Rendering Technical, Rendering Sacred: The Politics of Hydroelectric Development on British Columbia’s Saaghii Naachii/Peace River

Abstract

This article analyzes debates over the Site C Dam on the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River in northeastern British Columbia (BC), Canada. After heated debate over the past several decades, construction on the CN$10 billion hydroelectric project—the largest in the province’s history—recently commenced. The article focuses on debates over the analysis and adjudication of cumulative effects, and concomitant treaty rights infringement, within the environmental review process. The shortcomings of the regulatory review process used to assess cumulative effects are analyzed in two ways: first, by a conventional academic assessment, and second, by a Dunne-Za teaching of the interrelationships between land, water, and animals in the dam-affected region. Through juxtaposing these two modes of analysis, the article engages with scholarship in political ecology and Indigenous political theory.