HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine

Thomas and Saik’uz First Nation v Rio Tinto Alcan Inc 2022 BCSC 15 (the Thomas case), the recent Supreme Court of British Columbia case weighing land rights, represents an ideal case through which to explore and unpack the discursive and material tensions between two opposing and seemingly incommensurable world views. Specifically, we contend that this case can act as a helpful synecdoche vis-à-vis larger debates around climate change and social justice. This is particularly the case with respect to the ways in which the Thomas case highlights necessary nature-culture relations and brings to the fore possible world building futurities in the context of impending and current climate disaster. Superficially the dichotomy is clear. On the one hand (Saik’uz First Nation and Stellat’en First Nation), we have a community whose approach to the natural world is constituted by intrinsic relationality and intra-activity, while the other (Rio Tinto Alcan Inc. (RTA)), is imbricated in a logic of extractivism whose operating principles are founded on settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberal hegemony. However, we argue that there is more to this story and that binarising these two poles risks replicating the kind of Enlightenment logic that poses nature and culture as opposites which, we argue, simply serves to reinscribe the kinds of extractivist thinking that is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. New materialism, the approach we take in this chapter, explodes this binary. It helps to recast and re-situate how to think about legal cases in which Indigenous worldviews do not represent a different but equivalent position but, rather, functions as an active and conjunctural discursive-material actant. In approaching this conjuncture, we draw on the work of Karen Barad who suggests that rather than approaching materiality as distinct from discourse, there is value in understanding how they are fundamentally entangled. We engage with new materialism as a challenge to extractivist thinking and reflect on the Thomas case. In doing so, we explore how, through this case, Indigenous worldviews function as a discursive material actant that fulminates the nature/culture binary by drawing on a moving sympoietic schema that is grounded in a ‘being-with’, a ‘making-with’, a ‘thinking-with’ as a ‘sympoietic system’.