Canada Seminar

Empowering Indigenous Communities through Clean Energy: The Development of Green Hydrogen Highway in the Pacific Northwest

Felix Giroux, Doctoral Candidate, University of British Columbia

Chair: Antonia Maioni, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies and Professor of Politics, Science, and Public Policy, McGill University

In person. Light lunch available. Please register here to attend.

In remote areas of the Pacific Northwest, an Indigenous-owned company, Salish Elements, is aiming to transform communities’ relationship with power by developing a green hydrogen highway. While their project is embedded within broad discourses of the energy transition, it is equally about the transformation of capitalism and the modern settler state. Their goal is to empower local and Indigenous communities with clean energy and showcase that the green transition can be respectful of our shared land and environment. As an anthropologist invited to collaborate with Salish Elements, I showcase how political and cultural realities matter just as much as the technical elements of the energy transition. By breaking open themes including but not limited to ownership, sustainability, the distribution of impacts and benefits, decision-making and hierarchies, and epistemological and ontological silencing, my fieldwork seeks to challenge the hegemony of technocracy and invite a more grounded and human-centered approach to the field and practice of the energy transition.

Felix Giroux is a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he is critically studying questions of power and technology around the energy transition. More specifically, he researches the development of green hydrogen in Canada through an anthropological lens. He is a 2023 Trudeau Scholar and he is affiliated with the Centre for Climate Justice at UBC. Prior to his academic journey, he was a social impact consultant in Montreal, and worked in Minister Steven Guilbeault’s cabinet office at the federal level, all while vigorously participating in climate activism. He is fully committed to bringing power shifts within the climate space and works through various mediums – scholarly work, activism, art – to enact this change.