SHIVERS

Within an expanse of evergreen trees and granitic hillocks, the city stands as a fortress. Its metal, concrete, and wood crenelations snow lapped. Down in Old Town, the door to a wooden cabin opens. A frigid wind rushes to meet an unprepared traveller. Stepping out, shivers enmesh his body, a gown coat goes hurriedly zipped. He looks south-east skyward, across the bay. A cold white return is given. Shivers recede.

PUPPETRY

Somewhere in the nucleic downtown, where the federal government has you believe their neutrality, and the mining companies their positivity, a duet of reproached soliloquies takes place. The stage is set a street back from main, in a minus 20 °C bluster. A stocky man, torso leather clad, head accented by yellow beret, is walking broadly then holds out and up a palm. His other hand raises in a single-finger point that first arcs up then down, emphatically, into the outstretched palm. “Any change?”. “Sorry, I don’t”, replies an ensconced technocrat; they continue to walk, passing each other. Then Soliloquy One comes in hard and fast, slurred from under the yellow beret where the puppet show has now ended like a switch thrown. The brutal words, said forcefully but undirected in a Molotov of resentment and shame, get snuffed out on the wind.

The technocrat, on his way to buy gluten-free lemon-poppy-seed cake, starts on his own train of words to never be heard, wondering if: 1) all the times he had been afraid of being violently accosted on the street were in vain as, really, someone was much more likely to stab him in the face after conversing with him; 2), that the wild yellow-beret man, in his anger, was valid to feel the way he did, foreseeably so; and 3), neo-barbaric: prostrate before soft hands and a well-oiled smug civility. This is the way it’s going to be. The puppet show continues.

Coincidentally, at the same spot a year prior, where there is a Subway at the crossroads and a Korean restaurant close by, the technocrat witnessed a woman in a wheelchair waiting on a person to get out of a car. However, her chair (and her) began to roll down along the pavement, turning, and she got launched off a high curb backward, cracking her head on the road below. The other passenger got out of the car and began to angrily reprimand the reeling wheelchair user, who was clasping their head for sometime. They both continued their respective actions for an unappealing amount of time. Foreseeably a street with one less pair of soft hands.

CRITICAL

It is a pedestrian Thursday afternoon that is as cold and dark as expected given the latitude and time of year. Outside the Capitol Theatre snow is falling softly, and the engine of a mini bus gently rumbles. Past the theatre entrance, at the base of the stairs and to one side is a faded movie poster mock-up with a nevertheless-vibrant border of warm orange and deep purple bands. A man in a suit is pictured against a bespeckled beige background. He has an enlarged camera for his head. The giant glass element of the lens covers all space where his head would be and more. “IT IS AN OFFENCE […]”, says the federal warning poster. Of all places for a reminder of the federal government.

Heading up the stairs, the networking of geoscientists can be heard, it is a baffle of voices. At the top, a security guard requests a pass which I cannot brandish as I have just arrived. He directs me one of the two ways there is to go, not back, but down an elongate corridor. The corridor is just long enough that your vision narrows in an attempt to clearly see what awaits at the end: there are three young women in a line, standing behind a counter framed by the corridor’s rectangular end. They are lit brightly from above in an otherwise crepuscular space. As I begin my passage down the corridor, their gaze seems to triangulate and I feel like I have been brought to, inspected, put on a scale and weighed… Please, give me my badge and officiate me.

Leftward of the inspection counter, and out of view of the liminal space of the corridor, is the coat check. It is run by measuredly curt senior members of the Yellowknife community. They appear to be volunteers based on the donation box at the desk with the written prompt, “Support our seniors!”. I feel guilt every time I make them move, but not as guilty as when at least two of the three young women at the inspection counter notice me staring at the bank notes in the box, which are piled like feathers. It’s not that I need the money, though I would kind of like it, it’s more that I don’t appreciate how to run a conference. There are two “Diamond”, two “Gold”, nine “Silver”, five “Tungsten”, and nine “Zinc” sponsors. These correspond respectively to donations upward of fifteen, ten, five, and two-and-a-half thousand Canadian dollars, but not coat, bag, and boot check. Conservatively the budget is C$117,500 for the three-day conference; I would guess about 100 people registered, which represents about another C$30,000 if they all paid the student fee. It is Yellowknife, mid-November. Value your seniors.

MINERALS

The poster I am to present follows an untraditional layout, as suggested by conference organisers. It was hurriedly made, and I did not manage to integrate edits put forth from the main collaborator before printing, but I thought it stood watertight for the content within. At the poster exhibition, all posters have the title and authors at the top bar mine. Mine looks like a denuded tree amongst a verdant information forest, or maybe, more aptly, a cute sapling competing for light. Do trees feel pity?

The keynote speech was by Matthew Steele-MacInnes. He described himself with chronological consideration: firstly, it was “economic geologist”, which he conceded was a dirty term for academics; then, “geologist studying geochemical anomalies”; and finally, to capture the zeitgeist, “critical minerals geologist”. He pointed out their synonymous nature. He enjoyed language and clearly had an appreciation for it; his talk was long but engaging and digestible. He spent a surprising amount of time talking about language (in geoscience and policy) and keeping the crowd buoyed with gentle laughs. He made things sound easy, both the talking and the academics, so it is readily imaginable that he is deserved of his acclaim and awards. His conscious unpacking of language was aspirational, so it was all the more disappointing that the sentiment landed as staunchly neoliberal.

He appeared to hold the assumption technology will liberate, which I, unfortunately, hold too. Where I think we differ is the extent of criticality toward technology as a register of power that concentrates money to those who have it. I’m sure he would say “A rising tide raises all ships”. To which I don’t have a meaningful rebuttal, yes the wider spread of technology seems most apt in the potential for quality of life. The best, and terrible, rebuttal I can formulate is “When has the tide risen enough?”. You don’t have to look far, geographically, to see the tide is still out. Perhaps a temporal view would be best. However, the blind spot to cultural critique was telling, and maybe best summed up in the image he used to show distribution of electronic infrastructure globally: where do the mines which enabled that infrastructure plot on that globe? Which countries are the companies registered in? Where doth the money flow?

Even if the technological tide rises high, can we get off this train? Will we ever societally desire to? When everyone has everything. When everyone owns everything. Capitalism is a highly prodigious system, in a war machine of nations it hard to see it being stepped back from.

I think Michael was a good look at what I perceive myself to be up against. A seemingly unquestionable neoliberal view. He was witty enough to be entertaining, amicable enough to be disarming, and noted language carefully, yet he is on the train. Next stop, critical minerals gold rush. For the technocrats!

UGLY THOUGHTS

I deliver the three-to-five-minute soapbox talk for the poster. I am not me. I sound like I started smoking at age six and my voice has dropped three-quarters of an octave. I feel like I am saying nothing, and an eternity has gone by. The microphone remains in its stand, where all other students who deliver soapbox talks keep it. I stoop because the mic is too low. I memorised the talk but am anchored behind this desk and godforsaken conference laptop, which I am stuck awkwardly looking toward as if I haven’t an idea of what I am going to say. I look down to spot the mic as I compensate my stoop to ensure my addled voice remains constant in the theatre.

I raise the laser pointer about a minute into the talk, to gesture at the map on my poster. Not only do I have a smoking habit but I’ve developed Parkinson’s too, as the laser pointer is in a jagged dance. It’s my evident lack of control disembodied and projected onto the back wall. It makes me laugh inwardly. Which makes me start to smile outwardly. And I begin to use the laser pointer more than need be. Yet, the eternity is still going. I feel I am losing people as well as my memory, so I abruptly stop. Thereafter comments on the talk were the usual spiel, “Good talk”. I wanted to jump down throats asking “What did you like about it? What did you like within it?… Something? Anything?…”.

I tell myself “No news is good news”. As long as the undergraduate. Does. Not. Win. The poster competition. The undergraduate of the keynote speaker. The keynote speaker currently affiliated with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey (a.k.a., the judging body). The undergraduate who read her presentation verbatim off the laptop. Who addressed the hot topic in the field. Who had a typo in their site name, “Pine Point” rendered “Pint Point”: it’s a fine drinking region, no doubt. “I’ll have one of whatever the masters student who forgot their laptop on the plane is having”.

Noam Chomsky, has said “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice”. That’s kind of how I see that poster competition and by extension the conference as a whole.

Sean McHale

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SHIVERS