Heritage is powerful because it is used as a way to define and identify. It is about who we as humans think we are, based upon where we believe we have come from and where we intend to go. It is what is maintained from the past, by the present, for the next generation to inherit (in-heritage): from objects, buildings, land, resources, status, power, values, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, environments, and ecosystems. Current conceptions of heritage are imbued with human agency, as a “discursive construction” (Smith, 2006, 13) with “material consequences” (Harvey, 2008, 19) that is “constituted and constructed (and at the same time, constitutive and constructing)” (Wu and Hou, 2015, 39). As such, heritage has the potential for reworlding and refuturing (Haraway, 2016; Harrison, 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2020; Onciul, 2015; Smith, 2006, 2022; Tlostanova, 2022). It can highlight the brief duration in planetary or species time of colonialism and capitalism, while illustrating its failing prospects—evidenced by increasing global inequalities and the accelerating inhabitability of the Earth. This future-orientated power places heritage at the center of efforts to enact and affirm Indigenous rights and address colonial legacies and responsibilities in the ancestral territories now collectively known as Canada.

The energy crisis of the early 1970s briefly opened up a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently around the world. For India, that energy crisis did not begin with the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973. Instead, like many poor oil-importing nations, it experienced the first oil shock as merely one component of a broader climate-food-energy emergency that reverberated throughout the political system. This crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship—the Emergency—for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one among a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the Global South. Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despite elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understanding India’s intensifying coal dependence, and its rapidly rising carbon emissions, in the decades that followed. Only when we accurately recognize the forces that created and hold carbon-intensive energy regimes in place can we begin to see how they might be dislodged.