Description
Settler states are the site of competing claims to sovereignty, with Indigenous nations asserting their authority in the face of settler colonial claims to jurisdiction. In this paper we explore the tension between these claims through the realm of energy governance and utility infrastructure, and specifically the British Columbia Utilities Commission’s (BCUC) Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry. Through an analysis of the Inquiry and its final report, we argue that such ‘technical’ bodies represent a sort of security professional, effectively depoliticizing the ongoing reproduction of settler sovereignty. In the BCUC’s Inquiry, this takes the form of prioritizing “economic reconciliation” and the creation of legal “certainty” which enables the continuation of a colonial form of the security/development nexus in and through energy. However, as observed in the final recommendations of the Inquiry, engaging with these technical bodies on issues such as energy governance also offers Indigenous nations meaningful opportunities to build their own infrastructure and institutions, thereby enacting their own decision-making authority. Understood in the context of the contemporary reconciliation discourse, processes of energy governance, and specifically the Inquiry and its recommendations, thus represent at once both a novel approach to reifying settler sovereignty and an opening for greater Indigenous self-determination.
