This thesis explores the role of authority and how Indigenous people have been gravely impacted throughout the 2014 Mount Polley Mine Disaster. Through critical engagement of political theory, environmental racism, and Indigenous Nationhood, I offer an analysis of the disaster that asks: How do we construct, accept, and uphold notions of authority in the Mount Polley Mine Disaster? I answer this by conducting a discourse analysis informed by Kwakwaka’wakw geographer Sarah Hunt’s colonialscape, Environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles’s wastelanding, and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s spatiolegal concepts of the state of exception and bare life. To conclude, I will provide an alternative understanding of authority that is grounded in Indigenous feminist approaches that can better represent what authority should look like. / Graduate / 2020-08-29

In the Canadian Cordillera, Mesozoic calcalkaline and alkaline intrusive igneous rocks that are prospective for hosting porphyry Cu-Au mineralization may be overlain by thick glacial overburden. Previous studies have shown that magnetite from ore deposits has a unique trace element signature that differs from magnetite in common igneous or metamorphic rocks. This study investigated if the composition of ore-related magnetite in till could provide a unique exploration tool to locate porphyry deposits in glaciated terrain. Bulk till samples were collected over an area of ~700 km2 surrounding the Mount Polley porphyry Cu-Au deposit, south-central British Columbia. Twenty elements were measured by LA-ICP-MS in ~50 detrital magnetite grains in each of 20 till samples. Previously proposed discrimination diagrams are proven to be of limited use in correctly identifying ore-related magnetite. Therefore, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was performed on a compiled dataset of magnetite compositions from various porphyry deposits and intrusive igneous rocks in order to rigorously redefine the chemical signature of hydrothermal magnetite from porphyry systems. Application of the LDA models to magnetite in till found that the dispersal of hydrothermal grains from Mount Polley is coincident with the deposit and the interpreted ice-flow history. Anomalous concentrations of hydrothermal magnetite grains in till are detected up to 2.5 km west-southwest and 4 km northwest of the deposit, indicating that magnetite has a strong potential to be an effective indicator in mineral exploration for porphyry systems. / Graduate