Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) as industrial and settler colonial structures: Towards a decolonial feminist approach

 Community consultation from the Aamjiwanaang Environmental Committee.
 Ongoing community reviews with interested community members to receive feedback about the project and its contents.

This article offers forms to understand pollution, more specifically the ones caused by Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs), as part of settler colonial structures of exploitation of Land and Indigenous communities. In this article, the authors present The Land and the Refinery project which promotes ways to attach responsibility visually and informationally for environmental violence to corporations and the State. Their initial research focus is the Imperial Oil Refinery, located in Canada’s Chemical Valley on traditional Anishinaabek land, and the specific territory of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Through community consultations and reviews with members of the Aamjiwanaang community, this Indigenous-led research group promotes decolonial feminist forms to engage with Indigenous Knowledge Systems when thinking about environmental justice in the context of pollution and governmental neglect.

This study was conducted in constant collaboration with the Aamjiwanaang Environmental Committee and interested community members. Rather than having university and government officials researching Indigenous people to understand pollution, the project has Indigenous researchers investigating pollution and how the government allows it. Moreover, it provides the community with tools to practice their sovereignty thorough producing and owning their own dataset about pollution and health harms.

Supporting and engaging with Indigenous-led science projects can lead to better understandings of environmental issues that directly affect Indigenous communities.

Creation of community-led forms of reporting environmental damage, such as the Pollution Reporter app, create autonomous ways of collecting data about pollution that can serve to contest the data produced and owned by State agencies.

 Primary sources, such as archival documents about the region.
 Environmental reports, such as The National Pollution Release Inventory (NPRI).
 Documentation produced at the community consultations.
 Academic research done by Indigenous researchers and collaborators.

The data that is produced by the researchers is shared though their website where one can find a comprehensive history of the region and the Imperial Oil refinery. Knowledge dissemination and transfer are also done through their Pollution Reporter app where one can learn about polluters and make reports concerning potential exposure to toxicants.

“Through our work, we aim to implicate the settler state, as well as the refinery and its multinational owner, ExxonMobil, as complicit in this violence. One element of this project is an extensive database we have constructed to link polluters to pollution to pollution-related health harms, which manifests in a mobile application called Pollution Reporter. Pollution Reporter aims to share information about health harms and emissions that is often inaccessible to Aamjiwnaang and other affected communities, and in so doing, hopes to support the communities’ sovereignty to care for Land and their abilities to link environmental violence to companies without having to transit research through their own suffering. (…) The Land and the Refinery project, including the app design, is created to refute exploitative practices of data extraction that manifest colonial logics of expropriation, logics that are even present in environmental and health data that seeks to contribute to the amelioration of pollution” (p. 18)

“What is different about this project is its approach. While much past work has documented harms to the community in order to show the violence of Chemical Valley, The Land and the Refinery is an Indigenous-led project, responsible to community, that seeks to critically study and obligate a settler colonial company and contribute to less-disrupted futures. In this way, we seek to suspend damage and activate desire-based frameworks, as well as respect and activate Indigenous jurisdiction, Land/body sovereignty, and decolonial futures. In doing this work, we have proceeded with permissions from Chief and Council as well as the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Environmental Committee and community consultation.” (p. 20)

Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Health, Pollution Studies