Q: Your people have been fighting pipelines for decades. Any advice? Glen Coulthard: My one concern and my one insistence is that this not be framed as simply an environmental issue but one of decolonization and framed through the lens of indigenous sovereignty. It’s too easy for environmentalists to play their ally card in a very instrumental way. A decolonial frame of analysis is needed, where you demonstrate how central indigenous peoples’ struggles are to blocking these types of reckless development projects and also the alternative cultural bases that can emerge in their wake. Reinstating indigenous social relations of authority and power over those territories that are being expropriated and devoured by extractivist industries and in relation to settler communities is crucial. That vision requires a form of solidarity that’s substantive and not instrumental. It requires a solidarity that’s organized around indigenous peoples’ relational understandings of land, autonomy, and sovereignty.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 20:29:31 +0000