Standing rock and the Indigenous commons

Abstract

A new cycle of communications commons has become part of the contemporary repertoire of Indigenous first nations in North America. The mobilization of the Standing Rock Sioux is perhaps the bestknown example of a continent-wide cycle of resistance in which Indigenous communities have employed a combination of collectively governed land-based encampments and sophisticated trans-media assemblages to challenge the further enclosure of their territories by the state and fossil fuel industries and instead represent their political and media sovereignty, and prefigure a more reciprocal relationship with other humans and with nature. Although their practices of commoning resemble other radical commons projects, the contemporary Indigenous commons begs for a reassessment of the critical framework of the commons. In this article, I discuss the critical commons literature and compare it with the practices of commoning in the antiextractivist encampments of Standing Rock.

Indigenous Philosophies and the "Psychedelic Renaissance"

“…Governmental jurisdiction over Indigenous lands has also led to numerous examples of colonial extraction—of hydroelectric energy, minerals, timber, and petrochemicals—that disregards Indigenous rights (Kidd 2020; Willow 2016). According to Willow (2016, 2), extraction is both a both a "political and environmental project" in that, "natural resources become vehicles for increasing personal wealth without regard for the potential cost to others."…”

Responsibilities to Decolonize Environmental Education: A Co-Learning Journey for Graduate Students and Instructors

“…[10] (p. 19) Table 1 gives an overview of the topics and sample materials we read, listened to and watched and examples of webinars we attended. Land-based pedagogies [6,13,21,32,33,38,41,53] Meshkanu: The Long Walk of Elizabeth Penashue [54] Introducing and disrupting the "perfect stranger" [55] The land owns us [56] Knowledge and cultural appropriation [57] All My Relations Ep #7 [58] Cultural Appropriation [59] Indigenous research and decolonizing methodologies [9,19,23,[60][61][62][63] Resilience, resurgence and revitalization [64][65][66][67] All My Relations-For the Love of the Mauna Pt 1 [68] and part 2 [69] There were four assignments for course participants taking the course for two credits: class participation; personal and community knowledge systems, which had three partspersonal knowledge system; community knowledge, which required course participants to have zoom conversations with 2-3 local people in their community to learn where the knowledge they use comes from, using the data from the conversations participants were to create a product (could take any form such as artwork, a poster, a video, or paper) to summarize what they learned from the community conversations and their personal knowledge system; a group project on facilitating a lesson on IKS of a particular place to an audience of their choice; media assignment, which required course participants to find a topic addressing the broader theme of "Indigenous Knowledge" in the media (e.g., magazines, newspapers, YouTube, internet stories, Podcasts, TV or movie clips, blogs), and analyze how the IK concept is discussed and consider whether this is consistent (or not) with class materials and discussions. Participants taking the course for three credits had an extra assignment that focused on creating an ethical protocol to conduct research in an Indigenous or local community.…”

Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance

“…(Harvey, 2005, p.159) Connected to AbD is the enclosure of the commons, which Karl Marx (1867Marx ( /1976, in Chapter 27 of his text Capital, defines as a process whereby the ownership/stewardship of commonly held resources (i.e., land) are violently transferred to the private ownership of the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, the ruling elite. This paper uses a revised conception of enclosure, which scholars such as Glen Coulthard (2014) and Dorothy Kidd (2020) extend from original Marxist references to European peasants, to phenomena wherein Indigenous peoples are colonially dispossessed of their commonly stewarded resources (in this case, lands and rivers). Such enclosure later opens space for capitalist modes of production and, consequently, the privatized ownership of resource wealth by elites.…”