Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Human Rights, Political Process, Political Advocacy
ISBN: 9781447329411
Google: aaJEDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32201637
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2017-03-29T12:56:02+00:00

TWELVE

Reoccupation and resurgence: indigenous protest camps in Canada

Adam J Barker and Russell Myers Ross

Introduction: a history of blockades

Disruption results in consequences

remember Kanenhstaton Caledonia

remember Gustafen Lake

remember Ipperwash

remember Oka

rememeber Alcatraz and Eagle Bay

remember Wounded Knee

everyday is remembrance day

everyday

(excerpt from ‘Forever’ by Janet Rogers, 2015)

The history of the settler states of North America, Canada and the United States, can be told through stories of Indigenous peoples’ struggles to maintain their lands in the face of relentless colonial displacement and dispossession (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Daschuck, 2013; Harris, 2004). As settler states have relentlessly driven railways and roads through Indigenous homelands, while restricting Indigenous nations onto reserves, fractions of their former land-bases, direct actions to violate those colonial spaces can be a powerful act of resurgence for Indigenous peoples (Alfred, 2005; Simpson, 2011). In response, blockading has become an important tactic through which Indigenous communities reassert their traditional forms of place-based culture and governance. Blockades run the gamut from flashmob-style disruptions of urban intersections, highways and commercial spaces (Barker, 2015, 48–50) to what Dene political scientist Glen Coulthard calls the rarest form of blockade action: the ‘more-or-less permanent reoccupation of a portion of Native land through the establishment of a reclamation site’ (Coulthard, 2014, 166).

These reoccupations or reclamation sites may be comparatively rare forms of resistance, but they also represent some of the most important moments in Indigenous activism in North America. In the USA, the history of the American Indian movement and the resurgence of tribal sovereignty struggles in the 1960s and 1970s is inextricably wrapped around occupations: Alcatraz in 1969–71, the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, DC in 1972, and the town of Wounded Knee in 1973 (Deloria, 1985; Smith and Warrior, 1997). These occupations continue into the present, with the Winnimum Wintu, an ‘unrecognised’ tribe – meaning lacking official federal status – taking control of sacred river spaces in California (Fimrite, 2012), among many others.

Indigenous peoples in Canada are also a part of this history of anticolonial occupations. Canada is often falsely portrayed as a ‘peaceful’ nation, built on treaties rather than conquest (Regan, 2010), but the response of settler governments and communities to Indigenous activists tells a different story. In 1995, Ontario Provincial Police violently raided Ipperwash Provincial Park, which had been occupied by members of the Stoney Point Ojibway band as part of a decades-old long land claim. During the raid, police fatally shot protester Dudley George.1 This standoff overlapped with an occupation near Gustafsen Lake in British Columbia, between August and September of 1995. Indigenous protesters occupied a private ranch on unceded Shushwap territory and the Canadian government responded by laying siege with federal police (Lambertus, 2004). And both of these protest camps followed on the heels of the most well-known standoff featuring blockades and occupations in Canadian history: the ‘Oka Crisis’ of 1990.

This chapter examines three important reclamation sites, ranging from the spontaneous and relatively-short lived blockades of the Oka Crisis near the Kanesatake and Kahnawake Mohawk reserves in Québec, through the long-term Anishinaabe anti-clearcutting blockade at

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