How to research mining claims

Earlier this week a front page story was published in Toronto Star looking at the massive increase of mining claims within Grassy Narrows’ territory. I was mentioned in the story because the Toronto Star built upon research I had been doing to document the increasing number of mining claims within Grassy Narrows’ territory.  

In this post I am going to explain a bit about how this sort of research can be carried out. Grassy Narrows is almost certainly not the only community that is seeing a ballooning number of mining claims within their traditional territory. And I hope this post can help members of those communities, or people working with them, to do similar research.

To carry out this sort of research you will require two different sources of data.

The first source is a shapefile with an outline of the community. This sort of shapefile is usually not publicly available. The Toronto Star obtained the outline they used from people connected to the community. 

The second is a set of publicly available shapefiles published by the Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines, which contain all operational mining claims, as well as other data such as all claims that have been cancelled since April 2018.  Those shapefiles can be downloaded by visiting this page and saving the data from the download link marked as “MLAS operational data”.  

Note that while MLAS data is specific to Ontario, similar data is likely available from all other provinces.

These specific instructions are for using the free and open source QGIS, but it is likely quite similar to carry out this research using ArcGIS.  

Once you open a new map, you will want to add two different ‘vector layers’. The first is the outline of the community's territory. In the case of Grassy Narrows, the area used was the IPCA, which is explained in the Star Article. The second layer that you will need to add is the file Operational_Cell_Claims.shp from the MLAS data.  

At this point you will have every operational mining claim in the province loaded on your map. 

You can then use the “Clip” tool to remove all the operational claims that did not fall within the territory of the community. At this point your map pretty much shows all the claims within the given territory.  

The actual size of the claims is slightly less than what is shown at this point, for instance one category of claim known as a boundary claim takes up less area than it shows on the map. I will skip writing a very long and detailed post that explains why this is and how to create a more accurate map, but if anyone is doing this research and wants to be more exact, please feel free to reach out to me and I will explain some of the more complicated features of the MLAS data. 

The area can then be found by opening the attributes table for the operational claims layer, then opening the field calculator, and using the operation ‘$area’.

To measure the number of claims on a given date you cannot rely simply on the files in Operational_Cell_Claims.shp but also need to incorporate the Cancelled_Claim_Polygons.shp file. However the data included in this file does not list the date on which a claim was cancelled, and to determine this will require some data entry or scraping from the online mining abstracts for each cancelled claim. Once again I would be happy to explain this to anyone who wants to dive deep into this sort of research. 

Mostly I just wanted to give people a small introduction to how this sort of research is done, and hopefully that will inspire and assist people in learning to build these skills and finding ways to support the struggles of other communities against mining companies. 

Here is a link to the call to action to Support Grassy Narrows in resisting mining in their territory.

Finally, for anyone who wants a broader understanding of some of the ways communities can resist mining companies, I want to plug a really great book by Joan Kuyek, “Unearthing Justice, How to protect your community from the mining industry.”