Settler stories now: Daniel Scholte, Settler News Media Understandings of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline: Discourses of Territorial Sovereignty, Legality, and Justice, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler stories now: Daniel Scholte, Settler News Media Understandings of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline: Discourses of Territorial Sovereignty, Legality, and Justice, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: This thesis uses the concept of the settler imaginary to conduct a critical discourse analysis of
113 news articles covering the Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict. Specifically, I engage with 3 research
questions: 1) What are the narratives that frame Wet’suwet’en dispossession as legal or “just”? 2)
How does mainstream media express understandings of territory and resource rights in the
context of Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty? 3) How do these understandings relate to, or
reflect, notions of settler reason? Mainstream media performs a discursive function in responding
to Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty, discursively moving claims into the jurisdiction of
Canadian law. News articles create a discursive distance between the present dynamics of the
Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict and historic and ongoing settler colonialism. I argue news articles
reflect a normative framework of rationality, one that justifies infringement of Wet’suwet’en title
for the needs of extraction.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed