Dr. Tyler McCreary is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University. His research examines how settler colonialism and racial capitalism inflect processes of environmental, labour, and community governance in North America. His research has analyzed themes such as how North American environmental governance processes address Black and Indigenous community concerns; the differential impacts of socio-technical transitions in North American labour markets; and how urban and regional governance processes relate to the historic marginalization of Indigenous and Black families living in towns and cities.
To learn more about Dr. McCreary, visit his webpage on The Department of Geography’s website:Â https://geography.fsu.edu/people/tyler-mccreary/.
Dr mccy thanks thanks uh thanks so much for having me um so this is uh a a interesting moment for me uh I’m in the kind of nervous excitement phase uh my book comes out tomorrow so this is either the first talk of the book existing or it’s last talk before it’s
Finally out um so it’s exciting for me uh you know I’m certainly uh always love to have this kind of moment I have that you know nervous energy this was originally my dissertation project um and I’m really excited to be able to share it with you today
Uh so Anthony already uh provided The Evergreen State uh College uh acknowledgement I also want to acknowledge that this pipeline that I’m going to be speaking about today intersects numerous indigenous territories although my research is based on the unseated territories of the watso and hereditary Chiefs and I want
To begin by paying respect to the elders past and present of the indigen naations here and also there um and extend that respect to the descendants future generations to come and all indigenous peoples so today what I’m going to be talking about uh to give a basic outline I’m
Going to start by throwing out my argument and then I’m going to step back to understand the stakes that are at the core of talking about pipeline debates um and struggles talk a little bit about the methods of my research and how I approach it then jump into the
Historical context specific to the whatsin um and then talk about how that framed this particular struggle around a pipeline so I’m going to be talking about the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline um and really to understand how indigenous struggle PA a really key role in the fate of that pipeline um and then
I’ll conclude by talking a little bit about how we can understand this as an ongoing uh dynamic continual struggle uh so the argument to start at the very base level uh what I argue is happening is a kind of continuous cycle of struggle um so we
Can see and we can start it at whichever point we want to um we have our our fat capitalist um who’s extracting wealth uh we have indigenous peoples who continue to assert relationships to the land on which wealth is extracted there’s a kind of contest between them uh state legal
Processes try to mediate those conflicts to allow accumulation to continue to occur that continues to be contested by indigenous peoples which C causes more State mediation so this is the basic cycle of my research certainly there has to be a smoother way to do this uh so just to
Give a kind of uh overview again theoretic thinking about this I draw on a number of sources uh in thinking about our uh uh structures of capitalism I draw on the traditions of Karl Marx and then particularly on uh the work of Cedric Robinson uh a black Marxist thinker who
Thinks about the Dynamics of racial capitalism and how that ties to accumulation thinking about indigenous peoples I draw on the work work uh of keyth thinkers like Leanne Simpson uh and Glenn colard who helped me think about the politics of recognition um and its limitations and the ways that we can
Understand indigenous ways of being indigenous Resurgence as vital forces that push back against these regimes of accumulation and then there’s one more slide in between these then finally thinking about regulation and the role of the state I draw upon the work of Michelle Fuko um to try to
Understand the disciplinary power of the state um and the way that that’s renegotiated over time so fundamentally at the core of my thinking um I give all of that but really is this thinking about the Resurgence of of indigenous law and the role of indigenous law in these
Contested struggles um so Glenn colard who was on the previous slide talks about grounded normativity this Foundation of indigenous movements in connections to the landbased pla practices and experiential knowledge that structures their own ethical engagements with the world um and then a kind of affirmative refusal of colonial paradigms of
Knowledge of colonial dispossession and a push to renew indigenous ways of being on the land that are embedded and in mesed in this grounded normativity this way form of experiential knowledge and land-based practices so this to me is really core to how we understand what’s
At stake in this cycle um many of you will have heard of and and thought about capitalism we think about the state and I think it’s really Central to think also about the role of indigenous resistance in thinking through all this so the stakes here the stakes are
Large uh so the conflict in miniature uh to give you a sense of what was involved this is the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is uh a 750 m proposed tar Sands pipeline uh it was costed about $7.9 billion so a significant amount of money it was uh designed to convey a
Half million barrels per day of diluted bitamin which is this tar oil equivalent um from this unconventional Source the tarand at stake for the woin are is the status of their unseated territories uh 22,000 square kmers of unseated land and I’ll talk about what that means uh and
At the core of that is really the continuation of their territorial governance and their relationships to the land as I talked about this matters uh because this is a photo of the tar Sands many of you may not have seen this this is unconventional extraction so tar
Bitchman combined with sand uh that is just torn up from the Boreal forest of Northern Alberta uh it is one of the largest reserves remaining of uh oil and gas in the world so 12% 11 or 12% of global reserves are in this uh source so
We’re talking about a major uh source of global energy and James Hansen the former director of NASA’s Godard Institute for climate science said if we were to fully exploit Canada tar Sands uh we would be putting the world at risk civilization would be at risk if this sounds apocalyptic it
Is so the stakes are High um in the early 2000s there was this major projection uh for the growth of the tar Sands that orange bar is is the growth um and you can see the sizable jump in production that would have been made possible through new pipelines
Infrastructure so the stakes of this debate are this projection for the this major transition uh this is from the national energy Board of Canada um so the blue is uh and the orange are both tar Sand’s production uh so we can see this sizeable uh source and this massive
Projection now notably this is a from the mid uh 2010s so that projection of future growth is all premised on this new infrastructure so the heart of this infrastructure is this massive plan for the Canadian economy and of course uh this has major climate Stakes um and you know here I have this
Tragic disturbing for me to actually look at I I was imagining that you would look at it there’s a screen at the front where I also have to look at it and it’s very troubling uh but we can see the the kind of impacts on animals uh some of my
Other research recently has been on tornadoes Recent research shows uh tornadoes as well as hurricanes are intensifying with climate change so this is a disastrous future that we’re really at stake so I’m arguing that indigenous uh knowledge somehow matters to all of this and the stakes of the are big how do I
Understand this how do I approach this well I draw on the work of uh Palestinian intellectual Edward SED uh using what he calls contrapunto analysis contrapunto or Counterpoint uh is drawing on a musical metaphor so two Melodies resonating off each other being independent but overlapping so applying this to indigenous Community
Activism um I work closely with the what soan community um in fact uh as I was driving in today I was talking on the phone with u some of my wodin collaborators uh in fact literally the guy on the screen David DT was who I was talking to
Um and I work closely to sort of understand their point of view um through participant observation participating in in their governance uh system doing oral histories with Elders uh doing archival research and also engaging in Acts of reciprocity this is really key for my research and for my
Ethical engagement so here uh this is my previous book launch um so I I held a feast in the center of the community to announce and share uh that research with the community um so giving back to the community um through my work on the other side I am engaged in
Uh critique of colonial institutions and I read these again as this kind of CounterPoint so as I understand indigenous and the richness of their Traditions I also look to the forms of colonial hearing or deafness um that doesn’t resonate with indigenous peoples and here this is a a court judge we’ll
Talk about him a little bit more as we go on but Chief mcketrin with his tin ear and looking at the the kind of inability to hear but also the ways in which indigenous activism tries to open up um that hearing so the historical
Context uh so to give us just a sense of where we are geographically um we’re on the west coast now uh where I’m talking about is further up the northwest coast just south of Alaska um on with so in territories so this is a a remapping of British Columbia as indigenous
Territories um the green do I have a thing uh that’s what soin territories they’re kind of in the center um this telinga territory is Alaska to give you a sense of where we are um and what’s really at stake here is an indigenous relationship to the
Land so with so and law in traditional systems runs through the hereditary Chiefs uh this is a quote from gway Alfred Joseph who talks about each hereditary Chief has an ancestor who encountered and acknowledged the life of the land from such encounters came power the land the plants the animals and the
People all have a spirit they all must be shown respect this is the basis of our law the chief is responsible for ensuring that all of the people of his y respect the land um and all of living things when a chief directs his y properly that’s when the
Laws are followed that’s when the original Power of that encounter with the land is recreated and that recreates the authority of the hereditary system so this is this traditional relationship to the land that were that’s at stake now the gek center with soin uh in Northern British Columbia never signed a
Treaty never signed an agreement never seeded this Authority they continue to practice it uh each y has its own uh territories uh so these are kind of family groupings extended family groupings uh with particular responsibilities for the land and in the 1980s they went to court to assert that
They had never seeded jurisdiction to their territories um it becomes the foundation in Canada of Aboriginal law it was a a significant court case not only within Canada but globally it was this first time where indigenous peoples went to the courts to contest to say our
System of law remains in place and we continue to have jurisdiction under that system of law so um this is Dan Michelle and he talked about in the court case when they they showed it to them that people are part of the land they belong to it and they
Return back to there the Government tried to say we gave you guys reserves Canadian term for reservations you guys belong on the reserves now and he said no we belong on our family territories that is where we’re connected to that is the source of our relationship and our Authority and that case at
Stake was not just uh this question of land as an economy or land is a commodity but land is a relationship so neides Sarah Leighton talked in the court case about our ancestors lived off the land I don’t want no money I want it back the way the
Way the territory was in the past for our future children’s use our grandchildren and our great great grandchildren so they’ll be able to use it the way that your ancestors have in the past so really what this is is about the continuity of this ancestral relationship um now the court case
Initially uh was very novel it transformed Canadian law uh at court rather than leading their evidence with experts on them like anthropologist the hereditary Chiefs themselves took to the stand and presented their own evidence of their legal system and explained it to the court the original
Trial judge uh it would be hard to understate how hostile he was to these Traditions um so in the end in the the trial judgments he quoted Hobbs to say indigenous peoples um and I’m going to point this out in a very Petty way he misspelled Hobbs uh but he invoked this
Western I indigenous people’s lives were nasty brutish and short they didn’t have the wheel before we came they had no concept of land we had to teach them about the idea of having authority over the land they just lived off the land like animals um this was undoubtedly racist
And when it eventually got appealed up to the Supreme Court of Canada the Supreme Court recognized that and said that indigenous people did have a concept of land they did have a form of title it does exist in Canadian law it is SW generis a fancy Latin word for of
Its own kind it’s a unique in nature it’s not something that comes from Canadian law it it comes from the ways in which indigenous legal orders enter into Canadian law because they pre-existed it it’s communally held and it has an economic component moreover they recognized Aboriginal rights must be understood
With reference not only to the traditions of Canadian law but Aboriginal perspectives and here they recognized that oral histories and traditional knowledge were a valid source of knowledge of indigenous connections to land so the strategy they made with the hereditary Chiefs taking the stand and testifying and those
Quotes I gave you before were all testimony before the court that that was a valid form of knowledge of their relationship to to the land and then they recognized that as distinctive Aboriginal societies there was a duty to for the state to reconcile its occupation and settlement of the land
With the established prior legal rights of indigenous societies as organized societies that were already present um this eventually folds out into a duty to to consult and involve them in government proceedings and this is the kind of vital backdrop for everything that we understand when the pipelines come this
Is the context for the pipeline struggle so what happens with the pipeline and how is this taken up well the first way what becomes codified is the series of studies called traditional land use studies this was a way to try to bring into governance indigenous knowledge of the
Land so what ended up happening with a pipeline company is they engage in these studies that I refer to as territorial triage so for folks that don’t know uh triage is the process in a hospital where you decide which patients to prioritize um and who gets to survive
And really what the pipeline company wanted the indigenous Community to do is identify the spots of most cultural import so they could do pipeline rooting around them so they’re like we’ll protect your lands just tell us like your fishing spot and we’ll go around the fishing
Spot show us where the graveyard is and we uh at least theoretically are not going to go through your graveyard um it turns out in practice pipeline companies are not as good at that but theoretically this is this kind of practice that you want uh to engage
In where they’re taking them as routing constraints and integrating it the same ways in many ways that they would unstable land slopes that the will Slough and cause the pipeline to break they bring it into these rooting decisions and offer this form of territorial triage now the wioa
And hereditary Chiefs however in the governance process rejected this logic of triage and they made their submissions primarily about the territories so here we see the territories um where the family groups are asserting no what matters is actually the larger question of jurisdiction the what we need to worry about is governance and
Our authority to respect this land so it’s not about what sites we use it’s about our governance traditions and the obligations that are encoded within those they also uh began to raise questions about the science at a more systemic level so there rather than sites they wanted to ask these questions particularly about
The kind of substances that were moving through this pipeline uh the company and the Canadian government wanted to talk about bitchman as a alternative type of oil but one of the things that was brought out in the pipeline governance process by Aboriginal uh interveners was bitchin is like a a tar substance that
Is in many ways quite distinct from oil in order to get bitumin to through the pipeline they have to dilute it with napthalene napthalene is like a a light fuel that you use in camp stoves um so they blend them together and it makes the tar bitchman liquid enough to get
Through the pipeline um this is notably why I use viscosities in the title of the book is this sort of play on friction because it’s heavy and it’s bitchin but it’s also uh indigenous challenges take on this viscosity um and really challenge it and one of the
Things they pointed out is uh that bitamin when it breaks out of the pipeline the diluted bitchin splits again the napthalene uh floats off as a light gas and the bitchman sinks so as bad as oil spills are all of the oil spill technology that we have
For cleanup is based on oil floating um we don’t have Tech techniques for digging it out of riverbeds um and this has been seen in the few disasters that have already happened with spills so they raised this concern that the governance process was not meaningfully taking account of science that indicated that this
Substance was something new that we didn’t know how to govern or how to protect the environment for now in the governance process there other thing that the company tried to argue was that there was opportunities for a new industrial Partnerships and they said okay there will be effects we
Recognize you have these Land Title uh that we have to reconcile with it has an economic component as the court offered what we can do is offset the impacts on your land and we can offer you opportunities primary among these is jobs we’ll give you job guarantees to
Work on the pipeline if you sign on so the economic component of your relationship to the land can become the basis for you working in pipeline Industries uh they also offered opportunities for Aboriginal communities to invest and buy a stake in the pipeline so they could get a share of
The revenues and what we see is this whole process of offering to transform that relationship to the land is a kind of economic commodity that can be bought and sold in a offset um so that you get jobs you get economic benefits in exchange for giving up that relationship
Now this did not simply go over with the woin the woin did not take this up now I use this title with the weight of a feather in part because the symbol of what so in law is uh Eagle down eagle feathers um so they they brought forward their
Law this came from the very opening of the hearings over the pipeline they entered singing a song that had been composed uh for the occasion our territory is our livelihood and Bridge don’t step onto our land um so from the very basis and the beginning it was very clear now the
Government chastised the woad in for a approaching the uh pipeline company in such a disrespectful way so the Sheila Legette the panel chair for the um review process said uh this word respect keeps being used by by your indigenous Community we’ve talked about it yesterday we talk
About it every day presenters should be respectful of all the parties involved in the proceedings with their evidence so particularly she’s taking issue with the fact that they’re singing and dancing and bringing forward these kinds of claims uh this hearing is to listen to your oral traditional knowledge that you
Indigenous peoples have to share with us historical perspectives about hunting for for the berries about the spirituality involved in going fishing so uh here we see the kind of perspective of the government uh officials that sort of Imagine indigenous people still to be just kind of living off the land not having
Governance activities and this challenge about don’t step on this land the challenge that indigenous peoples have authority is fundamentally seen as disrespectful of government process so in spite of going through the courts in spite of having their knowledge recognized as a system of law trying to
Go there when it comes down to these regulatory processes still we see that the system of law is not recognized as law as such now the W soin however continued in the hearing process in spite of uh this chastisement about respect to come forward opening each day with the same
Song and they came in wearing their traditional regalia now this traditional regalia is signic ific because the regalia that they wear each one of those animals symbolizes that original ancestor for your uh you your your family group has connection to this particular animal as representative of
The spirit of the land that you owe obligations to so wearing this regalia into the court they’re bringing in those responsibilities they’re bringing in those connections and they began with a a ceremony um called the c um and in this ceremony I don’t have a picture of of
The S because it’s a sacred ceremony you don’t photograph it but uh you can see the rattle here uh this is Chief neox uh showcasing the rattle so that we could have a picture uh and this is from the actual transcript of of of the explanation of the SC the this
Performance that followed they came in singing their song and then they spread uh they conducted a ceremony in which they spread eagle down uh throughout the courtroom and they said guess the national eny board government of Canada citizens of Burns Lake in the surrounding area Burns Lake is the town
In which the hearings were held the next portion is very important to us for every gathering for every ceremony that we plan a year and ahead there’s a ceremony called the rattle it signifies the start of serious business of talking straight talking in an appropriate manner along with the rattle cry is the
Feather the plume when it rises and it rises in a gathering like that that means whatever spok about that whatever is mentioned needs to be listened to the feather is very sacred to us when it rises the way that you will witness today and the rattle cry
Itself is very sacred to us well as well it signifies the start of serious business now this is important because the eagle down and the rattle are the invocation of what so and law um so in process of reconciliation that occur within woan legal Traditions the S is a ceremony that
Shows official business is going to be conducted and the terms of Peace will be laid out so what they’re doing in their testimony is they they’re showing their governance traditions and showing what for them were the terms of peace with the pipeline the terms of peace with the pipeline
Uh were relatively simply that you’re not going to build it uh so as neox told the the hearing as a whatso and chief we are taught right on how to look after our lands how to respect our laws how to look after our Our Youth and make sure
The promises that we’ve made to our grandchildren are never broken we do not own the land we’re only borrowing it from our grandchildren it is of the utmost importance that we return the land to our grandchildren in a better condition than when we walked on it this proposed project endangers our promises
To our grandchildren that we would look after the land or culture our people for them we cannot break this promise to our grandchildren so their stance is unambiguous before the court uh or before the formal governance hearing U this pipeline governance Hearing in Canada now the story I tell you is
Unusual for climate Justice a a relatively happy one um initially it doesn’t appear that way so the official government report uh which was called connections uh when it was released said that the panel does not share the view of some Aboriginal groups that the impacts associated with a project during
Construction and routine would eliminate them to maintain their cultural and spiritual practices um rather they they suggest that the traditional land use studies that the company had provided where they they did this triage they identified was sufficient that was enough recognition for Aboriginal uh rights and title
Um and that the panel is of the view that the northern gateways commitments uh and with the additional conditions that are put on to meet those commitments the project will have positive net economic benefits for local Regional and National economies and can provide positive benefits and opportunities to local Regional and
Aboriginal individuals communities and businesses that choose to participate so they said that economic component of your title is adequately compensated with the jobs with the business opportunities um with the Partnerships that you can said so they accepted those original terms um that are offered and this is the then Canadian Prime Minister
Um Stephen Harper who announced uh at the end of the hearing process in 2014 we’re going to build the pipeline we’ve approved it the company can go forward that however is not the end of the story following the approval of the pipeline indigenous people went to court the neighbors of the wsan the
Simen um and the heisa uh took a court case forward arguing that their government had given insufficient consideration of their concerns and specifically at the core of that case was um the insufficiency of their ability to understand what bitchman would do in the environment and how that would affect salmon and they
Basically argued that the government had and the company had done the necessary science to even understand these substances and what they would do uh and the courts agreed they overturned uh the pipeline consideration and they said they had to go back and do these studies or they had to account
More meaningfully for this however that’s not just the story of that they have to come back through a technical it becomes the larger political question the what so and were always asking it as a government question of a question of authority and what they did and they
Were part of a a national and indeed Global movement that pressed forward these claims and they illegitimize the government itself so what happens in the wake of of their Victory is that we see a change in government and the new government comes forward um of Justin Trudeau there are very many critiques we
Could make of Trudeau but on the claim at stake this Northern Gateway pipeline Trudeau comes out and cancels it um so it it is actually a victory uh a a victory for the climate where we see an indigenous Community an indigenous community of 4,000 people in combination with its
Neighbors able to De defeat a $7.9 billion project so going back to that that beginning that there is significance um to understanding these struggles this continues to go on there are more pipelines more struggles the government has grown more sophisticated in its techniques I would love to tell
You that this is all over and we’ve solved the climate crisis uh sadly that is not where I end but what I do want to end is that this cycle of struggle this larger conceptual frame that I started with is ongoing so that those obligations that we talked about they continue to be
Exercised and they continue to be the source of struggle that challenges the governing logic um of of capitalism of fossil capitalism of racial capitalism of settler colonialism um so before I go to questions what thing I wanted to do was to move beyond my voice um and and end
By showing you a short clip of one of the hereditary Chiefs chief keset that I worked with for the past 14 years um who sadly passed on just a month ago and this is a video kind of tribute uh that one of my collaborators who does film
Work fundo gasto Zoro made um to recognize her and her contribution and I think her words are a good moment for us to leave off the the kind of formal part and lead us into the conversation with the of the wait wait let’s come back together because this work that we’re doing is
Very important work that we’re doing it’s love for us it’s love for us to use in the future but is for our children for our children’s children your grandchildren their children their great grandchildren and those for those babies not get born that’s who your work for that’s who you’re going to leave T
You that’s who you’re working for in this VI [Applause] thank you very much much um uh thank you for sharing that video as well I know Viet was a very close collaborator of yours so I appreciate you sharing that and sharing her voice with us um I just want to see if we can maybe turn it over
For a discussion now talking about uh Tyler’s broader work um what he presented on today and I know some of you um had read some of his other work in the class so we can take questions regarding all those things um but yeah you can just open it up for question the
Audience now that’s all right yeah yeah I’m happy to do that um anybody want to start us off yeah um I remember a few years ago seeing videos of you know Canadian federal agents homes of land Defenders and been a hisory of like anti it’s all kind of chaotic up
So like know somebody who’s like involved in the work and like in the in the community like what do you see what do you see in the future for land Defenders given you know we have our own thing going onit policeing def of the land all sorts of pipeline projects
Going on around the world like what do you see for the future uh like in the criminalization of indigen yeah so this is very real um I in wanting to tell the story and and wanting to I mean part of what I wanted to do today was honor Vis memory um so I
Decided to tell a happy story uh where we can see a win um but as you said the pipelines haven’t stopped um the with soin have currently uh another fight pipeline that was forced through against their um will and uh land Defenders have um from their
Nation been uh arrested uh for uh trying to resist that on the land um so that’s very current and and very much uh related to uh the struggle that that I document in a new iteration um and the question is so pertinent so today actually um sale to sale is uh in in
Court uh gon uh one of the whato in hereditary Chiefs uh for uh disrupting the pipeline um he had uh the pipeline was and I gave a little gesture out to it the pipeline was about to um go uh through the grave area of um some
Uh people who had died uh in child child birth uh and had been buried on the territory and as part of his responsibilities to uh protect those people he had uh gone onto the site of uh the company and and uh taken a loader and dug up the pipeline uh yeah you can
Appreciate uh um the state is uh currently pursuing prosecution of him for uh trespassing and and destroying the property of the company he is arguing uh I think a very unique thing it will likely go up to substantial appeals it will be an interesting question um so his defense
Is that he was obligated to do so by what so and Law And if what so and law is not something that guides his action then the meaning uh of what so entitle is meaningless um that at stake in that court case was not uh simply little sites of traditional land use although
In in this case also that was at stake um but what he’s arguing is that for Aboriginal title for these Concepts to be meaningfully recognized by law it means that obligations that they carry need to be meaningfully protected and that he has a right to defend his territory from
Trespass um so that court case uh is ongoing and that is his defense um so anticipate that to be a story that goes forward um undoubtedly it’s a a challenge to the framework of Canadian law and and settler colonial law a powerful one um and I think that’s one
Of the strategies that that people are using to contest is that they say our legal Traditions have never been seed we have never agreed to be under you um your own courts have recognized that we have legal standing you need to uh reckon with our
Law uh so that is at stake it’s also worth noting in spite of the criminalization um the resistance has effects uh on one hand this pipeline got shut down the other pipeline the it’s uh called cgl Coastal Gas link pipeline has had to refinance uh it costed it I think an
Additional three or four billion dollars to build because of all the resistance um so this does have real meaningful impacts in the world in terms of whether or not these projects get built and under what terms they’re built so uh that’s a a part of my answer to
Your question uh although very much these questions are still unfolding yeah I’m yeah so certainly uh there are different strategies uh and and tactics and we see that uh with the ways that different groups engage so uh in the planning process some people have uh chosen to engage those
Processes because they say we have legal recognition you have a legal obligation to to reckon with us and that you are still not sub substantively meeting that that bar um and there have been various challenges that have had successful traction um including on on the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline including actually even when
They build the pipeline I say the resistance is uh and part of it’s the blockades and the criminalization that’s costing it but part of it is actually uh very technical permitting issues so the the land venders one of the things they do is they observe um the construction
They’re they’re looking at the effects um I’m currently in another project working uh with a a student to help uh develop drone capacity so that communities can observe um what’s happening on their land and one of the things that they’ve seen is that these companies are not upholding their
Environmental permit conditions um so one of the big costs that they have is they keep getting shut down for violating the terms that they committed to uphold um so I think that legal mechanisms uh that are often tedious and boring are also significant there’s significant sites of contestation and
Often Capital wants to extract at the lowest cost possible which means that they often cut corners and contesting at all of those Corners creates space um to really change actually the financing of of these projects to to shift their viability one of the arguments that
People keep making is that oh we need to have oil and gas to fund the transition we need these resources um economically and I think Shifting the economics uh and the economic formula of these shifts the decision about how we actually engage a transition you’re you pointing to me uh let’s jump
To another side of the room yeah uh I I think the Canadian and the American system are contrasting so tribal sovereignty in the United States is a lot stronger than what’s been recognized so government the Canadian system in it it’s uh particular racism has been very reticent to recognize government
Status um what it has been stronger at is been recognizing a connection to into the land uh the United States system is a contrast in the sense that tribal sovereignty is uh in effect recognized but tribal sovereignty is typically recognized within the frame uh of con of capitalism that you can be
Sovereign within a capitalist system and you can have governmental Authority but the environmental connections are not and the sacredness of the land is not well recognized um so I think in environmental challenges indigenous people in Canada tend to have more traction in governmental cases uh in the states uh governmental arguments have
Had historically had more traction uh so and then I’ll jump over there yeah is there concern in Canada thats to be like the likely Fall of the government in the next election cycle will trigger of like T expansion andc fil F yes yeah yeah I I mean uh I would say in
Canada and globally um the rise of of kind of right-wing extreme extractivist forces are something uh that we have to contend with uh certainly we’re in a moment of Reckoning where the kind of promises of liberal order are falling apart their legitimacy is fading um and uh certain forces have been effectively mobilizing
That often in connection to a kind of politics of white resentment um and that’s something that both we should be aware of I would say fearful of but also consciously um mobilizing to uh contest um so what that has looked like um has varied over time um and I have
Like a a number of projects that I’ve been working on um and have worked on so initially my research was on um on the pipeline and I I was sort of documenting resistance I um help try to publicize I wrote like popular media like newspaper pieces and
And still occasionally do um to try to raise awareness um but I also recognize that my capacity as an academic um has given me access to things that uh the community doesn’t necessarily know exist so as I’ve been working I’ve also um while I was doing my dissertation I
Found in an archive uh a film from 1927 um that had been constructed by an anthropologist that wasn’t uh available to the community we repatriated that I worked with Elders to develop contemporary educational programming to go with the film so they could use it in the schools so to support that work on
The ground and recognize the ways um that this kind of intimately Works my very first book um was I I did this as my dissertation research a decade ago um but I ended up when I presented my dissertation research to the community um Violet actually uh took me aside and
Said okay now you’ve done that what I want you to do next is tell the story of my family in town and what happened to them in this Northern Resource town and what I ended up doing and what I ended up engaging with is uh was unknown to me
In but the neighborhood that I had grown up in was uh an indigenous community in the early days of the Town um and they had been burned out in the 50s and 60s and so I told this story and I I worked with these Elders to tell the story of
The house that I grew up in and its relationship to their families um so at the same time as I’m doing this broader work that looks at at these kind of political struggles and I try to publicize it I’m also really attentive to these kind of interpersonal obligations and
Connections so I guess my question is um about reimagining being our relations and um I’m just curious from your Insight like how do you think we can reimagine our relations Beyond Survival or Beyond like like colonial law um yeah yeah so um I think this is really really
Important um and part of the conversation that I was having this morning was looking at at um the legacies of this and I think we should recognize uh our communities and I speak broadly there of settler communities of of recent immigrant communities and uh indigenous communities are all struggling with a degree of
Unhealthiness we see that in the opioid crisis we see that in the fentol crisis um that and and even uh to give um Credence to some of the the the feelings the the uh anger that people have there’s some something unhappy and unhealthy about where we’re at uh and I
Think it’s important for us to start by saying this is not working um I also think that it’s important to recognize that the reimagining that that we’re doing is not always reimagining in some ways is actually returning to things that have been silenced to voices that have been um
Excluded that still have forms of knowledge that we we can turn to so you talked a little bit about the land defenders in U my colleague and in the first question now it’s important that land Defenders aren’t just about resisting projects so the unen camp which is one of the wo and resistant
Camps is important because not only are they resisting but they actually built a Healing Center there um so at the core core of of the resistance is about restoring the relationship to the land um and they have uh their kind of director of uh uh Tate um I’m blanking
On her name carate uh who talks about the importance that they built this Wellness Center on the land um actually at the site where originally the pipeline was supposed to cross the river um which was showing occupation was showing their connection to the land but also was about healing that connection
To the land about dealing with the effects of of things like residential schools of addictions and all the violence that got internalized in the community um and serving as a model of the role that like reconnecting with the land can have in restoring health and function within the
Community kinding that this is not working I feel like um we then like kind of enter this like field of insanity of absurdity or Madness and like how do we grapple like we say this is not working people say well you’re just insane or you’re absurd like um I guess I don’t
Know if I have like my question fully put out but you’re picking up what I’m yeah no so I mean I think that there’s like both I mean we have to deal with like the questions of of inv validations to be like oh you’re not well um and this like kind of casting
Back that it’s like oh the illness is is you I mean on one hand my simplest thing is like I want to reject that that’s ridiculous uh but also I think that we need to talk about like yes it’s not just me like anxiety is at like acute levels
Um one of the things that we could say that we’ve learned from the Corona virus uh is that a lot of people don’t trust pharmaceutical companies there are some valid reasons for that um and it turns out I think the drugs are not curing us on their own I
Mean personally I I would recommend getting vaccinated for the for the virus but I would say you know proac wasn’t the Cure volume wasn’t the Cure like we’re continuing to have like these social anxieties and increasingly um I have a colleague who’s doing uh research right now on the problem of climate
Anxiety uh the kind of Doom scenarios that people face are are medically recognizably creating tra trauma in communities um the kind of ongoing and intensifying crises whether it be wildfires or hurricanes or tornadoes uh have disastrous Economic Consequences but are also um tearing at the kind of mental fa fabric of
Communities it really does um pull apart a community not just physical infrastructure but also the social infrastructure that people are struggling with and I think um when people push that back I think that it’s important to recognize that this is not an individual problem like uh we have a societal level
Um kind of malfunction and in many cases the first stage of healing is recognizing what hurts you um we can’t start really functioning in healing until we see what the hurt is coming from you know you have to name the poison and I think that’s part of of
Where we start um that kind of conversation is this is naming the poison yeah abity and illness into C IDE yeah I mean I think it’s important uh I’ve been thinking about normativity a bit actually lately and if we look at at kind of the history of discourses around uh normativity one
Of the things we can recognize and I think it goes back to the the Kinsey studies in the in the 60s around sexuality is not very many of us are really normal in terms of uh and one useful starting point is to recognize there are relatively few like I think some bankers and
Lawyers maybe are feeling like this is a normal and good system but most of us are not feeling like we really fit like um the pressures that we Face uh I would say in this particular moment are fragmenting us as as as people like we’re pushed into all of these
Roles um we’re working jobs that uh in many cases we hate uh they’re not rejuvenating us a few people have jobs I’m part of my job I I feel like deeply loving um part yeah University Administration is um the the fracturing part uh but we can have
Uh to recognize that we are actually the many that the norm is not actually the norm is an ideal but it’s not a condition that actually most of us feel and that those deals are are [Laughter] falsehoods yeah you you thought about how we can avoid exploitation of indigen
Communities when it comes to of trying toal or bring back yeah it’s yeah so this is something that actually um I’ve been talking and thinking about like so I have a colleague who uh is working in Australia with indigenous communities there and we were talking last week and he used this
Uh metaphor of a truck so um and it’s it’s the metaphor that the community works with likes to use but that we they had a nice truck it was running well uh white people or settlers borrowed the truck and really beat it up and now it’s
Not working and we’re like in some cases I suggesting that maybe we’ll give you the keys back and and you can show us how to drive it correctly now that it’s broken um and that’s not really fair as an expectation although when I was talking and I I follow this up after that
Conversation um sharing the same conversation with with uh David actually David DT and and David was like yeah no this is like really real the trauma that we face but he was also we need to reconnect to the land because that’s the only way we’re going to heal and he’s
Like it’s totally unfair it’s totally unfair this burden but also you need to give us the keys because you’re not driving safely and so he was like kind of an apologetic that he’s like we need and we need this for our communi he’s like we’re dying and it’s not
Fair but at the same time we need to to recognize a role for indigenous people now the other thing that he said about that was um that there’s a question of redistribution so it’s not just oh we give you the keys but also we redistribute some of the
Resources that we’ve taken from you so that you can fix the truck um and I think it’s really important that we recognize that a lot of resources have been extracted without wealth redistribution and he’s not saying we need to have continued pipelines to have the wealth redistribution he’s like the resources
Have been taken there’s a debt part of the and the West Coast societies I work with and I think the societies here too are gifting societies and in a gift you need to reciprocate you’ve been you’ve taken um uh capitalism is really good at taking
Gifts not so good at giving back and I think it’s important to have that giving back and I think you raise a really important thing is like we’re not just giving you the authority to or obligation to fix it we also have to reciprocate what we’ve been been
Taking um and that’s part of of that process yeah I mention a little bit about role as a faculty messor yeah wonder youe that a little B teaching Florida yeah so uh I’ve definitely uh so this is a negotiation I I have split loyalties I
I’ll say so I grew up on what in territory and I always have a sense of obligation back home so one of the things that I’ve done in in my teaching is uh often I make sure always that we talk about colonialism in class um I think it’s important to
Include indigenous voices on the syllabus so that we’re hearing from that um often this is a a forgotten part of uh educ a in Florida um there in the Southeast there is often a kind of relegation of indigenous peoples to the Past um and I think it’s really an
Obligation to to reintroduce that I would say people are not aware um but there’s not the same active hostility in that regard um there’s an openness to learning and I feel partly like decolonial education has to engage these moments of ignorance um so that’s part
Of of my work and then um also at Florida State um I have um in the midst of of of this environment uh this is the first year shockingly um that we formed a Native American and Indigenous studies Center on campus um so institutionalizing and recognizing those forms of knowledge
That have been long for neglected um and this is work that we’re doing in the midst of what can be construed as a hostile climate um at the other side I am in Florida and I I recognize uh there’s also other struggles there that I have um ethical
Obligations to um so I’ve been working uh with historically black communities in Florida to try to document their issues I I’ve brought that into the classroom as well um I’m relative ly Unapologetic about the fact that we need to talk about these issues um I think that we have academic freedom and we
Need to exercise it and not um police ourselves to not speak about the pressing issues of our day um there h i I would be uh dishonest if I said there haven’t been pressures or repercussions um if uh you care to to Google um there’s an
Article in the uh on Pro public or or the Atlantic um that was about uh me and some other faculty and the struggles that we’ve faced um so I’ve also been open talking about that talking about um this but I would say some things have actually been really
Positive um in a strange way so one of the things that um they’ve sort of come after us to sort of say is like oh you’re indoctrinating students and I’ve been taking my classes to sort of take this as a challenge to sort of say well I’m not intending to
Indoctrinate I want people to engage these issues I believe in democracy I believe that if we’re going to ever come out of this we have to collectively engage so I’ve taken my classes and tried to invert them in in L so rather than me talking at people we do more
Discussion we read and uh literally have read some of these pipeline documents and sort of said well how would you analyze what the government is doing uh and it turns out counter to the kind of perspectives we might be hearing politically the vast majority of students I encounter are entirely
Capable of independent critical thought [Applause] [Laughter] was AAL for to discussion around changing the uh so there has discussion about changing the ways we represent um So currently the SE well in within the NCAA it’s uh you have to have Tribal support um the seminal tribe of Florida has given their um permission
But what we’re doing is changing um slowly some of of the surrounding things so for for instance uh and I think you guys have uh a beach site for your campus we have uh FSU also has one it was until two or three years ago called the res which is really
Unfortunate um that site has now been renamed um we have taken the scalp scalp scalpel part out of our chant again yeah it’s a there I forgot to um which I think are steps um and I think we’re there’s an ongoing discussion uh but it’s been
Really slow like we just this is the first year of existence of Native American indigenist studies um which like we got the approval of the Board of Governors for um we also got the Board of Governors to have their first meeting on seol territory which is when they
Were introduced the idea that we were going to create this um which was a very appropriate place um and they unanimously endorsed it in that context um so I think that we are really kind of working to make change um I think there are people that are aware of the issue um
But it’s not happening as fast as um but I mean this is by the same token like um on the opposite side like EPS uh who was the original land owner that Beque the university um a descendant of of Jefferson and a slave owner
Um it took a long time for us to get the camp the campus to remove his statue but we have and I think that like the lesson is is duel there is a lot of work to do but also uh there’s a lot of opportunity for
Us to make change and in spite of uh how dark things look one of the things about the future is it’s unknown and there’s potential in that for it to be different than what we know current stat and OPP of theow I can you uh I didn’t catch uh which
Project you were project is in Alaska okay I to be honest I don’t know okay yeah and all of that not all that have you noticed an undercurrent of like pretty strong creativity in the resistance and are there any intersections also with queerness that you’re seeing especially in
Florida yeah um so I’m going to take those as two and we’ll see kind they they weave but uh so one of the things that’s interesting to me I haven’t written about this but I think is really fascinating so gayway I um was the lead uh what so and plaintiff
In in the court case um G that court case began in in 84 um gayway before the court case was he’s a Carver or was a Carver he he passed a few years ago um gayway was part of creating the first First Nations controlled carving school and the first First Nations or
Indigenous controlled Museum in Canada uh in the 70s so the Rejuvenation of these traditional practices intimately tied um so from from the origins of of the kind of contemporary movement that we can trace cultural Resurgence a as in some cases preceding but along operating alongside um so it’s not one or the
Other but I think often the creativity is is core to these movements and is uh core or to being able to express these kind of connections and um speak to that resurgent element that often like gets lost in the politics of resistance it’s not just about resistance uh in terms of uh sexual
Politics uh so it has been um within the woin president so um there has traditionally um coming from uh residential schools in these histories been kind of deeply entrenched heteropatriarchy um but we see negotiations so for instance um they have women’s camps part of the cultural revitalization is
Um is working through the community and they had as part of cultural R revitalization set up women’s camps and men’s camps camps um the they have a couple years ago um switched to allowing um them to not be like defined by born but by uh by identification um so there’s kind of
Opening up these spaces to recognize um gender is more fluid um and so those conversations are are cutting through and a number of the kind of leading figures of of the resistance uh are um uh some of the the militants on the front lines uh The Defenders that are
Being arrested are queer people themselves but also um one of the uh people that’s being groomed and and will likely become a hereditary Chief uh in the next probably a year or so uh will be the first openly gay uh hereditary Chiefs so you’re starting to see within the traditional system this
Move um I’d also uh note on the opposite side in the tar Sands um the first of of the Nations to break with the tar Sands and to uh the tar Sands are connected to these rare uh cancers uh that Community the leader that actually was the first one the
Elected chief of that Community um was also the first elect openly gay elected Chief in in the country um so this leadership is often tied um in those connections in Florida um uh I mean we or in the the South like if you look at at the leadership of I mean this is
Shifting years to more struggles around race but uh stop cop City in Atlanta uh the leadership in in that movement has been largely queer um and it’s been a lot of trans activists have have played a really prominent role in um talking about police violence uh so uh you can
See that also there um in uh Tallahassee um uh Tac which is the um group there that’s been organizing around police violence uh has trans leadership as well um so increasingly we’re seeing in the these movements the people that are are connecting different forms of violence together have this at the center of
Their analysis okay I think’s probably exhausted from all these amazing questions standing in front of us for an hour and a half so let’s let’s thank