Reoccupation and resurgence: indigenous protest camps in Canada

Abstract

In the face of ongoing Canadian colonialism and displacement, blockading has become an important tactic through which Indigenous communities reassert their traditional forms of place-based culture and governance. This chapter will examine three important reclamation sites in Canada over the past twenty five years, ranging from the spontaneous and relatively-short lived blockades of the Oka Crisis near the Kanesatake and Kahnawake Mohawk reserves in Quebec (1990), through the long-term Anishinaabe anti-clearcutting blockade at Grassy Narrows in northern Ontario (begun in 2002), to the growing and evolving anti-pipeline reclamation site in Unist’ot’en territory, in the British Columbia interior, which began in 2009. These three sites can reveal important lessons about Indigenous resurgence and the efficacy of protest camps as reoccupations of stolen land.

Book Review: Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance by Gavin Brown, Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy

“…The first strategy that stands out in the book is camping in the direct line of power. ‘When Indigenous communities take up visible presence on the land – especially presence that disrupts the mobility of the capitalist economy of the settler state – this disruption forces issues of Indigenous discontent and struggles for freedom into the settler Canadian public discourse’ (Barker and Ross, 2017: 207, see Chapter 12). The bare assembling of materiality, made from bodies, tents or barricades has blocked the construction of roads, golf courses and more recently fracking sites.…”

Toxic Encounters, Settler Logics of Elimination, and the Future of a Continent

“…The history of Grassy Narrows is exemplary of this point. Grassy Narrows is home to the longest standing roadblock in Canada that Toxic Encounters and Settler Logics of Elimination has been in place since 2002 (Barker and Ross 2017;Da Silva 2010;Wallace 2010). In 2011, the Nation won a decade-long court battle against the province of Ontario that ruled against logging on their treaty territory.…”