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

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.