Article adapted from an essay submission
Elizabeth Kuroyedov
“Movements against extreme energy extraction are becoming more than just battles against specific oil, gas, and coal companies and more, even, than pro-democracy movements. They are opening up spaces for a historical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and non-Natives, who are finally understanding that, at a time when elected officials have open disdain for basic democratic principles, Indigenous rights are not a threat, but a tremendous gift” (Klein 2014: 380).
On January 7, 2019 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), in body armour with assault rifles, stormed a peaceful anti-pipeline camp, known as Gidumt’en Checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia (LaFortune 2019; Sutherland-Wilson 2019). The Supreme Court had granted an injunction against individuals “physically impeding or delaying access” to a service road which Coastal GasLink needed to begin pipeline construction. Unarmed Wet’suwet’en land defenders insisted RCMP gain permission from Hereditary Chiefs before entering their yintah (territory). This was ignored and RCMP dismantled the barricade, climbed over top, and arrested anyone who continued to stay at the checkpoint (Sutherland-Wilson 2019).
Indigenous[1] groups globally continue to struggle for sovereign territory recognition in the face of marginalisation, violence, and neoliberal expansion. According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), Indigenous people have the fundamental right to self-determination (2007:5). The acknowledgement of self-determination can profoundly shift dominant notions of ‘development’ by restoring agency to Indigenous peoples to control their own destiny. The recognition of yintah as sovereign territory would devolve significant power from the nation-state. This is especially true in the context of extractivist states such as Peru and Canada, which repeatedly deny Indigenous sovereignty in favour of profit.
Following Arturo Escobar’s understanding of territory, how are struggles for territory important for recognising other ways of being and living? Indigenous struggles against resource extraction, in defence of traditional land, are demonstrative sites where conflicts of indigeneity, ‘development’, and territory converge. Valuing Indigenous rights and different conceptualisations of yintah is fundamental because territory is a medium through which Indigenous people control their own narratives. Indigenous peoples in Peru or Canada demonstrate this power of territory.
Sinakara Mountain, Peru
In December 2006, more than 1,000 peasants, or runakuna, gathered in Cuzco’s main square, traveling from their villages located at the foot of Ausangate mountain. Ausangate is well known as a powerful ‘earth being’. Earth beings are living entities that require the maintenance of proper relations, as they can be a source of wealth or misery (de la Cadena 2010: 338). People gathered to protest proposed mining along Ausangate’s range, specifically at Sinakara mountain. Intriguingly, people opposed mining for vastly different reasons: de la Cadena feared the devastating loss of pasture for herders. But runakuna feared the process of open-sky mining on Sinakara, which physically removes the earth rather than tunnel-mining. Runakuna knew this would make the powerful Ausangate angry, provoking landslides, epidemics, or droughts (2010:338-339).
Ultimately, runakuna believe mining developments would destroy ayllu - the relational placement through which runakuna exist with earth beings (2015: 274). While a complex concept, ayllu is essentially a dynamic space where all beings that exist in the world live: humans, plants, animals, mountains, and rivers. Ayllu is not a place, or not where we are from, it is who we are. For example, “I am not from Huantura, I am Huantura” (2004: 239, as in de la Cadena 2010: 354). Thus, digging up a mountain to open a mine may produce more than visible environmental damage: these activities violate networks of emplacement in territory that make life possible (de la Cadena 2010: 357).
During the 2006 protests, because ayllu was not relatable for outsiders, the defence of earth beings like Ausangate shifted for a call to defend the ‘environment’ in general (de la Cadena 2015: 356, 275). Interestingly, we see an inverse of this arrangement in the Canadian context, where environmental regulations cannot stop Coastal GasLink pipeline, but Indigenous rights and claims to culture should be able to (Huson et al 2019). Unfortunately, this propagates the false binary between environmental ‘nature’ and Indigenous ‘culture’, refusing to recognise the visceral connection between the two.
Unist’ot’en Camp & the Oil Sands
A connection to landscapes and a desire to protect them are a key site of struggle in Canada, especially the Alberta oil sands and its related pipelines. Oil extraction and pipelines are portrayed as ‘ethical’ economic opportunities, obscuring and normalising ongoing processes of Indigenous oppression (Preston 2013:42). Just as earlier genocidal policies of assimilation disguised themselves as philanthropic instruments of ‘advancement’, resource extraction initiatives claim to ‘help’ communities by offering employment or economic development (Husemann & Short 2012: 220). Moreover, treaty-making processes have historically worked with oil-stakeholders to diffuse dissent around the control of territory (Kulchyski & Bernauer 2014:18; Preston 2013:42). For these reasons, the environmental devastation of crude oil extraction has been met with Indigenous resistance for decades.
The Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, stretching a distance larger than England, extract oil using open-surface mining and fracking to melt bitumen out of the soil on Chipewyan land (Preston 2013:43). Coastal GasLink is currently attempting to construct a pipeline to ship bitumen to ports in British Columbia, but has been met by roadblocks on Wet’suwet’en territory, most importantly Unist’ot’en Camp. In 2009 the first checkpoint was established at the entrance of Unist’ot’en territory, and no pipelines have been built since (Unist’ot’en 2017).
While the opening of this article described the arrests at Unist’ot’en Camp, a criminalising response to Indigenous resistance is not new (Proulx 2014: 83). In 2012, the Canadian government established a new RCMP anti-terrorism unit – the K-Division Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (Preston 2013: 43). The government’s justification was to protect the energy industry from attacks by extremists. Yet what warrants state military protection of corporate interests? The visual significance of whose rights are upheld and respected is blatant.
What Canadian authorities disregard is the deeply traumatic violation of traversing, excavating, and destructing land as a ‘resource’ on sovereign Indigenous territory. Alienation from landscape results in a dissolution of Indigenous people’s network of social relations. Territory is what embodies historical narrative and who one is in both ritual, traditions, and in political and economic cohesion (Husemann & Short 2012: 221). Sovereign recognition of yintah is fundamentally misunderstood by colonial structures and governments, and excluded from legitimate politics in Canada.
What Canadian authorities disregard is the deeply traumatic violation of traversing, excavating, and destructing land as a ‘resource’ on sovereign Indigenous territory. Alienation from landscape results in a dissolution of Indigenous people’s network of social relations. Territory is what embodies historical narrative and who one is in both ritual, traditions, and in political and economic cohesion (Husemann & Short 2012: 221). Sovereign recognition of yintah is fundamentally misunderstood by colonial structures and governments, and excluded from legitimate politics in Canada.
We must recognise Indigenous rights to land and self-determination because territory is a key medium through which Indigenous ways of being are respected and maintained. Any economic or ‘development’ practices that challenge these claims are detrimental to Indigenous well-being, and fail to recognise historical dispossession. The defence of yintah in the face of resource extraction is about much more than physical territory – it protects a different ontology and way of being. Indigenous protests are based on the fundamental premise of responsibility to, not for, land (McGregor 2018). ‘Responsibility to’ indicates a different practice of care towards place than is currently present in neoliberal extraction. In North American activism, the use of the term ‘land protectors’ instead of ‘protestors’, and ‘ceremony’ instead of ‘protest’, indicates resistance coming from a place of love for living systems, not a hatred of pipelines. It must be noted that some Indigenous communities support petroleum development to fulfill very real needs for running water, schools, and clinics in both Canada and Peru. Regardless, we should trust that Indigenous communities globally know how to best manage both their territory and their futures.
Despite the arrests at the Gidumt’en Checkpoint, today the camp has grown to a whole community of volunteers, with a permaculture garden, solar power grid, and a healing centre (Unist’ot’en 2017). The healing centre draws on ancestral knowledge embedded in the land to help community members connect to their cultural heritage and unextinguished Wet’suwet’en law (Huson et al 2013). Unist’ot’en presents a hopeful vision for the future of Indigenous rights, of an entirely different ‘development’ based in caring relationships with yintah.
Disclaimer: Writing about indigeneity as a non-Indigenous person, my perspective stems not from lived experience but rather is informed by the experiences of Indigenous communities that have been shared with me. As such, I recognise how my own bias may inform this work.
References
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De la Cadena, M. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Escobar, A. 2008. Territories of difference place, movements, life, redes / Arturo Escobar, Durham: Duke University Press.
Escobar, A. 2016. Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red, 11:1, 11–32.
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Huson, F. et al. 13 February 2019. Open Letter to the Archaeology Branch of the BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Unist’ot’en. (Available online at: https://unistoten.camp/open-letter-to-the-archaeology-branch-of-the-bc-ministry-of-forests-lands-and-natural-resource-operations/, accessed 9 April 2019).
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Sutherland-Wilson, K. Understanding Unist’ot’en. 24 January 2019 The Martlet. (Available online at: https://www.martlet.ca/understanding-unistoten/, accessed 4 April 2019).
United Nations General Assembly, 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 13 September 2007, 1-29 (Available online at: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf, accessed 8 April 2019).
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[1] In hopes to capture the broadest sense of membership without generalising across difference, the term ‘Indigenous’ will be used throughout the remainder of this essay. I also choose to capitalise the term based on standard practices of respect in North America, just as one would capitalise ‘French’ or ‘Iranian’ (see Simeone 2015).
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