North American Extra-Activism and Indigenous Communications Practices
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Jul 15, 2019
Received:
Jul 30, 2020
Published:
Dec 16, 2020
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Kidd, D. (2020). North American Extra-Activism and Indigenous Communications Practices. MEDIACIONES, 16(25), 222–245. https://doi.org/10.26620/uniminuto.mediaciones.16.25.2020.222-245
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Revista MEDIACIONES © 2024 by Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios - UNIMINUTO is licensed under the Creative Commons BY.
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Abstract
There has been a wealth of research in Latin America on the most recent global intensification of extractivism, or the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. Some of this research has examined the resistance among front-line Indigenous and rural communities, and allied environmental groups, who are challenging the development of mega-scale mining, oil, gas, monoagricultural, and related infrastructural projects. Researchers have noted many similar tactical repertoires that can take multiple forms (through direct action, media representation, and in legal, political, and educational forums) and extend across geographic scales (local, national, regional, and transnational). Communications is key to much of their work; however there has been far less research examining the communications practices in any detail. This article focuses on the communications practices in use in three Indigenous led campaigns against extractivist projects in North America, the decade-old Unist’ot’en Camp in northwestern Canada, Idle No More, and the #NoDAPL of the Standing Rock Sioux. My findings indicate that a resurgent Indigenous movement, in concert with environmental and other settler allies, has adopted an array of communications practices that combine protective action on behalf of their lands and waters with the creation of new communities in place-based assemblies and social media and digital networks.
References
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Brand, U., Dietz, K., & Lang, M. (2016). Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: One Side of a New Phase of Global Capitalist Dynamics. Ciencia Politica 11(21), 125–159.
Brígido-Corachán, A. (2017). Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights: Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement. Studies in the Literary Imagination 50(1), 69–90.
Broad. R., & Fischer-Mackey, J. (2017). From Extractivism towards buen vivir: Mining Policy as an Indicator of a New Development Paradigm Prioritising the Environment. Third World Quarterly 38(6), 1327–1349.
Campbell, H. (2014). Video: Beyond Boarding. Inside the Unist’ot’en Camp Blockade. https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/inside-the-unistoten-camp-blockade/
Cappelli, M.L. (2018). Standing With Standing Rock: Affective Alignment and Artful Resistance at the Native Nations Rise March. SAGE Open, July-September, 1–13.
Caria, S., & Domínguez, R. (2015). Ecuador’s buen vivir: A New Ideology for Development. Latin American Perspectives 43(1), 18–33.
Coates, K. (2015). #IdleNoMore and the Remaking of Canada. University of Regina Press.
Conde, M. (2017). Resistance to Mining: A Review. Ecological Economics 132, 80–90.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2013). Transmedia Mobilization in the Popular Association of the Oaxacan Peoples, Los Angeles. In B. Cammaerts, A. Mattoni, and P. McCurdy (eds). Mediation and Protest Movements. Intellect Books, pp. 95–114.
Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press. Downing, J.D. (2013). Towards a PoliticalEconomy of Social Movement Media. Democratic Communiqué 26(1), 17–28.
Duarte, M. (2017). Connected Activism: Indigenous Uses of Social Media for Shaping Political Change. Australasian Journal of Information Systems Vol. 21, 1–12.
Dyer-Witheford, N. (2008), For a Compositional Analysis of the Multitude. In W. Bonefeld, ed. Subverting the Present Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons. Autonomedia, 247–266.
Earth Justice (2020). The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Litigation on the Dakota Access Pipeline. https://earthjustice.org/features/faq-standing-rock-litigation#timeline.
Epstein, A. (2015). The Colonialism of the Present: An Interview with Glen Coulthard. Jacobin, January 13.
Estes, N. (2019). Our history is the future: Standing Rock and the Dakota access pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance. Verso Books.
Federici, S. (2019). Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press.
Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press.
Gudynas, E. (2018). Nuevas coyunturas entre extractivismos y desarrollo. Los límites del concepto de populismo y la deriva autoritaria. Ecuador Debate No. 105, pp. 23–45.
Hearne, J. (2017). Native to the Device: Thoughts on Digital Indigenous Studies. Studies in American Indian Literatures 29(1), 3–26.
Hogenboom, B. (2015). Latin America’s Transformative New Extraction and Local Conflicts Review Essay. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (99), 143–151.
Jacobs, B., McAdam, S., Neve, A., & Walia, H. (2020) Settler governments are breaking international law, not Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, say 200 lawyers, legal scholars. The Star.
Jalbert, K., Willow, A., Casagrande, D., & Paladino, S. (2017). ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures. Routledge.
Kidd, D. (2014a). We Can Live without Gold but Not without Water. In A. L. Roth & M. Huff (eds.) Project Censored 2014. PM Press, pp. 223-243.
Kidd, D. with Fugazzola, C. (2014b). Dreaming Joe Hill: Insurgent Communications in Contests over Our Common Resources. In D. Leadbeater, ed. Resources, Empire and Labour: Globalization Crises and Alternatives. Fernwood Publishing, pp.304-318.
Kidd, D. (2016). Extra-activism. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice. 28 (1), 1–9.
Kidd, D. (2019). Challenging Knowledge-Making in the Extractive Zone. Information, Communication & Society Vol. 22, No. 7, 954–970.
Kidd, D. (In press). Mobilizing with Video in the Extractive Zone. In C. Robé & S. Charbonneau (eds). InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Global Media Activism Reader. University of Indiana Press.
Kidd, D. (2020). Standing rock and the Indigenous commons, Popular Communication: The International Journal of. Media and Culture, 18(3), 233-247.
Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate. Simon & Schuster.
Lane. T. (2018). The Frontline of Refusal: Indigenous Women Warriors of Standing Rock, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(3), 197–214.
Lim, M. (2018). Roots, Routes, and Routers: Communications and Media of Contemporary Social Movements. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 20(2), 92–136.
Llano Arias, V. (2014). Communication practices and citizens’ participation in the Colombian water movement. [Ph. D. Dissertation], University College Dublin, pp. 1–267.
Mattoni, A. (2013). Repertoires of Communication In Social Movement Processes. In: B. Cammaerts, A. Mattoni, & P. Mc Curdy (eds.). Mediation and Protest Movements. Intellect, pp. 39-56.
McCreary, T., & Turner, J. (2018). The contested scales of Indigenous and settler jurisdiction: Unist’ot’en struggles with Canadian pipeline governance. Studies in Political Economy, 99 (3), 223–245.
Moore. H. (2017). The secret cost of pivoting to video. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pivot-to-video.php.
Ødegaard, C., & Rivera, J. (eds). (2019). Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America. Palgrave MacMillan.
Özkaynak, B., Rodriguez-Labajos, B., Aydın, C.İ., Yanez, I., & Garibay, C. (2015). Towards Environmental Justice Success in Mining Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation, EJOLT Re-
port No. 14.
Pérez-Rincón, M, Vargas-Morales, J., & Martinez-Alier, J., (2019). Mapping and Analyzing Ecological Distribution Conflicts in Andean Countries. Ecological Economics Vol. 157, pp.
80–91.
Rafsky, S. (2017). Eyes in the Sky: Drones at Standing Rock and the Next Frontier of Human Rights Video. Witness Media Lab, November 2. https://lab.witness.org/projects/dronesstanding-rock/.
Raftopoulos, M. (2017). Contemporary Debates on Social-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America. The International Journal of Human Rights 21(4),387–404.
Robé, C. (2017). Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas. PM Press.
Rueck, D. (2014, September). Commons, enclosure, and resistance in Kahnawa: Ke Mohawk Territory,1850–1900. The Canadian Historical Review, 95(3), 352–381. doi:10.3138/chr.2556.
Steinman, E. (2019). Why was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL Campaign So Historic? Factors Affecting American Indian Participation in Social Movement Collaborations and Coalitions. Ethnic and Racial Studies (42), 7.
Submedia. (2017). Killing the Black Snake: Behind the Scenes of the #NoDAPL Struggle. https://sub.media/video/trouble-season-1-episode-1/
Svampa, M. (2015). The ‘Commodities Consensus’ and Valuation Languages in Latin America. Alternautas 2(1), 45–59.
Temper, L. (2019). Blocking Pipelines, Unsettling Environmental Justice: From Rights of Nature to Responsibility to Territory. Local Environment 24(2), 94–112.
Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. Routledge.
Turner, T., & Brownhill, L. (2004). We want our land back: Gendered class analysis, the second contradiction of capitalism and social movement theory. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 15(4), 21–40. doi:10.1080/1045575042000287307. Unist’ot’en Camp. (2020). Background of the Campaign. http://unistoten.camp/no-pipe-lines/background-of-the-campaign/. Last consulted Sept. 14, 2020.
Vásquez, P. (2014). Oil Sparks in the Amazon: Local Conflicts, Indigenous Populations, and Natural Resources. University of Georgia Press.
Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? Zed Books.
Walker, J., & Walter, P. (2018). Learning about Social Movements through News Media: Deconstructing New York Times and Fox News Representations of Standing Rock. International Journal Of Lifelong Education 37(4), 401–418.
Walter, M., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2010). How to Be Heard When Nobody Wants to Listen: Community Action against Mining in Argentina. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement 30(1–2), 281–301.
West Coast Environmental Law Association. (2017). Brief on Legal Risks for Trans Mountain. https://www.wcel.org/publication/kinder-morgan-canada-limited-brief-le-gal-risks-trans-mountain.
Wiles, T. (2017). Standing Rock’s Ripple Effects. High Country News 49(1), 4–19.
Willow, A. (2019). Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes. Routledge.
Wood, L. (2015). Idle No More, Facebook and Diffusion. Social Movement Studies 14(5),615–621.
Barcia, I. (2017). Women Human Rights Defenders Confronting Extractive Industries: An Overview of Critical Risks and Human Rights Obligations. Association for Women’s Rights in Development and Women Human Rights Defenders International Coalition. https://www.awid.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/whrds-confronting_extractive_industries_report-eng.pdf.
Bebbington, A. (2015). Political Ecologies of Resource Extraction: Agendas Pendientes. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 100, 85-98.
Bebbington, A., & Bury, J. (2013). Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. University of Texas Press.
Beyond B. (2017). Rights Versus Responsibilities with Toghestiy and Mel Bazil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w43j30S1yDI.
Bracken. A. (2020). “Protests go mainstream as support for Wet’suwet’en. pipeline fight widens.” The Guardian, February 24, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/14/wetsuweten-coastal-gaslink-pipelineallies.
Brand, U., Dietz, K., & Lang, M. (2016). Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: One Side of a New Phase of Global Capitalist Dynamics. Ciencia Politica 11(21), 125–159.
Brígido-Corachán, A. (2017). Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights: Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement. Studies in the Literary Imagination 50(1), 69–90.
Broad. R., & Fischer-Mackey, J. (2017). From Extractivism towards buen vivir: Mining Policy as an Indicator of a New Development Paradigm Prioritising the Environment. Third World Quarterly 38(6), 1327–1349.
Campbell, H. (2014). Video: Beyond Boarding. Inside the Unist’ot’en Camp Blockade. https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/inside-the-unistoten-camp-blockade/
Cappelli, M.L. (2018). Standing With Standing Rock: Affective Alignment and Artful Resistance at the Native Nations Rise March. SAGE Open, July-September, 1–13.
Caria, S., & Domínguez, R. (2015). Ecuador’s buen vivir: A New Ideology for Development. Latin American Perspectives 43(1), 18–33.
Coates, K. (2015). #IdleNoMore and the Remaking of Canada. University of Regina Press.
Conde, M. (2017). Resistance to Mining: A Review. Ecological Economics 132, 80–90.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2013). Transmedia Mobilization in the Popular Association of the Oaxacan Peoples, Los Angeles. In B. Cammaerts, A. Mattoni, and P. McCurdy (eds). Mediation and Protest Movements. Intellect Books, pp. 95–114.
Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press. Downing, J.D. (2013). Towards a PoliticalEconomy of Social Movement Media. Democratic Communiqué 26(1), 17–28.
Duarte, M. (2017). Connected Activism: Indigenous Uses of Social Media for Shaping Political Change. Australasian Journal of Information Systems Vol. 21, 1–12.
Dyer-Witheford, N. (2008), For a Compositional Analysis of the Multitude. In W. Bonefeld, ed. Subverting the Present Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons. Autonomedia, 247–266.
Earth Justice (2020). The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Litigation on the Dakota Access Pipeline. https://earthjustice.org/features/faq-standing-rock-litigation#timeline.
Epstein, A. (2015). The Colonialism of the Present: An Interview with Glen Coulthard. Jacobin, January 13.
Estes, N. (2019). Our history is the future: Standing Rock and the Dakota access pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance. Verso Books.
Federici, S. (2019). Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press.
Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press.
Gudynas, E. (2018). Nuevas coyunturas entre extractivismos y desarrollo. Los límites del concepto de populismo y la deriva autoritaria. Ecuador Debate No. 105, pp. 23–45.
Hearne, J. (2017). Native to the Device: Thoughts on Digital Indigenous Studies. Studies in American Indian Literatures 29(1), 3–26.
Hogenboom, B. (2015). Latin America’s Transformative New Extraction and Local Conflicts Review Essay. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (99), 143–151.
Jacobs, B., McAdam, S., Neve, A., & Walia, H. (2020) Settler governments are breaking international law, not Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, say 200 lawyers, legal scholars. The Star.
Jalbert, K., Willow, A., Casagrande, D., & Paladino, S. (2017). ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures. Routledge.
Kidd, D. (2014a). We Can Live without Gold but Not without Water. In A. L. Roth & M. Huff (eds.) Project Censored 2014. PM Press, pp. 223-243.
Kidd, D. with Fugazzola, C. (2014b). Dreaming Joe Hill: Insurgent Communications in Contests over Our Common Resources. In D. Leadbeater, ed. Resources, Empire and Labour: Globalization Crises and Alternatives. Fernwood Publishing, pp.304-318.
Kidd, D. (2016). Extra-activism. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice. 28 (1), 1–9.
Kidd, D. (2019). Challenging Knowledge-Making in the Extractive Zone. Information, Communication & Society Vol. 22, No. 7, 954–970.
Kidd, D. (In press). Mobilizing with Video in the Extractive Zone. In C. Robé & S. Charbonneau (eds). InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Global Media Activism Reader. University of Indiana Press.
Kidd, D. (2020). Standing rock and the Indigenous commons, Popular Communication: The International Journal of. Media and Culture, 18(3), 233-247.
Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate. Simon & Schuster.
Lane. T. (2018). The Frontline of Refusal: Indigenous Women Warriors of Standing Rock, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(3), 197–214.
Lim, M. (2018). Roots, Routes, and Routers: Communications and Media of Contemporary Social Movements. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 20(2), 92–136.
Llano Arias, V. (2014). Communication practices and citizens’ participation in the Colombian water movement. [Ph. D. Dissertation], University College Dublin, pp. 1–267.
Mattoni, A. (2013). Repertoires of Communication In Social Movement Processes. In: B. Cammaerts, A. Mattoni, & P. Mc Curdy (eds.). Mediation and Protest Movements. Intellect, pp. 39-56.
McCreary, T., & Turner, J. (2018). The contested scales of Indigenous and settler jurisdiction: Unist’ot’en struggles with Canadian pipeline governance. Studies in Political Economy, 99 (3), 223–245.
Moore. H. (2017). The secret cost of pivoting to video. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pivot-to-video.php.
Ødegaard, C., & Rivera, J. (eds). (2019). Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America. Palgrave MacMillan.
Özkaynak, B., Rodriguez-Labajos, B., Aydın, C.İ., Yanez, I., & Garibay, C. (2015). Towards Environmental Justice Success in Mining Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation, EJOLT Re-
port No. 14.
Pérez-Rincón, M, Vargas-Morales, J., & Martinez-Alier, J., (2019). Mapping and Analyzing Ecological Distribution Conflicts in Andean Countries. Ecological Economics Vol. 157, pp.
80–91.
Rafsky, S. (2017). Eyes in the Sky: Drones at Standing Rock and the Next Frontier of Human Rights Video. Witness Media Lab, November 2. https://lab.witness.org/projects/dronesstanding-rock/.
Raftopoulos, M. (2017). Contemporary Debates on Social-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America. The International Journal of Human Rights 21(4),387–404.
Robé, C. (2017). Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas. PM Press.
Rueck, D. (2014, September). Commons, enclosure, and resistance in Kahnawa: Ke Mohawk Territory,1850–1900. The Canadian Historical Review, 95(3), 352–381. doi:10.3138/chr.2556.
Steinman, E. (2019). Why was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL Campaign So Historic? Factors Affecting American Indian Participation in Social Movement Collaborations and Coalitions. Ethnic and Racial Studies (42), 7.
Submedia. (2017). Killing the Black Snake: Behind the Scenes of the #NoDAPL Struggle. https://sub.media/video/trouble-season-1-episode-1/
Svampa, M. (2015). The ‘Commodities Consensus’ and Valuation Languages in Latin America. Alternautas 2(1), 45–59.
Temper, L. (2019). Blocking Pipelines, Unsettling Environmental Justice: From Rights of Nature to Responsibility to Territory. Local Environment 24(2), 94–112.
Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. Routledge.
Turner, T., & Brownhill, L. (2004). We want our land back: Gendered class analysis, the second contradiction of capitalism and social movement theory. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 15(4), 21–40. doi:10.1080/1045575042000287307. Unist’ot’en Camp. (2020). Background of the Campaign. http://unistoten.camp/no-pipe-lines/background-of-the-campaign/. Last consulted Sept. 14, 2020.
Vásquez, P. (2014). Oil Sparks in the Amazon: Local Conflicts, Indigenous Populations, and Natural Resources. University of Georgia Press.
Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (2014). The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? Zed Books.
Walker, J., & Walter, P. (2018). Learning about Social Movements through News Media: Deconstructing New York Times and Fox News Representations of Standing Rock. International Journal Of Lifelong Education 37(4), 401–418.
Walter, M., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2010). How to Be Heard When Nobody Wants to Listen: Community Action against Mining in Argentina. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement 30(1–2), 281–301.
West Coast Environmental Law Association. (2017). Brief on Legal Risks for Trans Mountain. https://www.wcel.org/publication/kinder-morgan-canada-limited-brief-le-gal-risks-trans-mountain.
Wiles, T. (2017). Standing Rock’s Ripple Effects. High Country News 49(1), 4–19.
Willow, A. (2019). Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes. Routledge.
Wood, L. (2015). Idle No More, Facebook and Diffusion. Social Movement Studies 14(5),615–621.