Canada’s Indigenous wary of mining push in rich ‘Ring of Fire’

Growing up in northern Canada, Sol Mamakwa said his Indigenous community knew their land held valuable minerals, but he didn’t understand the scale of the potential riches until later in life.

“My grandparents, my parents, always said there will come a day when governments, settlers, will want access to these lands because of the minerals,” Mamakwa, an opposition member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, told AFP.

“It wasn’t until I got into politics that I started to understand what the Ring of Fire actually means,” he said.

The so-called “Ring of Fire” is a crescent-shaped stretch of territory in northern Ontario’s James Bay lowlands, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of Toronto, believed to contain large quantities of the critical minerals needed to power new technologies, in