Note from the Editors

Infrastructure seems to be all over the news in Canada. Rarely heard in the media until recently, this somewhat technical term now has become ubiquitous. Given the ways that Canada’s relationship with the USA and the world at large is being transformed, infrastructure – often in the form of major extractive projects and transportation corridors – has come to feature prominently in new national imaginaries, brewing regional tensions, and differing visions of the future. As the nation’s elbows seem to be coming down (to carry on with the type of sporting metaphor that has also proliferated in this political frame), are ports and pipelines the best we can hope for from this inflection point? How might such projects, or other infrastructure, further long-term national efforts to become more than an extractor of raw materials, and to advance towards justice for Indigenous Peoples, among others? Guest editors Giuseppe Amatulli and Philipp Budka have brought together a group of papers under the theme “Narratives and Temporalities of Infrastructure: The Canadian Experience.” The editors, in their perceptive introductory essay, remind us that infrastructures “are designed and assembled in ways that sustain settler colonial states and societies.” The articles included in the thematic issue cover multiple regions of Canada with a focus on the north. Carly Dokis, working with the Dokis First Nation in Ontario, focuses on water insecurity on reserve as one aspect of colonial subjugation. Susanna Gartler and Susan Crate describe the infrastructural dynamics of permafrost and how Indigenous residents of the Mackenzie Delta who rely on permafrost to support their transportation networks are being affected by its loss through climate change. Amatulli’s article examines energy infrastructure proposals in northern British Columbia. Anna Bettini analyzes politics and perceptions around renewable energy in Alberta, where the policy environment for green energy such as wind and solar differs considerably from the welcome extended to oil and gas projects. Kaylia Little’s contribution describes perceptions of infrastructural reliability among Iqaluit residents, who depend on services such as electricity, while always knowing that they are not dependable. Katrin Schmid discusses airports in Nunavut, which are the main links to the outside world for these northern communities. Budka provides an account of logistical networks in northern Manitoba. In a commentary written in French, Anna Soer rightly emphasizes the timely and critical nature of these contributions. We are pleased to include four manuscripts in the non-thematic section of this issue. Émile Duchesne explores how two cases, Innu Elders’ concerns about colonial control over wildlife and the illegal introduction of invasive species in Québécois sport fisheries, illustrate the cultural and biological homogenization of the “homogenocene,” a concept used to describe the erosion of both ecological diversity and the capacity for distinct worldviews to be expressed. Loa Gordon examines how university students in Canada navigate institutional gaps in mental health care by engaging in self-care practices as relational and generative acts, highlighting the complex, non-linear nature of care pathways and the value of social cartography in capturing lived experiences. Gemechu Adimassu Abeshu analyzes how the displaced Afar pastoralists of Northeast Ethiopia resist state-backed commercial and land dispossession through a range of legal, cultural and symbolic strategies, highlighting broader political dynamics of resource extraction in the Horn of Africa. Based on two years of participant observation in France, Marck Pépin explores the global spread and continued vitality of tagging practices and reveals how global territorial shifts are reshaping the socio-spatial structures of taggers. There are some changes to announce at Anthropologica. I (Clinton Westman) began a three-year term as Editor-in-Chief in May. I want to thank the CASCA executive, and those …