionally organized resulted in a poorly specified land claims settlement. The subsequent decades of litigation aimed at securing granular resources effectively circumscribed Indigenous geologic power.

The practice of intra-Indigenous conflicts over gravel is exemplified by another dispute, which would drag on in the courts for decades. In Leisnoi, Inc. v. Stratman (1988), Leisnoi, a village corporation in the Kodiak Island Archipelago, sued a cattle rancher named Omar Stratman, who had just received sand-and-gravel rights from the subsurface owner, regional corporation Koniag. In its opinion, the Supreme Court of Alaska found:

Unfortunately, through the years, the Regional and Village Corporations have often found themselves in court as adversaries… The litigation has had much to do with the fact that twenty-two million acres of ANCSA land are “dually owned”: The surface estate belongs to the Village Corporations, and the subsurface estate to the Regional Corporations…Because of ambiguities in these abutting land rights, controversies have arisen. This case is yet another chapter in the ongoing saga that pits surface-estate owner against subsurface-estate owner.

One key argument behind creating regional organizations was that as more centralized entities than village corporations, they would be better placed to manage the development of natural resources (Franklin 1993). This rationalization of resource development, however, has come at the cost of one of the pillars of Alaska Native society—villages—obtaining full control over their land columns. Sharing, or, more precisely dominating, these lands are powerful regional corporations who hold the keys to the subsurface, which is the ultimate source of geologic power. Although, as in the vignette that opened this article, village corporations can and do make use of the subsurface, their power to do so is constrained by the regional corporations who legally own its depths. At the same time, regional corporations can be stymied by village corporations that do not consent to subterranean development, resulting in the settler state's subversion of Indigenous geologic power on dually owned lands.

Exercising Indigenous geologic power in the Northwest Territories

To the east of Alaska’s North Slope, the 1080-mile-long Mackenzie River drains out of Canada’s Northwest Territories into the Beaufort Sea. While the Iñupiat have inhabited the coasts of Alaska and northern Canada for millennia, the contrasting political geology of the two regions reflects historical differences in development and the outcomes of the land claims processes of the 1970s and 1980s. These differences have altered the concentrations of geologic power, with one actor on the Canadian side of the border, the IRC, amassing enough to become a geologic agent on its own lands.

Since the mid-twentieth century, gravel has shaped the siting of government activity in the western Canadian Arctic. In 1954, a Canadian government survey party began scouting for a location to establish a regional political and economic hub. The fast-growing hamlet of Aklavik, originally established as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post along the Mackenzie River in 1912, was seen as unviable, as it flooded frequently and lacked suitable land for expansion or a year-round airport (McFadden and Bennett 1992). Eventually, Canadian authorities selected a site farther north along the river consisting of gently sloping terrain underlaid by fine glacial till (Day and Rice 1964). The site, first known as East Three and later named Inuvik, or “place of man,” was rich in gravel “generally well graded in all sizes from silt to cobbles” (Pihlainen 1962, p. 9). Construction commenced in 1955, with access roads built out to borrow pits (gravel pits), warehouses, and construction quarters. The material used for the roads was the top layer of brown gravel sourced from two borrow pits called Twin Lake and Boot Creek. These pits provided the material for all of the town’s roads and gravel pads until the late 1980s.

The biggest road of all in the Mackenzie Delta, the ITH, which extends the 740-km, gravel Dempster Highway snaking up from the south completed by the Canadian government in 1978, opened in 2017 following decades of planning and lobbying (Fig. 3). The Indigenous geologic power needed to construct the highway to Tuktoyaktuk on the edge of the Arctic Ocean originates in the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA) concluded in 1981. The IFA represents the final settlement of land claims negotiations between the Inuvialuit, represented by the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (COPE), and federal Canadian negotiators.

Fig. 3.

A gravel pit north of Inuvik being mined to construct the ITH. Photo Author, March 2016

In their negotiations, the Inuvialuit benefited from the hindsight of 10 years of ANCSA. An evaluation commissioned by Justice Thomas Berger (1985) to evaluate the settlement’s impacts and inform the IFA cautioned that many of its stipulations had put Alaska Natives at risk of losing their land due to several corporations’ undercapitalization and insolvency. While this situation did not materialize, negotiators still heeded ANCSA’s issues, particularly regarding granular resources. An expert named Dwight Noseworthy representing the Government of the Northwest Territories during land claims negotiations with COPE shared his views during the international overview of the Alaska Native Review Commission in 1984. He explained, “[Inuvialuit] land ownership is subject to certain conditions. It can only be expropriated by order in council or by federal cabinet approval, and there are…provisions for things such as public roads right of way, acquiring sites for national parks, and the ownership also includes ownership of sand and gravel, which is a very important resource in the Western Arctic region”(Berger 1984, p. 1165).

The IFA established a relatively cohesive political geology of Inuvialuit lands, which avoided the internecine litigation provoked by ANCSA and which positioned the IRC to become a geologic agent. First, reducing the potential for conflicts over “dually owned lands,” the agreement created only one Inuvialuit landholding entity: the Inuvialuit Land Corporation (ILC), which is a subsidiary of the IRC, and which is managed by the Inuvialuit Land Administration. Second, like ANCSA, the IFA distinguishes surface from subsurface lands. The ILC received 5000 miles² of surface and subsurface title—defined in the IFA as lands “in fee simple absolute (which for greater certainty includes all minerals whether solid, liquid or gaseous and all granular materials)” (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 2005 [1984], p. 10). Radically, this was the first agreement in Canada to include such title. In contrast, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement signed 2 years prior by the Cree and Inuit of Nunavik granted them no subsurface nor mineral rights, allocating them instead to the Quebec government (McPherson 2004). The ILC also received 30 000 miles² of surface title. Although it excludes oil, gas, and minerals, crucially, it includes sand and gravel (Stuhl 2019). In addition, Section 7(27) of the IFA mandates that “with respect to sand and gravel on Inuvialuit lands, as a first priority the Inuvialuit shall reserve supplies of sand and gravel of appropriate quality and within reasonable transport distances on Inuvialuit lands to meet public community needs in the Western Arctic Region and in Inuvik” (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 2005 [1984], p. 13). The second priority is for direct private and corporate needs, and the third priority is for projects approved by government agencies. Taken together, then, and returning to Deleuze and Guattari’s attention to inter-stratic phenomena (1987), the IFA effectively remixed the strata on paper to meet their own objectives on Earth.

While the IFA has been recognized for its preservation of subsistence practices and establishment of co-management institutions, which arguably maintain Native culture and traditions better than ANCSA (Zellen 2015), less has been made of Inuvialuit foresight in facilitating their long-term access to and use of granular resources. The IFA reflected not only the penetration of settler-colonialism and extractive capitalism, but also new Inuvialuit ways of seeing, knowing, and stewarding the land that amalgamate Western and Indigenous “geological visions” (Braun 2000). Within wider Inuit and Yupik cultures, the evolution of the term nuna, a holistic concept relating to land and the Earth, captures some of these ongoing geosocial transformations. Nuna is defined in the first Inuktitut dictionary as, “Does not move. For a long time, the inhabited land and the place where humans and animals grow and also where they die” (Pongérard 2017, p. 19). Early meanings of nuna were also connected with the tundra, berry picking, and clam collecting. More recently, departing from geologic and biotic dimensions, the contemporary nunaquti (‘one’s belonging nuna’, used to describe legally owned property Fortescue 2020, p. 45) has emerged. The addition of this legal dimension illustrates how settler-colonial concepts such as property—the “central tool by which the settler state has extended its colonial power” (Chaplier 2018, p. 62)—have reconfigured Arctic Indigenous lands and languages. Yet seen from another angle, Inuit–Yupik languages have Indigenized these once alien terms.5 In North Slope Iñupiaq, nuna also means “citizen’s nation-state” (Maclean 2014). And in an Inuinnaqtun-English dictionary, right below nuna lie nunakkuurutik—a three- or four-wheeler—and nunaliqun, a pickax or spade (Nunavut Arctic College 2013). Both are tools imported from the “outside” now leveraged to move across and into the land, transforming the strata in turn.

The IFA enabled the IRC to pursue a gravel megaproject: the CAD $299 million, 138-km ITH (Bennett 2018). Constructing this public highway required the equivalent of 80 years of Tuktoyaktuk’s annual gravel use. 65% of the ITH traversed Inuvialuit-owned lands, while the remainder crossed federal Crown land, Commissioner’s land, and privately held Gwich’in Settlement lands (Terriplan Consultants 1999). Fully funded by the federal and territorial governments and constructed by two local contractors, the megaproject was realized despite outstanding local needs. In the late 2000s, during community consultations in Tuktoyaktuk, one resident observed, “Some houses are being built without a layer of gravel underneath, and in the summer the ground becomes muddy because there is no insulating layer. Some houses haven’t been built because it would be too expensive to get the gravel” (Inuvialuit Land Administration n.d., p. 79). Gravel appears to have been prioritized for an Inuvialuit corporate and government project, contradicting the order specified by the IFA. Some community members, however, see the highway as permitting the development of more gravel sources. One local official in Tuktoyaktuk explained, “The beginning of the road was really about access to the gravel pit – it’s something the community really needs” (Interview, July 9, 2016). Indeed, the first step of ITH construction involved the opening of a 22-km road to a new year-round borrow pit, Source 177. Its operationalization has created a new gravel source for people’s homes and yards in Tuktoyaktuk while paving the way for year-round overground transportation between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.

The IRC has also been able to monetize the gravel on its land by reaping the royalties from the territorial government’s purchases of the resource to build the public highway. This supposed windfall led one Member of the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories, Robert Hawkins, to press the case in the legislature for making the royalty fee public. He argued, “Again I ask [the Minister], tell the House the cost of these particular royalties and demonstrate what is the Inuvialuit’s skin in the game on this particular project. Because as it stands today, they have zero investment in this game and all the game” (Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories 2013, p. 2494). Minister of Transport David Ramsay responded:

Mr. Speaker, the Inuvialuit have significant skin, as the Member calls it, in this game. The road program goes entirely over ISR lands in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. They have significant impact on this. They have a future need and requirement for granular materials. They have every right to charge royalties to people using granular materials from ISR lands. We, again, continue to negotiate with the Inuvialuit. We will get the best price (Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories 2013, p. 2494).

This exchange suggests that the IRC wields a degree of geologic power over the Canadian government. The corporation also holds the power to determine not only how land is used, but whether it can exist, too. As one community member in Tuktoyaktuk offered, “We’re already losing a lot of land mass here – from the gravel being removed – from the ground sinking, from dredging up” (Interview, July 9, 2016). The exercise of geologic power appears to defy the laws of conservation of matter. Once sacrosanct under traditional land management systems, under the IFA, land is liable to disappearing.

Conclusion

Gravel is elemental to contemporary Indigenous infrastructures in the North American Arctic, from swimming pools to all-weather highways. As climate change melts the icy building blocks of northern cultures and ecologies and erodes permafrost and shorelines, pebbly rocks are becoming even more indispensable to fortifying the slumping Earth. The unequal capacities of Alaska Native and Inuvialuit corporations to access and use gravel arise from differing land claims settlements, which have produced distinct political geologies. On both Alaska Native and Inuvialuit lands, those who hold tenure over the entirety of the vertical column are best positioned to become geological agents able to transform subterranean strata into aboveground infrastructures. In instances in which the state has not granted full ownership over the surface and subsurface, control over granular resources offers a next-best means of securing geologic power in the gravel-scarce Arctic.

Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel (2012, p. 88) argues, “One of our biggest enemies is compartmentalization, as shape-shifting colonial entities attempt to sever our relationship to the natural world and define the terrain of struggle.” By dividing the nuna into dually owned lands, ANCSA buried the terrain of struggle into the substrate, setting the stage for conflicts between surface owners (village corporations) and subsurface owners (regional corporations). This politicized geology has subverted the collective power of Alaska Natives. Across the border in Canada, having learnt from the flaws of ANCSA, Inuvialuit negotiators secured a land claims agreement that granted clear title to sand and gravel, even on surface lands, which as in Alaska still comprise the majority of Inuvialuit title. Furthermore, lands in the ISR were concentrated in the hands of one actor: the ILA, which can use granular resources and sell them in exchange for royalties, too. This legal ordering of the strata, which acknowledged and better met local needs for gravel, reduced the potential for competition between Indigenous corporations while vesting geologic power in one entity. As a result, the IRC was able to push forward a gravel megaproject: the ITH.

While the Inuvialuit have built a 138-km gravel road to the Arctic Ocean, in Utqiagvik, where this paper began, almost all the local gravel is used for maintaining a temporary berm along the coastline. Large sacks of the aggregate are placed at the bottom to reinforce the shore as the forces of coastal erosion and climate change batter away at its loose edges. In a tragic irony of geology, the coastline is comprised almost entirely of gravel, but it is too loose to use as building material because it does not bind well. Instead, gravel from other sources around the city must be trucked in (Field notes, 2020). The commodity has become crucial to not only Utqiaġvik’s development, but its survival, too. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies are reducing their gravel needs. In 2022, ConocoPhillips Alaska President Erec Isaacson announced that the newly operational Fiord West Kuparuk development on the North Slope “opens a new era we call ‘growth without gravel’ where we can use extended reach technology to access 60% more acreage from a single pad, dramatically reducing our footprint and enabling us to safely produce from environmentally sensitive areas” (Cashman 2022). While Indigenous villages scramble for gravel to stop their homes from falling into the sea, multinational corporations—many of which do business with Indigenous corporations—are engineering their way out of gravel scarcity.

As more Indigenous land claims are settled in the Arctic and beyond, the fight for sovereignty and self-determination will likely extend beneath the Earth’s surface. The quest for Indigenous geologic power merits further research, particularly in partnership with communities seeking to obtain access to subterranean and/or granular rights and resources. In Greenland, for instance, since the country obtained exclusive rights to its subsurface minerals from Denmark with the 2009 Self-Government Act (Kuokkanen 2021), many politicians have embraced mining as an avenue to greater independence (Hastrup and Brichet 2022). Nevertheless, while gaining ownership of the surface and subsurface—or, at the very least, the ability to obtain minerals crucial to development, whether gravel or rare earths—represents the key to geologic power, wielding this force can undermine the land’s ability to support traditional practices and vibrant ecologies. Across the Arctic, the deployment of geologic power by Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors alike is turning the Earth inside out. Even from the remotest of summits such as that of Oka Mountain just outside Anaktuvuk Pass in the roadless Brooks Range, where the last nomadic people in North America, the inland Iñupiat (Nunamiut) finally settled in 1949, “in the thin mountain air you can hear the backup beeps of the machines and the gravel marching along the conveyer belts” (Blackman 2004, p. 149).

Mia M. Bennett

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. Her research interests include geopolitics, infrastructure, the Arctic, and critical remote sensing.