December 2021

On November 15, members of the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation blockaded a service road in northern British Columbia after giving workers on the Coastal GasLink pipeline eight hours’ notice to evacuate. The pipeline is currently being built on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory without the consent of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. If Canada were to follow the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (which it has signed), or even their own court cases which ruled that Aboriginal title had to be respected on unceded land, it would be treating the land as Wet’suwet’en land and respecting traditional Wet’suwet’en governance. Instead, just like last year and the year before that, the RCMP moved in and started making arrests.

Let’s recap how Canadian institutions have responded to the Coastal GasLink pipeline controversy. The Canadian government approved the pipeline, British Columbia courts twice approved injunctions against Indigenous land defenders, and the police moved in to enforce them. The government and police talked a lot about “the rule of law” as if they themselves weren’t violating international law. They talked a lot about “dialogue” as they violently evicted land defenders with militarized police.

So what was this all about? Resource extraction. Seventeen percent of Canada’s GDP and a staggering 32% of the country’s capital investments come from the natural resources industry. From the very first arrival of European settler-colonists, Canada has devoted a huge amount of its time, effort, and institutional muscle to this activity. And I mean the whole country, not just the western Canadian economies that would benefit from the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Sixty percent of the world’s mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, which more than half of all worldwide capital investment in the mining industry travels through. The journalist Niko Block argues that, in a sense, Toronto is a mining town the same way that Pittsburgh is a steel town, even though there are no mines within the city limits.

All of this comes at a cost: Canada is one of the world’s worst per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases. Directly explain how/why this pipeline is connected to greenhouse gases. As climate emergencies keep arriving, among them the recent floods and mudslides in British Columbia that forced workers to pause construction on the Coastal GasLink pipeline, we can’t seem to stop contributing to the problem. Our institutions simply can’t quit fossil fuels because this is what they were designed to do. With this history and context in mind, you can see why every single governing institution fights so hard to defend a predatory industry that tramples Indigenous sovereignty. To look at the history of this country and its institutions is to see that Canada is not so much a “nation” as a means to an end—an end incompatible with our planet’s survival.

Sources

Barrera, Jorge. “RCMP arrest 14, clear road on Wet’suwet’en territory in ongoing dispute over land rights, pipeline.” CBC News, 18 November 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rcmp-wet-suwet-en-pipeline-resistance-1.6254245

Block, Niko. “Toronto's buried history: the dark story of how mining built a city.” The Guardian, 3 March 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/03/toronto-hidden-history-how-city-built-mining

Bernstein, Jaela. “Canadians are among the world's worst carbon emitters. Here's what we can do about it.” CBC News, 8 October 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/how-canadians-can-cut-carbon-footprints-1.6202194

George-Kanentiio, Doug. “The myth of band councils as First Nations.” Toronto Star, 24 February 2020, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/02/24/the-myth-of-band-councils-as-first-nations.html

Green, Alex V. “Canada is fake.” The Outline, 19 February 2020, https://theoutline.com/post/8686/canada-is-fake

Jacobs, Beverly, et al. “Settler governments are breaking international law, not Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, say 200 lawyers, legal scholars.” Toronto Star, 24 February 2020, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/02/24/settler-governments-are-breaking-international-law-not-wetsuweten-hereditary-chiefs-and-their-supporters.html

National Resources Canada. “10 Key Facts on Canada’s Natural Resources.” 2020, https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/emmc/pdf/10_key_facts_nrcan_2020_e.pdf

Wilson, Lee. “Gidimt’en evict Coastal GasLink from Wet’suwet’en territory.” APTN News, 15 November 2021, https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/gidimten-evict-coastal-gaslink-

from-wetsuweten-territory/

When one hears the words, “Young Adult Fantasy,” visions of fabricated and imaginary depictions of magic often spring forth in the mind. However, such fictitious depictions of powers and the supernatural are oftentimes rooted in reality. This is the case with Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse series, which employs an extraordinary, real-world science called invisibility cloak technology that gives the main character, Alina Starkov, the ability to bend and amplify light. In the Grishaverse, Alina Starkov is renowned throughout Ravka (the fictional country) for her rare ability, labeled “sun summoning,” as it is the only power that can stop the main antagonist from taking control of all the nations.

Though similar in premise, Alina’s power differs in terms of appearance from that of invisibility cloak technology. There are two main types of actual, real-life cloaking devices which I’ll be touching upon here. The first is composed of plastics which bend light so that objects behind it appear near invisible to the naked eye. Coined “Quantum Stealth,” the material is still in its early stages of development for military use. The concept for this type of cloaking device originated from the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” where the screenwriter wanted a spaceship version of submarines hiding underwater.

The “invisibility cloak” works because it is made of something called a lenticular lens. This is a sheet which has been corrugated to have ridges that are entirely composed of outward-curving lenses. Imagine a 3D bookmark left clear, with no designs printed on it. Cloaking devices layer multiple lenticular sheets together to refract light in a way that will create dead spots where light will not be able to pass through, and the object hiding behind these clear sheets will remain hidden.

The second method of invisibility cloak technology uses metamaterials, which are materials engineered to have properties that do not occur naturally. These metamaterials are organized in a lattice design, with the spacing sequenced to be smaller than the wavelengths of light, therefore preventing the passage of light. The beginnings of metamaterial cloaking took place in 2006 when, at first, only microwaves were able to be blocked. Today the technology has developed into a seven-layer cloak that can shield objects from infrared to radio waves.

So how exactly does this tie in with Alina Starkov’s ability to summon light? I’ve come up with a hypothesis based on the events and descriptions in the books. Alina’s power is often described as innate, something she is able to control by pulling on threads. When she first discovers her powers, she describes it as “a call ringing through her” and throughout her training sessions, it is revealed that she is able to concentrate the light so that it only shines through her hands. Later on in Ruin and Rising, it is discovered that she is able to summon light anywhere on the surface of her body, since she’s described as “glowing” when walking through her old village. Alina is able to summon two types of light - one that comes with heat, and one that doesn’t. This alludes to the possibility that Alina is able to create metamaterials with her powers. Firstly, I think that her ability to concentrate where she summons light in her body in itself is a result of her covering the rest of her body in a metamaterial cloak. So, for example, if she summons little concentrated beams of light from her fingers, that means the rest of her body (hands, arms, legs, etc.) is cloaked. Secondly, the fact that she is able to control whether or not her light has heat is also because of metamaterial filtering. Not all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum produce or transmit heat, so Alina uses metamaterials to block infrared light while allowing ultraviolet light through. She also uses gloves covered in little slivers of glass and plastic to bend and refract light, similarly to Quantum Stealth technology. When she puts on a light show at the Little Palace, she is able to move light in the shape of “inky tendrils” with these gloves because she uses them to refract light into dead spots, creating the illusion of tendrils. Pretty cool, right?