It is relatively unknown that in the 1940s, uranium from the Belgian Congo and the Northwest Territories in Canada was used in the atomic bomb that was tested in New Mexico and detonated over Hiroshima. Although Indigenous land and labor are actively disconnected from nuclearism and nuclear modernity, it is largely Indigenous peoples across the globe who suffer the consequences of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining and refining to nuclear power and weapons production and testing. As such, uranium extraction is a deeply embedded feature of colonial power, even as it is rendered external to what Gabrielle Hecht refers to as “nuclear exceptionalism” that remains fixated on nations of the global north. Mining in Madagascar began under French colonial rule; the profitability of uranium extraction labor in South Africa bolstered the apartheid regime; Namibian uranium was a key site of struggle and resistance against South African occupation by funding the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO); and the vast majority of uranium mines are located in or near Indigenous lands and waters in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstsan, Russia, and the continental United States. When mines are depleted or abandoned after inevitable crashes in uranium pricing, Indigenous communities are left with nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for millennia. Despite the disastrous levels of radioactive contamination from uranium extracted from Indigenous lands in the Congo and the Northwest Territories, these sites remain outside of the frame of nuclear modernity.

What this history suggests is how settler colonial racial capitalism designates Indigenous lands as non-sites of nuclear modernity, making them available for what Traci Brynne Voyles calls “wastelanding.” As she elaborates in her important work on uranium mines on Navajo lands, “the ‘wasteland’ is a racial and spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable” (Wastelanding, 9). These are sites that are deemed unproductive, backward, and peripheral to the technological superiority of the global north but are nevertheless mined for resources, while toxic waste is dumped or left abandoned. Excluded from infrastructural modernity and subject to recursive rounds of economic and environmental devastation, the wasteland raises questions about what kind of capitalist logic is being enacted. Is the wasteland a core expression of capital accumulation or a violation of it? And why are certain racial and colonial geographies repeatedly vulnerable to wastelanding? Kalyan Sanyal asks a similar question about the “surplus humanity” who populate the planet’s slums and favelas, seemingly residing in “an economic space of informal survivalism both outside and alongside the world of capital” (Rethinking Capitalist Development, 1). Further, in non-sites of wastelanded underdevelopment, Indigenous labor exists in ambiguous relation to the circuits of capital. These and other questions invite us to revisit Marx’s theorization of primitive accumulation presented in Volume 1 of Capital.

Primitive Accumulation and Wastelanding

Inhabiting non-sites of nuclear modernity, Indigenous peoples are subject to a modality of settler colonial racial capitalism that funnels environmental risk toward poor communities of color. Manu Karuka sees this as the core infrastructure of continental imperialism, which “centers on building capacities to make war, and to extract energy from the soil and water” (Empire’s Tracks, 33). This section attempts to make sense of these operations by approaching the colonial violence of wastelanding through the framework of so-called primitive accumulation, Karl Marx’s account of the origins of capital accumulation in which the transition from feudalism to capitalism was one of excessive extra-economic violence, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt” (Capital, 926). I will argue that primitive accumulation offers an important explanatory theory for understanding the racial politics of extractivism, dispossession, and labor exploitation that animate the colonial entanglements of nuclear modernity. Both building on and departing from recent revisionist accounts of primitive accumulation, I contend that Marx’s chapter on “The Modern Theory of Colonization” resolves ongoing tensions about whether primitive accumulation represents a structure or stage of capitalist development, or whether it offers a normative developmentalist account that results in proletarianization rather than land dispossession. Although Marx clarified that his usage of “primitive” was a reference to the “prehistory of capital, and a mode of production corresponding to capital” (874), this essay approaches “primitive” as an index of the recursive colonial logics that accompany imperial infrastructural development and capital accumulation. Recursivity, in this sense, is not simply a matter of history repeating itself. Rather, as Robert Nichols delineates, “recursive procedures loop back upon themselves in a ‘boot-strapping’ manner such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds upon or augments its original postulate” (Theft, 9). Recursive colonial logics fortify and compound.

The final chapters of Marx’s first volume of Capital have been the subject of considerable attention and debate. Marx’s vivid account of the violent origins of the capital relation was an important rejoinder to bourgeois political economists of his time, who presented the transition to capitalism as the welcome emancipation of serfs and lower classes from feudal domination. Liberated from feudal overlords, “free” laborers could thus fulfill their human destiny, which was, according to Adam Smith, the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (Wealth of Nations, 17). In Capital Marx mocks the subsequent defense of class hierarchy as a natural outcome of individual behaviors, rationalized through a fairy-tale account in which “long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals spending their substance, and more, in riotous living” (873). Against this fabrication, Marx offers the blunt corrective that “In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder play the greatest part” (874). Critics have thus been drawn to these chapters in Capital for their focus on relations of extra-economic violence required by capitalism, ranging from colonial land dispossession to chattel slavery.

Numerous debates have arisen on the precise terms on which Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation is relevant to the contemporary and non-European contexts of capitalist development. Objections to the theory have focused on whether primitive accumulation represents a stage or structure of capitalist development. Specifically, critics have debated whether the extra-economic violence Marx attributes to primitive accumulation was a constant feature of capitalist relations or was supplanted by a bloodless “silent compulsion of economic relations” (899). For anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the notion of a historical division between “primitive” and “general” laws of accumulation was completely erroneous given the role of state repression. Resolving this tension in The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg argued that capitalism’s survival depended on the ongoing, violent primitive accumulation of noncapitalist spheres – those regions “outside” capitalist relations. She explained that “capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organizations. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organizations makes accumulation of capital possible” (416). In other words, imperial expansion into the colonies was integral to the survival of capitalism.

Luxemburg’s emphasis on capitalism’s expansion into noncapitalist outsides has influenced spatial and progressively more abstract critical formulations of what constitutes an “outside” to capitalism. For Marxist geographers, the chronological assumptions embedded in Marx’s rendering of primitive accumulation could be resolved “by shifting the temporal framework provided in Capital to a spatial one” (Nichols, Theft, 68). This approach can be observed in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s examination of rural California’s prison boom, which represents a “partial geographical solution to political economic crises” (Golden Gulag, 27). Here rural areas constitute the geographical “outside” for state expansion through prison construction. By extension, David Harvey’s revised formulation of primitive accumulation as “accumulation by dispossession” similarly forgoes the historical demarcation of “original” accumulation in order to characterize ongoing processes in which public assets and resources are privatized, often through violent means. Harvey further reworks Luxemburg’s designation of a noncapitalist “outside,” which he concurs is “necessary for the stabilization of capitalism” (New Imperialism, 141), which can take spatial and non-spatial forms. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson distinguish, “such expansion must be understood as a simultaneous dynamic of intensification (of social wants and needs, of population totals and the like) and geographical extension” (Politics of Operations, 88). This illustrates the non-literal, deterritorialized translation of Luxemburg’s noncapitalist sphere. Mezzadra and Neilson underscore the processes of abstraction, emphasizing that “capital’s outsides should not be understood in terms of untouched physical or social territories” (89). In sum, in contemporary adaptations of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, the specificity of time and space have become progressively eclipsed and abstracted.

What would it then mean to restore both the temporal and spatial features of primitive accumulation? Could this make sense of what Voyles describes as the “treadmill” of production that “requires ‘wastelands’ from which resources are increasingly abstracted and where (often toxic) waste is increasingly dumped” (9)? I suggest Marx’s theory can do precisely this, but first it is necessary to acknowledge that the extraction and form of toxic waste dumping involved in wastelanding on Indigenous lands refers to the dynamics of land dispossession rather than labor exploitation, reversing the usual order of priority given to these concepts. To contextualize this point within Indigenous studies, the relevance of primitive accumulation has been subject to debate and revision, and implicitly addresses the gradual abstraction applied to the dynamics of accumulation discussed above. Political theorist Glen Coulthard (Dene) takes issue with the tendency to reduce the objective of primitive accumulation to proletarianization – that expansion into capitalist outsides is driven to create a class of free wage proletarians. Marx did observe such a process of proletarianization in Scotland, where the dispossession of peasantry drove them forcibly into wage labor. A problem arises when looking through this frame retrospectively, because land dispossession through enclosures seems to occur in order to force the peasantry into wage labor (after having lost their access to the means of subsistence). But as Coulthard rightly observes, “the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the historical relation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state” (Red Skin, White Masks, 13). In order to unpack the political economy of settler colonialism, therefore, he suggests “contextually shifting our investigation from an emphasis on the capital relation to the colonial relation” (10). Building and expanding on Coulthard’s intervention, Robert Nichols has proposed “disaggregating” primitive accumulation in order to examine the distinctive and contemporary violence of Indigenous land dispossession, which need not result in proletarianization. He points to examples of “expropriation without exploitation” (Theft, 81), where domination occurs without hegemony.

But for our purposes of exploring the structural features of nuclear wastelands in settler colonial contexts of the Belgian Congo and the Canadian Northwest Territories, the violence of the accumulation process arises out of a toxic confluence of the settler state and capital that both expropriates land and exploits labor. Robin Kelley has challenged the structural distinctions that have become orthodoxy within settler colonial critical theory associated with the late Patrick Wolfe. As Kelley observes in Wolfe’s disregard of settler colonial contexts in African nations, his definition of settler colonialism “obscures its global and transnational character but also eliminates the settler from African history” (“The Rest of Us,” 269). Specifically, Wolfe’s delineation of the elimination of the Native doesn’t take into account the long histories of extractive labor processes, such as rubber production and mining in the Congo. In concentrated areas of white settlement, Indigenous Congolese were similarly targeted for elimination. As Kelley puts it pointedly, “They wanted the land and the labor, but not the people” (269). The dehumanizing implications of Kelley’s summation capture some of the complexity of wastelanding, which is neither reducible to land dispossession nor proletarianization. Moreover, to adapt Kelley’s evocative phrasing for the Sahtu Dene uranium ore carriers of the Northwest Territories, we can similarly say that settlers wanted the uranium and exploitable Indigenous labor, just not the Sahtu Dene Nation.

We can begin to reconcile these approaches to Indigenous land and labor through a reconstructed approach to Marx’s theory. The first step is to acknowledge that Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation is based on a European historical and political context. As Marx advises, therefore, “the history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs” (876). What this means is that the emergence and development of capitalist social relations in British colonies will likely be distinct from that of Western Europe. As Nichols clarifies, “primitive accumulation in Western Europe took place in a global context in which no other capitalist societies already existed” (“Disaggregating,” 21). In other words, while Marx’s primary focus was on the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism, his European context should not be approached as a template for the conquest of the Americas. As Nichols puts it, “colonial policy of the nineteenth or twentieth century is not analogous to primitive accumulation in seventeenth-century England” (“Disaggregating,” 23). But these vast differences are anticipated by Marx, who understood that subsequent examples of primitive accumulation would likely diverge from its “classic form” in England (876). From this standpoint, Marx’s theory does not reinforce predetermined structural or historical assumptions.

If we home in on Marx’s commentary on the divergent forms of primitive accumulation in the colonies, we can begin to appreciate how new relations of time and space emerge to complicate arguments of primitive accumulation as structure or stage. In the chapter entitled “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” Marx recounts the insights of E. G. Wakefield, a political economist who wrote an influential book on colonial policy. Much of Wakefield’s colonialist ideas were developed while he was imprisoned (for the attempted abduction of an heiress) alongside prisoners who were scheduled to be transported to Australia to work as convict labor. In their company he realized the crucial distinctions between the imperial metropole as a “ready-made world of capital” (931) – as opposed to the colonies’ “cancerous affliction” – their resistance to the establishment of capital (934). In particular, he recognized that the British metropole was naturally suited to the growth of capital because wage labor was plentiful, whereas it was much less so in the colonies. What he deduced from the failures of the Swan River settlement of Western Australia was twofold. First, that no amount of machinery, money, or land expropriation would generate capital. In Australia – and we could add Canada and the United States – settlers with relatively easy access to stolen Indigenous land through legal and extra-legal preemption schemes were generally inclined to become self-sufficient homesteaders than wage laborers. Second, Wakefield acknowledged that capitalist value could not be generated by things (money, machinery, etc.) but could only be created through social labor. There is no capital without wage labor, which Marx recounts as follows:

What Marx praises Wakefield for identifying is that in the absence of free wage labor, the transfer of money, machines, and other means of production to the colonies will be incapable of creating a colony of capitalists.

The passage above reveals the explicitly nonteleological, nondevelopmentalist principles guiding Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. Land enclosure and expropriation, particularly on the colonial “frontier,” did not produce an army of wage laborers – nor did Marx assume it would. On the contrary, as Marx observes through Wakefield’s diagnosis of the failures of the Swan River settlement, so long as “the worker can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains in possession of his means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible” (933, my italics). Against any essentialist notion of humanity’s inclination to truck, barter, and trade, as Adam Smith would have it, the landholding settler was generally satisfied with being an independent producer. And against this resistance to the establishment of capital in the colonies, only the brutality of slavery could save it – as Wakefield identified in the case of Saint Domingo, where, “without slavery ‘their capital must have perished’” (934). He recognized that slavery was the sole basis of colonial wealth. Wakefield’s theory of “systemic colonization” is thus presented as an antidote to the “anti-capitalist cancer of the colonies” (938). He proposes that the state compel through corrupt, extra-economic extortion the formation of free wage laborers by setting an “artificial price of virgin soil, a price independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land and turn himself into an independent farmer” (938). Through the parasitic relation of the state on capital, the “secret” of systemic colonization was that the laws of supply and demand – the hidden hand of the market – must be violated through the extortion of wage laborers in order to maintain a constant and regular supply of labor. Marx observes the great influence of this secret, such that “the English government for years practices this method of ‘primitive accumulation’ prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for use in the colonies” (929).

From this account we can approach primitive accumulation as both structure and stage of capital accumulation. What is important to recognize, as Wakefield did, is that primitive accumulation is exercised by the state, not by capitalists. Because the state is parasitic on capital, it creates the conditions of possibility for the accumulation of capital to occur. As William Clare Roberts explains, “As capital’s dependent agent, the state executes and enforces expropriations that capital needs but cannot itself carry out” (“What Was Primitive Accumulation,” 13). This means that the extortion that Wakefield describes is not a “prehistory” or “precapitalist” stage of capitalism, but rather an ongoing necessity to capitalism that remains anterior to the operations of capital. As Roberts clarifies, “violence and theft are prehistoric because they cannot create capital, but only capital’s preconditions” (15). As structure and stage, we can understand primitive accumulation as both an ongoing structural requirement and a temporal precondition for capital to accumulate. Such a reframing allows us to distinguish the requirements of capitalism from the limits of capital. Importantly, extra-economic predation, fraud, and violence form the fundamental economic irrationality of capitalism that takes the state form. Capital is a process and relationship rather than a thing itself; therefore, as Karuka reminds us, “the existence of capital is predicated on the interrelationship of wage labor with ‘monopolized earth’” (20), an interrelationship that is secured through the extra-economic violence of a colonial state that is parasitic on capital. Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation reveals how the history of capitalism in the colonies is not a history of free market principles of competition and self-possessed individualism, but rather a history in which the state ensures the conditions of capital accumulation through a war–finance nexus (Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 34).

Zones of Racial Abstraction

Let us return to our original concern to understand how the practice of nuclear wastelanding on Indigenous lands relates to primitive accumulation and, more broadly, to racial capitalism. First, we can observe that Indigenous lands are unique sites of primitive accumulation, subject to the extra-economic irrationality, predation, and violence carried out by the settler state. Given that uranium is tied to military power and energy production, its extraction serves both sides of the war–finance nexus. Secondly, having explored the nonlinear character of primitive accumulation in Marx’s discussion of Wakefield’s “systemic colonization,” we can examine primitive accumulation as a race-making operation and a necessary precondition for the present and future accumulation of capital. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as a “practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories” (Golden Gulag, 16). The violent forces of abstraction embedded in colonial property regimes obliterate preexisting relations to land and delimit the very definition of labor to colonial ideologies of use and improvement. These connections help make sense of the racial logics that form the enduring “prehistory” of capital accumulation.

As a case in point, in Canada, the irrational, extra-economic logic of primitive accumulation exercised by the state constitutes Indigenous land and labor as “waste.” In a survey of the legal co-production of race and property in British Columbia, South Australia, and the Naqab region of East Jerusalem, Brenna Bhandar demonstrates how a central means of establishing ownership in settler colonies was through a Eurocentric ideology of land use and improvement, core features that shaped property law from the seventeenth century onward. Bhandar draws attention to William Petty, whose role in the colonial appropriation of Irish lands in the seventeenth century had a profound influence on the use of land surveys to quantify the value of land against the value of its “savage” inhabitants. Formulating an early labor theory of value, Petty calculated the value of land and human life as conceptual equivalents. The improvement of one was predicated on the improvement of the other. Uncultivated land and subsistence modes of living were deemed waste. Importantly, this racialized mode of space-making was a prerequisite for the dispossession and criminalization of Native peoples, and their biopolitical elimination through intermarriage. As Bhandar clarifies, “the colonial compulsion to improve the Native was not conditioned by the need to create a reserve army of labor” (Colonial Lives of Property, 36). Rather, Indigenous peoples faced expulsion and criminalization for resisting marketized forms of cultivation. Unlike the white settlers who had to be extorted into wage labor in Wakefield’s account, the mode of primitive accumulation for Indigenous peoples was and continues to be otherwise. Indigenous groups must contend instead with what Karuka describes as a reactionary mode of settler counter-sovereignty, delegitimizing Indigenous modes of relationship to the human and nonhuman world, “transforming abundance into scarcity, interdependence into isolation” (25). This exercise of colonial authority is fundamentally reactive, reflecting the underlying anxiety of the colonial order as it creates conditions for capital accumulation through primitive accumulation.

As capital is an abstract social relation mediated through things, racial regimes of ownership are similarly forged through a logic of abstraction. Bhandar demonstrates how the colonial appropriation of land into property, from homesteading to land titling, is itself a process of abstraction – transforming land into abstract, fungible space through surveys, mapping, and commoditization. The commodity logic of abstraction that undergirds private property parallels the way human life is taxonomized through racial categorizations. Building on Cheryl Harris’s examination of the analogy of whiteness and property, we can see how property emerges with modern concepts of race, articulated through a logic of abstraction. Harris’s critique of abstraction follows Marx’s discussion of the fetishism of the commodity, understood as a mode of abstraction that conceals multiple forms of concrete labor to produce qualitatively distinct use values. Unpacking this further, Bhandar states that “in masking these different forms of labor and use, the commodity logic of abstraction obliterates preexisting relations to the land, and preexisting conceptualizations of land as something other than a commodity” (98). The material relations concealed within the commodity as a bearer of value is not simply an illusion, but rather a part of the violence of abstraction. As Alberto Toscano elaborates on Marx’s notion of “real abstraction,” this idea differs from a notion of abstraction as a mental conception toward a vision of abstraction as “a social, historical, and trans-individual phenomenon” (quoted in Colonial Lives of Property, 98). Moishe Postone similarly calls attention to the way that the dialectical tension between value and use value internal to the commodity is externalized as an opposition between the “abstract, as the ‘root of all evil,’ and ‘thingly’ nature” that became violently manifested in the anti-Semitic ideology of National Socialism (“Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 109). In a colonial context, the violence of abstraction carries over into the racialized modes of relation embedded in the emergence of modern legal personhood. Defined as an appropriative, self-possessed individual, the legal subject of capitalist relations conceals itself through the illusion of abstract equivalence that works to devalue personhood through property. It is a racial construction that stands in reactionary opposition to Indigenous modes of relation.

The material articulation of race and property comes into full view in the legal construction of “Indian status” in Canada, a colonial invention of the nineteenth century that tethers property rights to a racial and gendered legal persona. In view of Harris’s argument that whiteness operates as inalienable property, Native “status” is similarly associated with property rights, membership, and access to reserve lands. Within the Canadian Indian Act, “the juridical concept of Indian status articulates the intimate bind between the racial, ontological structure of possessive individualism and the modern economy of private property relations in the settler colony” (Colonial Lives of Property, 153). But in a twist of Harris’s conceptualization of whiteness as property, Indian status was defined in contradistinction to the ideal legal and political subject of the possessive individual. Preventing relations of legal possession was an integral feature of the Indian Act, which prohibited the development of any kind of independent reserve economy, and any money that came from the sale of lands or resources was controlled by the colonial government. Framed as the opposite of the self-possessing and appropriative settler citizen subject, Bhandar demonstrates that Native status encapsulates the fusion of identity and property ownership – “a political structure based on a legal form rooted in private property” (177). Akin to a form of currency that functions as a material expression of abstract value, Native status is an embodied expression of state-controlled and reified racial difference: “Like currency, status retains a degree of flexibility and mobility as something that is passed on and transmitted, a sign that has economic, cultural, and social value, but at the same time is regulated and controlled by the state” (178). Returning to Gilmore’s notion of racism as a death-dealing abstraction and displacement of difference, Native status makes racial difference ontologically concrete.

The primitive accumulation of Indigenous lands and peoples through colonial regimes of property accomplishes several things. It means that the treadmill of wastelanding through uranium extraction and toxic waste dumping and abandonment is carried out by the settler state in order to maintain infrastructural appropriability as a requirement for capital accumulation. As the polluted, uncanny other of infrastructural modernity, the wasteland is valuable because it is always potentially available to capitalist use and improvement. As a racially-mapped capitalist “outside,” it is a permanent site of speculative encroachment. And as against the creation of a reserve army of wage labor where labor exploitation is an end in itself, it does not “civilize” Indigenous peoples through the economic rationality of the possessive individual. Rather, as Bhandar shows, Native labor is constructed in opposition to the rational yet exploited human worker. To recall Kelley, “They wanted the land and the labor, but not the people” (269). As such, Indigenous workers are excluded from the capitalist construction of the rational free wage worker, and their agency represents a threatening, anti-value social relation. This resonates with the legal non-personhood of slaves, whose only agency was a criminal rather than a civil one. As Tiffany Lethabo King emphasizes, “There is no wage, or unit of economic rationalization, through which to humanize the slave as a human yet exploited worker” (Black Shoals, 137). Corporate personhood was forged in contradistinction to the legal nonpersonhood of the slave, echoing the way the Status Native of the Indian Act is forged as an inversion of the self-possessive, appropriative settler citizen.

Conclusion

This essay has sought to demonstrate that wastelanding is a uniquely recursive form of primitive accumulation that is structural, temporal, and territorial – carried out by a colonial state regime that is parasitic on capital. This mode of primitive accumulation expropriates Indigenous land and Indigenous labor through a racial logic of abstraction embedded in ownership. Wastelanding targets Indigenous lands that represent an “outside” of capital that, through the racialized regimes of ownership, remains an outside. These racialized sacrifice zones are necessary for capitalist social reproduction in reaction to Indigenous modes of relation. We might therefore approach the wasteland itself as a non-chrononormative carceral space insofar as it suspends the progressive temporality of use and improvement central to reactionary settler-legal conceptions of land as property and resource. As queer land, the wasteland is non-chrononormative, occupying a liminal temporality that is simultaneously repository for the pastness of dead labor and the placeholder for speculative futures. As such, the wasteland offers a productive reminder of the degenerative, unwanted, erased past, which is always potentially leveraged as a future site of expropriation and “improvement.”

This kind of temporal leveraging is evident in the Northwest Territories. After decades of toxic contamination from open mines and uranium tailings in the Great Bear Lake region of the Northwest Territories, the energy corporation Alberta Star secured rights in 2006 to prospect for uranium at the very site where uranium was sourced for the Manhattan Project. This followed a longstanding demand for justice to address the postwar cancer epidemic that decimated the Sahtu Dene community. These calls went unheard for decades until 2005, when the Canadian government issued a report that claimed that “the main risk that radiation poses at present is psychological” (Wallace, Risk Criticism, 277). Similar forms of gaslighting tactics were exploited to cast doubt on the cancer epidemic that affected uranium miners in African nations. As Gabrielle Hecht notes, the 10–30 years required to detect Radon exposure is enough of a time lag to generate doubt. Given assumptions about diminished life expectancy of Indigenous peoples in the Northwest Territories and in the Congo, “the global health community has until recently treated cancer like a ‘First World disease’” (Being Nuclear, 42). The point is no matter the duration in which the sacrifice zone of abandoned toxic waste, machinery, and raw materials has remained fallow, that period is retroactively incorporated into the temporal schema and rationale of improvement and resource development to support the war–finance nexus.

But as a non-chrononormative “outside” of capital, the extractive wasteland may offer a vision of what King calls the “chaotic terra nullius” (Black Shoals, 85), which reveals the underlying settler anxiety about the ungovernability of Indigenous, nonrational flesh. As chaotic terra nullius and undisciplined, disordered space, it embodies Native survival and restoration against the reactive logics of settler counter-sovereignty and primitive accumulation. Erica Violet Lee (Nēhiyaw) expresses this embrace of the discarded pastness as a refusal of racial capitalism and its technologies of antirelationality:

Lee provides a glimpse into different modes of relation, one that emphasizes affective care and healing. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) articulates, “The opposite of dispossession is not possession; it is deep, reciprocal, consensual attachment” (As We Have Always Done, 43). The opposite of wastelanding is not development. It is indebtedness, connection, and a reappropriation of historical time.