Settling the Bakken

Over the weekend I had the chance to read  Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun’s edited volume Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil. (Minneapolis 2022). It was perhaps the most mature and thoughtful collection of articles on the Bakken that I’ve had the chance to read. Not only to the authors show a deft grasp of contemporary theory on time, settler colonialism, and petromasculinity (among other perspectives), but also a distinctive view of the Bakken which stands neatly between local familiarity and the Bakken as an icon of extractive practices on a global scale. In fact, when I first was thinking about this book, I found myself bothered by the seeming lack of deep familiarity with the Bakken situation. This feeling only dissipated when I was able to take a deep breath and realize that whatever the contributors knew about the Bakken, the goal of this book was not to capture the Bakken as a place, but as a supermodern phenomenon with a global (or at very least national) context.

As per my typical practice, I offer here less of a review and more of a reaction to the book which I expect I’ll continue to think about and unpack over the next few months.  

Settler Colonialism and Petromasculinity. I particularly appreciated the thoughtful analysis of the interplay between historical depictions of the frontier and contemporary depictions of the rugged white male carving a precarious livelihood out of a reluctant territory. This echoes the recent dissertation by Nestor Silva (which I blogged about here). The contributors to Settling the Boom show how the narrative of settler colonial masculinity culminates in the modern era in which settlers tame “unruly landscapes” through private property. Private property becomes the basis for idealized forms of family life and ultimately suburbanization where a tamed version of “nature” is allowed to reemerge under the watchful eye of heteronormative male with his prophylactic lawnmower. My only critique of this is that the contributors missed an opportunity to recognize how settler colonial attitudes manifest themselves in the subtle efforts to evoke suburban life even in the temporary accommodations offered by work force housing. 

Settler and Boom Time. I also found particularly compelling the various arguments — often visual — for how residents of the Bakken constructed historical continuity between settler times and the modern boom. This served to reinforce a sense of inevitability in the history of the region (culminating we’re led to believe in single-family suburban homes) and to marginalize temporal regimes that challenge this narrative (whether by non-conforming settler individuals or Indigenous individuals and communities). The most compelling consequence of these arguments is that they establish the inescapability of a future dependent on oil, capitalism, and colonialism. I do with that the authors explored a bit more intensively the “cracks in capitalism,” however, which sometimes manifest themselves in narrative of oil field workers themselves and challenge the slick and more managed depictions of settler and boom futures promoted by oil companies, the state, and communities throughout the region.  

Cruel Optimism and Fast Oil. This is not to suggest that the contributors to this volume didn’t dig more deeply into the local situation. On a micro-scale, settler colonial narratives support an extractive industry that relies on the continuous, rapid drilling of wells in the Bakken. Fracked wells in the region decline quickly in productivity once fracked. This aspect of Bakken production demonstrates the kind of “geosocial” assemblages that several commentators have noted as characterizing life in the Anthropocene. The geology of the region combines with the prevalence of small time operators in the region who relied on loans to secure capital necessary to drill and who had to drill to pay off debts acquired while drilling earlier wells. As a result, the pace of drilling the Bakken was faster than elsewhere (and sometimes referred to as the “drilling treadmill”). This combination embodies a kind of cruel optimism (sensu Berlant) that informs extractive work in the Bakken and authorizes companies (and workers) to take greater risks. The only way to make work in the Bakken possible is to believe that at some point in the future the treadmill will stop. 

Vulnerability and Security. A number of contributors highlight the tension between vulnerability and security in the Bakken. Kai Bosworth’s brilliant analysis of the DAPL protests is compelling case study for how the oil industry supported by massive quantities of private capital and the state (including the massive capacity of the state for focused violence). Despite these advantages, the oil industry nevertheless depicts itself as vulnerable to attack by everything from protestors to regulations, climate, and even non-state terrorists. This vulnerability allows even the most colonialist project to take on the mantle of victimhood and for the state to intervene in the name of preserving our “way of life.” Alternate perspectives on the place of oil (as well as capitalism and democracy) represents threats that seek to punch down on the fragile underpinnings of our every day life. This justifies the brutal economic, individual and collective violence necessary to protect its viability. 

Infrastructure. In the end, the book highlights the intellectual, political, economic, and physical infrastructure necessary to make a boom function in contemporary society. From the narratives that various agents construct to support places within the global economy to the financial and political tools used to naturalize these narratives as inevitable, the manifestations of these narratives “on the ground,” and the technology adopted to allow for the continued functioning of these systems, the authors recognize that the infrastructure of settler colonialism is robust, persistent, and most of all complex.

That alone makes the sometimes complicated theoretic perspectives offered by this work a complement to more empirical work done on the Bakken by myself and my colleagues over the past decade.