Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118

20Dec23

Excerpt: In what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada, events that will shape the contours of its energetic and infrastructural futures for better or worse are currently unfolding. Since 2009, members and hereditary chiefs of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en peoples reoccupied their unceded territory, building a healing center and other infrastructures of care in the face of necropolitical extractive, fossilfueled infrastructure developments. This reoccupation was initiated against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, a twin pipeline project that would run 1,177 km (731 mi.) between Alberta and British Columbia’s coast carrying natural gas condensate on one end and diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” on the other in what I have called elsewhere a mutually informing circular economy of energy deepening. Energy deepening describes how capital relies on ever-increasing energy inputs for its maintenance and reproduction as the dominant political economy of the recent past and present (Diamanti 2021, 14). Such deepening in this case would reproduce ongoing settler colonialism as expressed through extractive capitalism. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway wasn’t built, but more pipelines would be proposed as the inertia of fossil capital further sedimented. For now, TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink is under construction, a 670 km (420 mi.) natural gas pipeline that represents what Tlingit (Kwanlin Dun First Nation) anthropologist Anne Spice has powerfully termed invasive infrastructures (2018, 44–47). Violent raids in 2019, 2020, and 2021 executed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) revealed the character of this invasion as they enforced an injunction granted by the Supreme Court of BC on behalf of TC Energy. Here the state secures the realization of the pipeline’s construction through a kind of public-private partnership between TC Energy and its repressive apparatuses. Of course, for anyone familiar with extractivism and its resistance today, the Unist’ot’en Camp registers as one of many ongoing efforts within Canada’s borders. We could also name the Secwepmc-led Tiny House Warriors or Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar project, an initiative to outfit Indigenous communities with solar energy infrastructure and the training to maintain it. Such resistance is motivated by diverse Indigenous ways of knowing and being, as media from the Unist’ot’en Camp, Tiny House Warriors, and Laboucan-Massimo make clear. But what links these efforts are not only these diverse ways of knowing and being; they are also linked by a shared politics beyond wholly negative modes of refusal (A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017). Writing south of the medicine line in the wake of the Standing Rock blockade encampment to stop Energy Transfer Partner’s Dakota Access Pipeline, Lakota (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) historian Nick Estes draws attention to the political potentiality of a pan-Indigenous solidarity emerging from struggles against colonial, extractive capitalism that taps into “the tradition of radical Indigenous internationalism” (2019, 204). This article will detail how such interventions against extractive, settler-colonial infrastructures motivated by a pan-Indigenous solidarity are a kind of infrastructure in themselves that also express infrastructuralism that critical scholars of infrastructure would do well to take seriously as a materialization of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and decolonial critique.

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