Excerpt: In 2013 a photo of twenty- eight- year- old Amanda Polchies at a Mi’kmaq antifracking protest in New Brunswick, Canada, became iconic as a symbol of Indigenous resistance to industrial extraction. The image draws power in juxtaposition: Polchies silently lifts a delicate feather before a hard horizon of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose humanness is lost in the line of force with which they mean to protect the interests of the oil and gas industry. Th e dissonance captured in this photo is disturbing but not unique. Recent images of militarized police blasting water cannons at unarmed water protectors at Standing Rock in subfreezing temperatures also elicited shock and rage. Anger is justified. Surprise is not.
