Subsurface Power
How Mineral Rights are Hidden and How to Uncover Them
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v23i5.2298Keywords:
mineral rights, private property, mining, resistance, extractivism, activismAbstract
Mineral rights, and more generally, the land below the surface, are legally classified as real property and sold separately from surface property. The vertical separation of property rights, coupled with intricate procedures for accessing property information, poses complex challenges for people seeking to safeguard their communities, including activists, Indigenous communities, homeowners, environmental organizations, and local communities. Drawing from the conceptual framework of administrative burdens, as defined by Herd and Moynihan (2018), I argue that these deliberate opacities and complex bureaucratic obstacles create significant challenges for individuals seeking government goods and services. In this context, I identify the key legal, bureaucratic, spatial, and cost barriers to uncovering subsurface property details as well as the methods that facilitate the identification of mineral claimants, two pieces of knowledge that can enable the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty and offer a countermeasure against unbridled mineral extraction. In addition, this paper illustrates how limited accessibility to such information benefits the state and corporations while excluding local communities from decision-making. The identification of mineral claimants brings to light dual power dynamics: one at the surface attempting to access public information that remains elusive, and the other delving deep beneath the Earth's surface, unraveling the holders of mineral claims as a strategic resistance against unchecked extraction.
References
Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barry, Andrew. 2013 Material politics: Disputes along the pipeline. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Bhandar, Brenna. 2015. “Title by Registration: Instituting Modern Property Law and Creating Racial Value in the Settler Colony.” Journal of Law and Society 42 (2): 253–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00707.x.
———. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braun, Bruce. 2000. “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.” Ecumene 7 (1): 7–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700102.
Burden, Barry C., David T. Canon, Kenneth R. Mayer, and Donald P. Moynihan. 2012. “The Effect of Administrative Burden on Bureaucratic Perception of Policies: Evidence from Election Administration.” Public Administration Review 72 (5): 741–51.
Churchill, Ward, and Winona LaDuke. 1986. “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism.” Insurgent Sociologist 13 (3): 51–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/089692058601300306.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks. Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Curley, Andrew. 2023. Carbon Sovereignty. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1935. Black Reconstruction in America. 1997 edition. New York: Free Press.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2015. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Elden, Stuart. 2013. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power.” Political Geography 34 (May): 35–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009.
Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. 2018. Ojibwe Treaty Rights. http://www.glifwc.org/publications/pdf/2018TreatyRights.pdf
Grow, Brian, and Michelle Conlin. 2013. “Special Report: U.S. Builders Hoard Mineral Rights under New Homes.” Reuters, October 9, 2013. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009.
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787.
Herd, Pamela, and Donald P. Moynihan. 2019. Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means. 1st edition. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Himley, Matthew. 2021. “The Future Lies beneath: Mineral Science, Resource-Making, and the (de)Differentiation of the Peruvian Underground.” Political Geography 87 (May): 102373. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102373.
Hoogeveen, Dawn. 2015. “Sub-Surface Property, Free-Entry Mineral Staking and Settler Colonialism in Canada.” Antipode 47 (1): 121–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12095.
Huber, Matthew T., and Jody Emel. 2009. “Fixed Minerals, Scalar Politics: The Weight of Scale in Conflicts over the 1872 Mining Law in the United States.” Environment and Planning A 41 (2): 371–88.
Huber, Matthew T, and James McCarthy. 2017. “Beyond the Subterranean Energy Regime? Fuel, Land Use and the Production of Space.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (4): 655–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12182.
Inwood, Joshua F. J., and Anne Bonds. 2017. “Property and Whiteness: The Oregon Standoff and the Contradictions of the U.S. Settler State.” Space and Polity 21 (3): 253–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2017.1373425.
Jung, Moon-Kie, João H. Costa Vargas, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds. 2011. State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States. 1st edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kappler, Charles J., comp. and ed. 1904. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II (Treaties). Treaty with the Chippewa, 1842. October 4, 1842. 7 Stat. 591. Proclamation, March 23, 1843. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904.
Keeling, Arn, and John Sandlos. 2009. “Environmental Justice Goes Underground? Historical Notes from Canada’s Northern Mining Frontier.” Environmental Justice 2 (3): 117–25. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2009.0009.
KPMG LLP. 2018. Highland Copper Company Inc., Consolidated Financial Statements. Independent Auditors’ Report.
Kroepsch, Adrieanne C., and Katherine R. Clifford. 2022. “On Environments of Not Knowing: How Some Environmental Spaces and Circulations Are Made Inscrutable” Geoforum 132 (June): 171–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.05.009.
Lee, Robert. 2020. “Morill Act of 1862 Indigenous Land Parcels Database.” High Country News.
Maley, Terry S. 1982. “Mineral Rights for Land Appraisers.” Journal of ASFMRA 46 (1): 11–18.
Marston, Andrea. 2019. “Strata of the State: Resource Nationalism and Vertical Territory in Bolivia.” Political Geography 74 (October): 102040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102040.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Moynihan, Donald, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey. 2015. “Administrative Burden: Learning, Psychological, and Compliance Costs in Citizen-State Interactions.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 25 (1): 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu009.
Nichols, Robert. 2017. “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession ” Political Theory 46 (1): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717701709.
Pulido, Laura. 2017. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism and State-Sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (4): 524–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516646495.
Save the Wild UP. 2021 “Mineral Rights + Michigan Landowner Rights | Mining Action Group.” Accessed March 6, 2022. https://savethewildup.org/about/michigan-landowner-rights/.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.
Weizman, Eyal. 2002. “The Politics of Verticality.” Mute Magazine, 2002.
Zalik, Anna. 2009. “Zones of Exclusion: Offshore Extraction, the Contestation of Space and Physical Displacement in the Nigerian Delta and the Mexican Gulf.” Antipode 41 (3): 557–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00687.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Sophia Ford
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors agree to publish their articles in ACME under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
