In the way that we engage rather than disengage, we change what wants to appear unchangeable.
In August 2018, poet and scholar Rita Wong was sentenced to twenty-eight days in jail for blocking the gates to the Trans Mountain pipeline tank terminal in Burnaby, British Columbia. She did so in solidarity with Protect the Inlet, a movement led by the Coast Salish peoples who built Kwekwecnewtxw, a traditional Watch House, as part of their resurgence and resistance to settler colonialism.Footnote 2 More than 200 people were arrested that summer. In a statement that Wong released after her sentencing, she wrote:
I … intend to ask the court to respect Coast Salish laws that uphold our responsibilities to care for the land and waters that make life, liberty and peace possible for everyone … We can all learn from natural law and Coast Salish law that we have a reciprocal relationship with the land; and that we all have a responsibility to care for the land’s health, which is ultimately our health too.Footnote 3
Wong’s statement expresses her respect for Coast Salish law, recognizes relationships of interdependence and reciprocity within that law, and acknowledges learning her responsibility to care for the land from these legal principles. While it is not unusual for Indigenous peoples to cite their own laws within Canadian courts, Wong’s statement is notable for doing so because she is an (un)settler of Chinese descent. In other words, she is not Indigenous to the territories in question. Despite the consequences of doing so, people like Wong disrupt settler colonialism by engaging with Indigenous resurgence.Footnote 4 This process of engagement, and the collectivities that such engagements generate, comprise the subject of this chapter.
For my purposes, settler colonialism can be understood as the attempted elimination or enclosure of Indigenous lands and peoples plus the concomitant production of a new society through colonization and settlement.Footnote 5 Settler colonialism can also be characterized by “a predatory economy that is entirely at odds with the deep reciprocity that forms the cultural core of many Indigenous peoples’ relationships with land,”Footnote 6 such that capital accumulation is valued over supportive relations with each other and sustainable relationships with the earth. These predatory relations have brought settler colonial societies into the coconstitutive social and ecological crises that differentially affect individuals and groups within stratified liberal democracies.Footnote 7 As scholars argue, however, settler colonialism is “imperfect” – it is unfinished, or not fully “settled.”Footnote 8 As such, settler colonial states are always attempting to perfect their dominion over Indigenous lands and peoples.
In other words, settler colonial states attempt to enclose and foreclose Indigenous relationships to place and political authority.Footnote 9 Although Indigenous peoples continue to point out their relationships to place prior to settler presence, as Dian Million describes, “Still, the concrete is real, a metaphor that readily conveys the institutional essentializing of capitalist forms. It is meant to convey permanence when nothing is permanent, it’s all spirit, where there is only ever change.”Footnote 10 I understand “concretization” as the process through which settler colonialism attempts to perfect itself. Concretization instills a sense of permanence or inevitability – a sense in which the predatory and oppressive relations of settler colonialism are perceived as inevitable, unchangeable, and the only viable possibility – despite the ongoing presence of Indigenous nations and their legal, social, and political orders. Settler colonial concretization works by incentivizing subjects – Indigenous and otherwise – to understand themselves, the world, and their agency within it through the matrices of empire, capitalism, and colonialism.
As “subjects of empire” within settler colonial contexts, diverse Indigenous peoples come to identify with and understand themselves through asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition, and this understanding maintains the political and economic hierarchies of imperial power and colonial domination.Footnote 11 In contrast, Indigenous resurgence movements offer conceptual and practical resources to refuse imperial subject positions and hierarchies. Indigenous theorists, such as Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, have theorized Indigenous ways of understanding and living through the concept of “grounded normativity.”Footnote 12 Grounded normativities are deeply rooted in Indigenous relationships to land and forms of political community, and emphasize political responsibilities to place, people, and other-than-human beings. For those embedded within settler colonial concrete, however, grounded normativity can seem opaque or inaccessible because Indigenous peoples’ ontologies and epistemologies have been mystified, or even made to seem “mystical,” by Cartesian and Enlightenment-based epistemologies.Footnote 13 Yet people who are not embedded in grounded normativity, and who are not Indigenous to the place being protected, still engage with Indigenous resurgence despite the consequences of doing so – for example, those such as Wong, as a woman of Chinese descent, and other non-Coast Salish people who were arrested at Kwekwecnewtxw. Given the mystification of grounded normativity, how do people come to refuse the incentives of settler colonialism and take up a political practice that furthers Indigenous resurgence, instead of concretizing settler colonial hierarchies of domination?
In this chapter, I suggest that engaging with Indigenous resurgence can engender forms of political subjecthood and agency that complement grounded normativity, and in doing so disrupt the perception that settler colonialism has concretized. I characterize the collectivities generated through engagement with Indigenous resurgence as relational, practice-based, and animated by a place-based ethic of responsibility. In section one of this chapter, I provide an argument that begins with theories of Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativity. In section two, I offer three stories of engagement with Indigenous resurgence in which to ground my theoretical argument. These stories are drawn from my own experience, for which I am indebted to Kwakwaka’wakw, Secwépemc, and Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ places and peoples.Footnote 14 In section three, I discuss the stories through the concepts proposed in my theoretical argument. In my understanding, Indigenous resurgence movements disrupt the concretization of settler colonialism by embodying decolonial political relations that are drawn from grounded normativity. As a basis from which to engage with and relate to others, grounded normativity also offers opportunities to connect and collaborate with those who share ethical commitments and a political project. The stories in section two offer examples of such cooperative work, and I deploy political theorist Jakeet Singh’s work on the “politics of recognition and self-determination from below” to understand how engagement can complement grounded normativity. Because both grounded normativity and politics from below are premised upon principles of mutual recognition and interdependent self-determination, their conjunction can precipitate ways of understanding oneself and acting in the world that are implicated within and informed by resurgent Indigenous nations’ relationships to place, political responsibilities, and practices of reciprocity. To paraphrase Wong, all those who live within Indigenous territories have the potential to learn from natural and Indigenous laws.Footnote 15 The relational and practice-based collectivities that do so, I conclude, also disrupt settler colonial concretization because they constitute a network of democratic movements – ones that recognize Indigenous forms of political authority that settler colonialism attempts to eliminate and foreclose.
Theory
The events in the stories I provide are contingent upon Indigenous resurgence, which makes it both a necessary and pragmatic starting point. While by no means homogenous, the Indigenous resurgence literature suggests that for Indigenous peoples, the pathway to a sustainable and ethical future lies in reconnecting to traditional practices while being open to and adapting to modern technologies. As Gina Starblanket notes:
The term “resurgence” implies a process of renewal or awakening from a period of dormancy. In Indigenous contexts, it also carries a particular cultural and political connotation, referring to a form of mobilization and action that is grounded in the revitalization of our traditional ways. Practices of resurgence emerge from a worldview that acknowledges a living relationship between past, present, and future, and makes possible the imagination of strategies of cultural renewal based on the interplay of pre-colonial pasts and decolonial futures.Footnote 16
As a form of mobilization, action, and practice, Indigenous resurgence movements reactivate the ethical and political commitments within Indigenous social, political, legal, and spiritual orders. These commitments can be understood as legal and political responsibilities, which flow from the historical and ongoing relationships that an Indigenous nation has with place, people, and other-than-human beings. While not being exempt from internal power dynamics,Footnote 17 Indigenous resurgence can be understood as a prefigurative political project, which imagines alternatives to settler colonialism’s hierarchies of domination.
While Indigenous resurgence can be understood as a prefigurative political project, the frame of reference and means through which Indigenous ethico-political commitments are activated and embodied can be understood as “grounded normativity.” As Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains, grounded normativities are the “intelligence systems that hold the potential, the theory as practice, for making ethical, sustainable, Indigenous worlds.”Footnote 18 Grounded normativity sets out the place-based and nation-specific responsibilities that are drawn out from Indigenous forms of organization and relations with the world; upholding these responsibilities enables Indigenous peoples to live in good relationships with each other, the land, the waters, and other-than-human beings.Footnote 19 As the base of Indigenous political systems, economies, and nationhood, grounded normativities also create “process-centered modes of living that generate profoundly different conceptualizations of nationhood and governmentality” from nation to nation.Footnote 20 As a concept within Indigenous political theory, grounded normativity therefore offers resources for understanding how the ethical commitments of Indigenous legal and governance orders provide a foundation from which to critique “the imperatives of colonial sovereignty and capitalist accumulation.”Footnote 21 In practice, grounded normativities provide a perspective or frame of reference from which to understand oneself and the world, and embodied techniques through which to express political agency against and instead of how settler colonialism interpellates and incentives. As Simpson and Coulthard describe, “Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner.”Footnote 22 Grounded normativities are how Indigenous resurgence movements embody the decolonial relations that they envision.
As argued, Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativity provide forms of political subjecthood and agency that significantly differ from those offered by empire, capitalism, and settler colonialism. However, it is worth taking a step back to ask what precipitates an understanding of one’s practices as expressions of political agency within the context of collective movements against oppressive structures. Legal scholars Val Napoleon and Hadley Friedland ask a similar question: how can people in marginalized subject positions, and those who work with them, view their everyday practices as “practices of citizenship” within anti-imperial and decolonizing movements – in light of the sense of powerlessness often felt by such subjects?Footnote 23 Their theoretical work is instructive for other contexts in which a sense of powerlessness is inculcated, such as I posited for settler colonialism earlier. Settler colonial society can be understood as one such context because political possibilities are constrained by the concretization of unjust relations of domination; settler colonialism encloses subjecthood and agency, forecloses alternatives, and institutionalizes a sense of permanence or inevitability. Napoleon and Friedland suggest that the shift in perspective from powerlessness within one frame of reference to political agency within another involves three factors: the recognition that one has the “freedom to act otherwise,” even within limits; the development of “a broader frame of meaning” through which to understand one’s actions; and the connection of one’s actions to a larger political project. To build on their work, in the context of settler colonialism individuals must see themselves as more than “subjects of empire.” Rather, subjects must understand themselves and their actions through more liberatory frames of reference, such as those offered within the grounded normativities of Indigenous nations. Then, connecting to a collective, political project such as Indigenous resurgence allows for new possibilities and cooperation between those who are engaged in practices of freedom or practices that resist domination and oppression.
Thus far, I have built upon political theorists, primarily Indigenous, to suggest that grounded normativity and Indigenous resurgence offer anti- and decolonial forms of subjecthood and agency for Indigenous peoples. In doing so, they subvert the logics of settler colonialism and disrupt its concretization. While somewhat abstract up to this point, I will ground this theory in sections two and three. In my introduction, however, I pose a question: how do people who are not Indigenous to a place in question come to refuse the incentives of settler colonialism and disrupt its concretization by taking up a political praxis that complements Indigenous resurgence?Footnote 24 An initial reason to ask this question is because Indigenous resurgence is often conceptualized as a turn inward, away from the settler colonial state – and perhaps society, too. Further, as described earlier, the resurgence literature shows that grounded normativity is place-based and nation-specific: it is embedded in relationships to the lands and waters, stories, songs, dances, ceremonies, subsistence practices, and other such learned perspectives and embodied techniques.Footnote 25 Grounded normativities can therefore be inaccessible to those who are not embedded within them – not because they are inherently opaque or mystical, but because settler colonialism attempts to erase or capture them within imperial, capitalist, and liberal frames of reference.Footnote 26 However, grounded normativities must be able to be engaged with and learned, even if incrementally. I say this for one, because members of diverse Indigenous nations return to grounded normativity despite the displacements and disconnections of settler colonialism. Further, Indigenous scholars turn outward and explain their own nation’s grounded normativities as a basis from which to engage with others.Footnote 27 The act of turning outward is key here, because I suggest that it creates the opportunity for those who are not Indigenous to a place in question to engage with and learn from Indigenous resurgence within a shared, collective political project.
As Simpson and Coulthard describe, “grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests.”Footnote 28 On a more intimate scale than the nation, Simpson conceptualizes networks of consensual and reciprocal relationships through the constellation as drawn from her own nation’s grounded normativity. Speaking to the opacity previously mentioned, like the land itself constellations are “visible to everyone all night” but “unreadable theory and imagery to the colonizer or those who aren’t embedded in grounded normativity.”Footnote 29 For Simpson constellations are entry points that function in relationship with others, and thus also offer lessons on connection and cooperation: “Constellations in relationship with other constellations form flight paths out of settler colonialism into Indigeneity. They become doorways out of the enclosure of settler colonialism and into Indigenous worlds. They can be small collectives of like-minded people working and living together, amplifying the renewal of Indigenous place-based practices.”Footnote 30 In the stories that follow, I talk about engagements with Indigenous resurgence as examples of such collectives that support the renewal of Indigenous place-based practices. The point that I aim to develop further is the process through which Indigenous resurgence movements open doorways for others to see and step through – not into an absence, nothingness, or lawlessness, but into generative relations that engender forms of subjecthood and agency that complement grounded normativity.Footnote 31 Grounded normativity offers ways to relate that refuse the concrete enclosures of settler colonialism, with an emphasis upon practice and collaboration from the ground up.
With an eye toward those who are engaging with grounded normativity instead of those fully embedded within it, I suggest that Singh’s “politics of recognition and self-determination from below” can be used as a complementary approach. Singh contrasts politics from below against top-down or statist projects, emphasizing politics from below as a form of “building or practicing alternative cultures of politics from the ground up.” These alternative politics tend to be “articulated in the relatively provisional voice of a much less dominant social actor who is participating in an ongoing social struggle and critical dialogue with many other (differently situated) social actors.”Footnote 32 As I understand it, this aptly describes the situation of Indigenous nations and others within stratified settler societies, sharing in struggles against imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. The politics of recognition from below requires mutual rather than unidirectional recognition between subjects as relational actors sharing in struggle,Footnote 33 wherein power is understood as cooperative or interactive instead of coercive; coupled to power, freedom can be understood as a form of “situated agency” within power relations.Footnote 34 In my reading, this “situated agency” resembles the principles of relationality and reciprocity that often animate Indigenous resurgence movements. Within these movements, grounded normativities propose a dynamic of recognition that is premised upon seeing oneself as situated in relation to and interdependent with others (including place and nonhuman others) – instead of through the hierarchical politics of recognition offered by the settler state and society – which affects one’s expressions of political agency and instills the responsibility to sustain one another through practices of reciprocity. The politics of recognition and self-determination from below and grounded normativity complement each other in their shared emphasis upon practicing alternatives from the ground up, mutual recognition, and situated or relational agency expressed in pursuit of freedom, which is a mutual benefit.
To summarize my theoretical contribution, I propose that we understand engagements with Indigenous resurgence that occur through a politics from below as generating collectivities that are relational, practice-based, and animated by a place-based ethic of responsibility. As Singh describes, politics from below are “a kind of ethico-political practice” to bring about “alternative ethico-political goods,” instead of “a particular institutional telos” within imperial relations.Footnote 35 In the context of settler colonialism, those “alternative ethico-political goods” include a more just and sustainable relationship with Indigenous peoples, the earth, and each other more broadly. As Wong alludes to in her statement upon sentencing, these ways to relate are premised upon principles of interdependence, responsibility, and reciprocity learned from resurgent Indigenous nations. Others are drawn into relational and practice-based collectivities through ethical, cooperative work alongside Indigenous resurgence movements. Relational and practice-based collectivities animated by a place-based ethic of responsibility have implications within settler colonial contexts: they offer alternatives to settler colonial relations of domination, in the form of collective cooperation and collaboration with diverse Indigenous nations grounded in their own normativities. By enacting these alternatives, relational and practice-based collectivities generated through engagement with Indigenous resurgence disrupt the concretization of settler colonialism. In the next two sections, I turn to movements and engagements to illustrate this process.
Stories
In this section, I narrate three stories of engagement with Indigenous resurgence movements. I aim to ground my theory of relational and practice-based collectivities, animated by a place-based ethic of responsibility, within the movements and places that the theory is drawn from. I relate these stories from my own experience, as a white, cis, able-bodied settler of Ukrainian–British descent, who grew up in Treaty 6 territory south of Amiskwaciwâskahikan/ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Edmonton). I moved to Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ territories in August 2017, after which I began to physically engage with Indigenous resurgence movements. I offer these stories from my own perspective because the engagements taught me, and others working alongside me, to see beyond the concrete that calcifies our current, unsustainable social and ecological situation.
My methodological approach is informed by Paulo Freire’s conceptualization of praxis. For Freire, praxis requires the identification of a problem, action to address that problem, and reflection, which informs further action.Footnote 36 As such, theorizing, acting, and reflecting are coconstitutive elements of any attempt to transform conditions of oppression. In each story presented here, settler colonialism in a range of forms, including the predatory relations identified earlier, can be acknowledged and understood as the problem. This problem spurred me and others to act alongside Indigenous resurgence, and against settler colonialism. For me, writing this chapter is a form of reflection – one form of dialogue alongside other, ongoing conversations. The engagements in the stories herein were not perfect, in part because of my own situated whiteness, but they have also been place-based, generative processes of relationship building, learning responsibilities, and practicing reciprocity. As moments of engagement with Indigenous resurgence through politics from below, I consider them through the framework of “flows, rivers, kinships, [and] knowledges that do not create enclosure, but that create relations, help, support, other ways of thinking and moving concrete.”Footnote 37
Story 1
It is February, and the dusting of snow on the trees that line the narrow highway glows gold in the sun. Two friends and I are on our way to Port McNeill, on the northeast side of Vancouver Island. From there, we will take a ferry to Yalis/Alert Bay, and then a smaller boat to a place called Swanson Island. We are there in answer to a call for supporters put out by hereditary Chief Ernest Alfred of the ‘Namgis nation, who has been (re)occupying a cabin built by the Norwegian corporation Marine Harvest Seafood (now called Mowi) since September 9, 2017. The cabin, seemingly abandoned along with three others, sits across a small bay from an open-water net pen fish farm. When we arrive off the dock in Alert Bay, we are met by an organizer of the group Maya’xala Xan’s Awinakola, which translates (if insufficiently) to “respect our land, sea, and sky,” because we are part of and depend upon them. The sign-up form on the Maya’xala xan’s Awinakola group’s website states “You will be provided with Protocol from the ‘Namgis and Mamalilikala Tribes. You will be expected to maya’xala – respect and follow and adhere to the ground rules of being at the farm.”
We are told to expect a quiet week because the fish farm is currently empty, and are given instructions on what to monitor, how to order food supplies, and what amenities the cabin offers. There is a wood-burning stove to heat the cabin, internet if we turn the generator on at night, and a composting toilet. In addition to monitoring activity on the fish farm, we are welcome to do small improvement projects around the site. I hammer thin strips of wood across the slippery boards up to the composting toilet, one friend patches rotting slats in the walkway, while another builds a wooden frame for the camp stove inside. The mornings begin with a quick and icy splash from the rain barrel, while days are filled by reading and eagle-watching interspersed with walks. Once darkness falls, we stoke the fire, drink tea, eat chocolate, and play cards. We sleep on the floor next to the stove.
Our time on Swanson Island brings a strange mix of feelings. It is often idyllic, alternatively anger- and sadness-inducing, and sometimes exciting. The first evening there, we witness a stunning orange, purple, and deep blue sunset. As the light fades from the sky, the array of pens and floating docks across the bay is hidden within the black silhouette of the land that marks the water’s edge. The waters off Swanson Island, like others within the Broughton Archipelago Marine Conservation Area, are host to open-net pen fish farms. The pens are regularly filled with imported Atlantic salmon smolts who spend about two years growing before being collected, canned, and shipped to other countries. While the salmon are in the pens the fish farmers feed them food pellets which, along with their feces, can pass through the nets to litter the seabed. Similarly, small fish can pass through the nets and juvenile wild salmon can get trapped within them. The net-pens are breeding grounds for sea lice, which pass through and pass on piscine ortho-reovirus, a disease that reduces wild salmon’s musculature and thus their ability to move quickly, catch prey, and travel upstream to their spawning grounds.
The lands and waterways that belong to the wild salmon also comprise the territories of several nations within the Kwakwaka’wakw, those who speak Kwak’wala. At least five of the local nations – the ‘Namgis, Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw, Mamalilikala, Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, and Gwawaenuk – have been united in their opposition to fish farms for more than thirty years.Footnote 38 Elected and traditional leaders issued multiple eviction notices to the fish farms in 2001, 2003, and in August and December of 2017. These eviction notices have also been delivered through oral tradition, such as by Ma’amtagila matriarch Tsastilqualus Umbas in 2019. Swanson Occupation, in addition to occupations and camps near other fish farm sites, is part of the local nations’ movement to re-establish presence and assert jurisdiction over the lands and waters that they have never ceded or signed treaties to share. In the December 2017 eviction notice, Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw identify open-water pens as “a serious risk to our wild salmon, environment, culture, and way of life.”Footnote 39
By coming to Swanson Occupation, my friends and I give Chief Ernest a period of respite with his relatives in town. While there, we watch the fish farm through binoculars and a telescope, listen to a squawking CB radio, and record the names of the boats that come and go and how many people arrive and leave with them. One day a large boat comes, with a long blue tube that we learn is sucking dead fish from within the net. Next comes a barge loaded with nets and white bags, which we are told is probably feed. Contrary to the expectations of the local nations, the Swanson Island fish farm is being prepped to host another shipload of Atlantic salmon smolts. The smolts will be propelled into the pens through a tube like the one that sucked the dead fish up. My friends and I return to the city at the end of our six days, where we begin to learn more about the fish farm industry and Kwakwaka’wakw resistance. Over the next few months we organize a phone bank, which leads to us becoming engaged with a community of others acting in support of Kwakwaka’wakw resistance and resurgence.
Story 2
In August 2018, I helped to organize a bus trip that departed from the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ territories of Victoria, BC, took a ferry across the Salish Sea, made several stops in Vancouver, and traveled to Secwépemcul’ecw – the territories of the Secwépemc nation, which lie on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountain Range. The bus trip, which had more than twenty people of Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage on it, began with an invitation extended by the Tiny House Warriors (THW). The THW are a movement, largely made up of Secwépemc women and families, which intends to place ten tiny houses in the path of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX).Footnote 40 The expansion would not only increase the flow of oil through Secwépemcul’ecw, but also bring transient workers for construction and the industrial “man camps” associated with large-scale oil and gas infrastructure.
On the bus trip, our destination was meant to be the THW village at Blue River, then the highest point on the “Canadian” side of the Rocky Mountains: Mount Robson Provincial Park, where Mount Robson overlooks the visitor center.Footnote 41 We were going there for an event called “Our Water Gives Life: WUCWMILCETKWE.” Before reaching Blue River or Mount Robson, however, our journey was beset with difficulties. First, some people’s gear was stolen from the bus in the wee hours of the morning that we were leaving. Then, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) met us in the Vancouver parking lot where we had arranged to pick passengers up, indicating that they were aware of our route and surveilling our movements. Once on our way, the community action bus – a blue school bus converted to biofuel – chugged up the hills of the Coquihalla highway before overheating in the hot August weather. We pulled over once, then again, near the apex of a hill inundated with smoke and a forest fire visible on the far side of the neighboring mountain. While we debated what to do, someone smudged the bus with sage. We opted to continue on, and were pleasantly shocked to see the bus levels stabilize enough to coast into Kamloops that night. Now in Secwépemc lands under the jurisdiction of the women traveling on the bus with us, we cooked dinner and changed to a mini-bus organized by the THW. Late that night, the mini-bus delivered us to a Mount Robson campground where we (re)claimed a group campsite and set up tents for a few hours of sleep.
The next day, the hot afternoon brought another form of heat: the RCMP’s Aboriginal police liaisons, who pressured us to leave despite Secwépemc people asserting their right to be on their territory, threatening us with forcible removal and arrest. Then the THW pulled a tiny house onto the visitor center lawn, and we joined them there. The afternoon featured drumming and singing by the Secwépemc and others, music and dancing on the service road, and speakers from Kwekwecnewtxw/Protect the Inlet and other Indigenous land defenders from further afield. We shared barbequed wild salmon that our bus picked up from a reserve downriver, alongside bannock, potatoes, corn on the cob, and a grain salad. When the gathering concluded we camped near the visitor center, and the next morning we ate breakfast, listened to stories, and then moved with the tiny house to blockade a small bridge over the Fraser River. There, within a stone’s throw of a TMX pumping station and with the green water rushing over the rocks below, an elder offered a prayer. While sage burned in an abalone shell on one of the concrete barriers, we tied red ribbons to the bridge in honor of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people up- and downriver. Secwépemc/Ktunaxa woman warrior, birth keeper, and traditional tattoo artist Kanahus Manuel spoke of fulfilling her responsibilities to the river rushing below, the berry bushes fed by it, and to her own nation, but also to those who are connected to the Secwépemc through the river and the infrastructure of TMX. Some of the wild salmon who swim through Kwakwaka’wakw territories migrate as far as Rearguard Falls, a mere ten minute drive away from the Mount Robson visitor center. On our journey back to the Salish Sea, we stop to visit the THW village at Blue River and are shown where to gather and eat some wild blueberries. The newly serviced community action bus is filled with singing as we descend toward the coast and the places we reside. This is not an ending, however: the THW continue their work in Blue River, while others go on to blockade tank terminals at Kwekwecnewtxw, resist RCMP invasion at Gidumt’en, (re)occupy the BC Legislature, and build tiny homes and Little Big Houses for the people and places we relate to.
Story 3
As an early fall morning sleepily dawns some months later, I arrive on the University of Victoria campus with coffee in hand. In the green space next to the Students’ Union Building, I take out my keys to unlock the tall, blue, padlocked construction fencing. After I swing open one fence panel to create a gap, I set up an awning, tables, lawn chairs, signage, and tee-shirts that read “water is life” and “protect the sacred.” Further inside sits a flatbed trailer with its wheels taken off, leveled on wooden blocks atop a small hillock. On the trailer, a structure is taking shape. The morning sun filters through misty clouds, illuminating the dewdrops that line the grass and piles of tarp-covered tools and lumber. As I work on one side, Catherine pulls her truck up and unlocks another, smaller gap. Catherine is a builder who began building tiny houses as a volunteer with the THW in Neskonlith, and who now lends her time, knowledge, and experience to building projects organized within Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. On the first morning that we met here, W̱SÁNEĆ/ Sḵx̱wu7mesh plant and language revitalist Tiffany Joseph had welcomed volunteers and shared teachings about the place, the land, and her people, including her family’s long-running relationships with members of other Indigenous nations.
Standing in the cool morning air, Catherine and I sip our coffee together. We chat about how many build volunteers have signed up for that day, what tasks they will work on, what’s for lunch, and if there’s a workshop happening that evening or not. As volunteers start to arrive, the sounds of conversation and construction begin to fill the air. This particular moment is easy for me to evoke from my memories of October 2018 and September 2019. In those times, UVic students and community members (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) came together to provide material infrastructure for Indigenous resurgence movements: first for the THW resisting TMX by returning to their lands, and then for the Ma’amtagila (Kwakwaka’wakw) nation fighting against fish farms and deforestation. The first was one of three tiny houses sent to the THW, while the second was a “Little Big House” for matriarch Tsastilqualus and her kin to move home to Hiladi, “the place to make things right.” At Hiladi the Matriarch Camp will rematriate the land and rebuild their nation, like the THW are doing across the Salish Sea and upriver. As the summer arrives they are collecting seeds, starter plants, and tools to support their move home.
Discussion
I offer these stories as examples of engagement with Indigenous resurgence movements. They can be understood as examples in which grounded normativity and politics from below function complementarily to generate relational and practice-based collectivities comprised of those who are Indigenous to a place in question and those who may not be. These collectivities are animated by a place-based ethic of accountability, learned from principles of relationship, interdependence, and reciprocity present within the grounded normativities under discussion. As Million cautions, however, “These are familiar words now, relations, reciprocity, resurgence – but it is also our responsibility to look closely at what we practice to bring these closer into living.”Footnote 42 In this section, I reflect upon the stories of engagement through the concepts developed earlier. To keep the discussion manageable, I focus on three questions: How do the movements in question enact their grounded normativities within political projects of resurgence to create opportunities for cooperation and collaboration? How does the process through which others engage with these movements represent a politics of recognition and self-determination from below? And how does a place-based ethic of responsibility manifest within and through these engagements?Footnote 43 Relational and practice-based collectivities, I argue, constitute networks that are informed by and implicated within Indigenous resurgence. These networks disrupt the concretization of settler colonialism by embodying alternative relations.
A brief consideration of settler colonialism’s concretization helps to provide context for what follows. As discussed in my introduction, the enclosures and foreclosures of empire, colonialism, and capitalism can be understood as logics and techniques of concretization. For example, the histories that shaped Kwakwaka’awkw, Secwépemc, Lkwungen, and W̱SÁNEĆ contexts include the enclosure of Indigenous children within residential schools and Indigenous nations within reserves. Although contested by the Indigenous peoples they attempt to contain throughout history and into today, these enclosures limit the mobility of Indigenous peoples while opening up their lands and waters for settler colonial infrastructure such as fish farms, pipelines, cities, and university campuses. In doing so, they also attempt to foreclose the possibility of Indigenous political authority, law, and governance. Disconnected or restricted from land use, life ways, and livelihoods,Footnote 44 the Indigenous peoples of these places have been subjected to predatory and oppressive systems: as wage workers in canneries or fish farms, subjects of environmental racism and gender-based sexual violence in communities near industrial projects, and consumers within colonial and capitalist structures that occupy stolen lands, such as universities. Within these sites, those who are embedded within settler colonialism populate and reproduce settler colonial structures, logics, and norms. Concretization occurs when people do so as if there is no other choice – thinking and acting as if settler colonialism is permanent or inevitable.
Despite settler colonialism’s attempt to concretize, diverse Indigenous nations have dynamic legal and governance orders that persist and manifest within Indigenous resurgence movements. Practices of resurgence are not in idealized, precontact forms; they are drawn from grounded normativities, based in tradition but adapted to modern exigencies. Examples include the Watch House at the tank terminal in Coast Salish territories, Secwépemc using tiny homes on trailers to rebuild villages because their “land is home,” or members of Kwakwaka’wakw nations delivering written and oral eviction notices to fish farms by canoe and speedboat, while wearing once-forbidden regalia. These are members within Indigenous nations exercising sovereignty.Footnote 45 As the THW say, “We are committed to upholding our collective and spiritual responsibility and jurisdiction to look after the land, the language and the culture of our people.” This responsibility may arise from the legal principle of Qwenqwent, or humility and human dependence upon the land, which is expressed within Secwépemc language and stories.Footnote 46 Or, as one of the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw eviction notices reads, “We are here because we feel it is necessary, in order to preserve and protect these lands and waters that have been the home of our people for thousands of years. It is our right and responsibility to be here.” As Sarah Hunt contends, Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw boarding fish farms were not performing civil disobedience, and I would add that nor were the ‘Namgis, and Ma’amtagila alongside them.Footnote 47 Rather, they were enacting their responsibilities to wild salmon, to each other, and to the land and waters in accordance with their laws.Footnote 48 This can be understood through the framework of maya’xala xan’s awinakola, which approximately translates to respect our land, sea, and sky, which includes the living beings within these realms. By being on the lands and waters to protect their homelands from colonial and capitalist harm, Secwépemc and Kwakwaka’wakw people represent Indigenous resurgence movements embedded within their respective grounded normativities, upholding their ethical commitments and political responsibilities to place, other-than-humans, and each other.
In taking up their political responsibilities, Secwépemc and Kwakwaka’wakw resurgence movements have also turned outward, inviting others to work alongside and share in their political projects. As the Maya’xala Xans Awinakola website explains, visitors to Swanson Island would be provided with protocol and expected to maya’xala – respect, adhere to, and follow the ground rules of being there. The THW “Our Land is Home” project states “The Tiny House Warriors are building something beautiful that models hope, possibility and solutions to the world. We invite anyone and everyone to join us.”Footnote 49 Further, the trip to Secwépemcul’ecw only came about because of the THW’s invitation to “Our Water Gives Life: WUCWMILCETKWE”:
We are inviting you to join us on this beautiful day to acknowledge and give thanks to the headwaters of the Fraser River, that form in Secwépemc Territory … We ask you to gather with us on this day for this family-friendly event of music, sharing food and witnessing the lands and water at risk at the Sacred Headwaters.Footnote 50
By identifying ways to relate to others and to place, these invitations reflect the legal principles, ethical commitments, and political responsibilities contained within their respective nations’ grounded normativities. To recall Simpson’s constellation metaphor, I understand these invitations as Indigenous nations embedded in grounded normativity opening a doorway and inviting others to approach and step through it. When people do so, it creates an opportunity for collective, ethical, cooperative work based on mutual recognition and self-determination – a politics from below.
To reiterate one aspect of my theoretical argument, I suggest that a praxis based on mutual recognition and self-determination from the bottom-up, where a politics from below complements grounded normativity, has the potential to shift the frame of reference through which participants understand their political subjecthood and agency. In other words, those engaged in relational and practice-based collectivities are not necessarily embedded within grounded normativity – though their political subjecthood and agency can be implicated within and informed by grounded normativity to amplify what Simpson refers to as “the renewal of Indigenous place-based practices” – or Indigenous resurgence. Namely, upon entering into relationship with Indigenous places and people through a dynamic of mutual recognition, those who were not Indigenous to the place in question must recognize the ongoing sovereignty and jurisdiction of Kwakwaka’wakw and Secwépemc people. Pursuant to this, and because this dynamic of recognition is reciprocal, those who are engaging with Indigenous resurgence are recognized in turn by members of Indigenous nations who are grounded in their own governance and laws. This recognition interpellates those who are not Indigenous to the place in question not as “Indigenous” in any sense of the term nor as members of Indigenous nations, but as relational actors situated within the web of relationships that inhabit and include that place. Expressions of political agency, or practices of self-determination, are conditioned by this recognition and the relationships that follow; in other words, mutual recognition from below informs political conduct or praxis. Put simply, those who recognize Indigenous nationhood must act as such – these relationships shape behavior. For example, fish farm occupiers practice maya’xala through the protocols provided, and bus trip participants listen to and follow the lead of Secwépemc people while present within Secwépemcul’ecw.Footnote 51 Taking up a political praxis through a politics from below, engaged with Indigenous resurgence, means learning from Indigenous ways of understanding and relating to place, other people, and other-than-human beings.
From this learning, a place-based ethic of responsibility extends outward from Indigenous grounded normativities to others relating to that place. In other words, those who are not Indigenous to a place in question come to see their own responsibilities within and to place. As discussed, Kwakwaka’wakw and Secwépemc resurgence movements draw their political practices from place-based grounded normativities, which contain principles of responsibility, interdependence, and reciprocity. In the stories presented here, I and those with me on Swanson Island and within Secwépemcul’ecw bore witness to these principles in practice. To illustrate this, I will draw upon my own experience, as someone who was raised in “oil country” and who now lives on Coast Salish lands. After spending time on Swanson Island to protect the salmon, I learned about how wild salmon travel throughout coastal waters and into the interior, as a keystone species that feeds other animals and the forests, in addition to Indigenous nations. For example, as the invitation to “Our Water Gives Life: WUCWMILCETKWE” describes, “This area is Sacred to Secwépemc and have [sic] nourished thousands of years of Secwépemc and all Indigenous Peoples and Nations downstream that depend on the Fraser River.” At the headwaters of the Fraser River in the interior we heard Kanahus Manuel speak upon her responsibility to others connected by the water – not only the wild salmon and those who depend upon them, but also women, girls, and two-spirit people endangered in both directions along the pipeline crossing Secwépemcul’ecw, toward the Alberta tar sands in one direction, with the tank terminal in Burnaby and the supertankers traversing the coastline of Vancouver Island in the other. From a perspective drawn from place, the interdependencies across these places – and the ways in which settler colonial infrastructures attempt to disconnect and sever them – become much more visible, as does one’s own implication within them. From this shift in perspective and recognition of interdependence, as learned from Indigenous grounded normativities, flows a place-based ethic of responsibility. This ethic, in turn, can engender a political praxis of reciprocity that creates further opportunities for collaborative work in solidarity with Indigenous resurgence.
Having developed a place-based ethic of responsibility, those who have engaged are motivated to give back to the Indigenous peoples and places they relate to and learn from. To see how a place-based ethic of responsibility can engender a reciprocal praxis, we can most easily look to the Tiny House and Little Big House builds.Footnote 52 These build projects were made possible by engagements with Kwawkwaka’wakw and Secwépemc people embodying the grounded normativities of their nations within their own territories. Given where the builds took place and to recognize Indigenous political authority, it is important to recognize that some of these engagements were between W̱SÁNEĆ and Secwépemc people, or W̱SÁNEĆ and Ma’amtagila people. For example, at the first build on campus, Tiffany Joseph spoke of her family’s connection to the Secwépemc/Ktunaxa Manuel family through several generations; at the second, Tiffany and Ma’amtagila matriarch Tsastilqualus each spoke of their mutual love and respect. In addition, the builds arose from prior engagements and collaborations between those who are Indigenous to the place(s) in question and others who are not. For instance, the builder involved went to Secwpemcul’ecw to build Tiny Houses and brought this knowledge back to the island, and there was a Tiny House built by community members on W̱SÁNEĆ territories a year or so before the campus build took place.Footnote 53 The two build projects I speak of were entirely volunteer-run. This included organizing meetings, fundraising, physically building the houses, holding art and screen-printing workshops, hosting panels and talks, and feeding volunteers throughout. Many volunteers participated in multiple builds, transmitting knowledge, learning new skills, and building relationships. As sites of engagement that provide material support for Indigenous resurgence, the build sites provide opportunities for collective, cooperative work – those who take this work up constitute what I have termed relational and practice-based collectivities. That collaborative work is geared toward amplifying the land-based practices of Indigenous resurgence – those who protect the territories that sustain all of us, and whose invitations into that work make our own interdependence and responsibilities visible. In giving back to Indigenous people protecting the land, we give back to the lands and waters that sustain us. Understood from within a place-based ethic of responsibility, the Tiny House and the Little Big House are material embodiments of reciprocity in practice.
The engagements that I discuss, including the builds, would not have been possible without the Indigenous resurgence movements at the center of them. Through these movements and the networks extending out from them, people learn ways to relate that are drawn from Indigenous normativities; the relational and practice-based collectivities generated through these processes will help sustain Indigenous resistance and resurgence. I feel compelled, however, to address an issue that I see as both a limitation and a possibility within my experience and this discussion. The stories that I share and reflect upon primarily center upon Secwépemc and Kwakwaka’wakw resurgence and grounded normativities. However, it is the Lkwungen and WSÁNEĆ peoples who have legal and governance orders that respect the land, water, and wild salmon here and now, where the builds took place and where I write this chapter from. In the stories, however, I have provided little evidence of engagement with the ways that Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativities are embodied and practiced by members of Lkwungen or WSÁNEĆ nations. They too have distinct ways of relating and upholding responsibilities to place, to the water of the Salish Sea and up rivers like the Goldstream, where wild salmon still return to spawn.Footnote 54 While my own focus in this chapter doesn’t preclude those who were involved from having prior, deeper engagements with the Indigenous peoples of these lands, it does reveal where the build projects and I still need to do more learning, relationship building, and cooperative work. From the theoretical perspective I argue for here, however, this limitation is also where the potential lies. Participation within relational and practice-based collectivities induces others to see themselves as subjects and agents within broader, place-based networks of interdependence, responsibility, and reciprocity. This shift in perspective may also lead one to look more closely at the place one lives, where the concrete of settler colonialism may appear to be more solidified but cracks remain and can be widened.Footnote 55 For example, engaging with place and wild salmon alongside Kwakwaka’wakw and Secwépemc people embedded in grounded normativity may precipitate not only recognizing the Goldstream River as SELEK̵TEL̵, but also wondering how the stream that runs beneath a road, on the commute to campus instead of within a provincial park, formerly and still sustains life – and how one’s everyday actions may impact its ability to do so.Footnote 56 Engaging with Indigenous resurgence, even if partially and imperfectly, can serve as a step toward relationships and practices for living more responsibly with these lands and waters.
Conclusion
The relational networks comprised of resurgent Indigenous nations and those who engage with them can be made visible by looking to place. The collectivities that make up these networks can be understood as democratic movements that recognize the political authority and vitality of resurgent Indigenous nationhood in the present, in the places we live and interact with and within. By relating and acting in ways that refuse the incentives of empire, capitalism, and liberalism, these networks of relational and practice-based collectivities threaten the permanence and inevitability of settler colonial structures and institutions.Footnote 57 Evidence of this can be seen in the surveillance of Indigenous movements and rights activists by Canadian Security and Intelligence Services (CSIS) and the RCMP, the latter of whom monitored me and others within Secwépemcul’ecw. As Jeffrey Monaghan and Miles Howe show, when it comes to Indigenous movements the Canadian security state’s pre-emptive surveillance and policing tactics “translate the potential ‘successes’” of Indigenous social movements that challenge injustice “into ‘risks’ associated with public order,” revealing a logic of enmity.Footnote 58 Settler colonial surveillance tactics do not emphasize actual violence or lawlessness, but rather various noncriminal criteria that demonstrate an individual or group’s potential for “virality”: their mobility, appeal to others, and ability to network and “gain popular support” through affiliation and alliance-making.Footnote 59 As one surveillance report warns, “the longer a protest continues, the stronger and larger the web of interconnectivity grows and the more difficult it will be to disentangle.”Footnote 60 This attempt to disentangle – to disconnect, enclose, and foreclose by concretizing colonial and capitalist structures – is a primary logic of settler colonialism.Footnote 61 Through engagement, connection, and collaboration with Indigenous resurgence, relational and practice-based collectivities have the potential to subvert settler colonial logics such as this. Because this web of interconnectivity is premised upon ways to relate to place, each other, and other-than-human beings that are drawn from grounded normativities, the web runs deeper than the settler colonial security apparatus is willing to permit – hence the arrests that began this chapter.
Rather than “protests” against a hegemonic order, we can understand relational and practice-based collectivities as generative democratic movements in which people act otherwise than the predatory logics of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. These movements recognize Indigenous political authorities within specific places. Like water and wild salmon, resurgent Indigenous nations and places have their own logics and laws. Through a political praxis that complements the grounded normativities of Indigenous nations, a politics of recognition and self-determination from below, relational and practice-based collectivities learn how to live more responsibly with both people and place. These networked webs of alliance and affiliation span below, through, and beyond the settler colonial state, flowing with the waters and following the movements of wild salmon and Indigenous resurgence. Further, these relational networks have the potential to be made denser through the extension of place-based ethics of responsibility and practices of reciprocity. This density holds the promise and power to widen cracks and fissures in the settler colonial concrete. By making these webs of relationship and practice visible through the stories I share in this chapter, I am not revealing anything that is not already known and shown through Indigenous political theory and mobilization at a range of sites and scales. What I am trying to show, however, is the process by which others can be drawn into, informed by, and agential within Indigenous ethico-political frameworks – in addition to but, more importantly, instead of settler colonial ways of relating to and understanding the world. To paraphrase the epigraph to this chapter, engagements with Indigenous resurgence can and do change what wants to appear unchangeable – they demystify settler colonialism and show that its predatory relations are not permanent nor inevitable. Neither democratic theory nor political praxis should proceed as if they were.
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