Indigenous peoples’ agency within and beyond rights in the mining context: The case of the Schefferville region

•Indigenous peoples use a variety of strategies to exercise their agency on mining.•Asymmetrical rights regimes shape indigenous participation in mining decision-making.•Indigenous peoples exercise their agency through resistance and negotiations.•Indigenous agency is constrained by prevailing legal, political, economic structures. In the Schefferville mining region, as in many other places in Canada, Indigenous peoples experience and negotiate mining encounters at the crossroads of overlapping, and often competing, governance frameworks and territorial rights regimes. While prevailing legal frameworks shape the participation of Indigenous peoples in mining decision-making processes, ambiguities in these arrangements, as argued by researchers, can also generate spaces for Indigenous peoples to assert their jurisdiction and exercise their agency on extractive projects within their traditional lands. Drawing on participant observation during our field school in the region of Schefferville and on one of the authors’ fieldwork, this article uses the case of Tata Steel Minerals Canada's projects to highlight how the different colonial trajectories and Indigenous peoples’ rights configurations in the area have contributed to shape the agency of Indigenous peoples in mining development. Our case study illustrates how Indigenous peoples’ agency in mining projects can be embedded within, or emerge beyond, the formal recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights through the mobilization of a variety of political and legal strategies.