Indigenous nations continue to thrive despite decades of forced removal, land dispossession, and economic underdevelopment. Within Indigenous communities, extractive industries produce a particular kind of colonizing relationship that expands social difference and creates new cultural understandings of resources.

The social forces at work are neither static nor two-dimensional. They are dynamic, contradictory, and counter-intuitive. My research focuses on the everyday incorporation of Indigenous nations into colonial economies. Building on ethnographic research, my publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand coal, energy, land, water, infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change.