“To see things in an objective light”: the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Contingency
• landscape
• settler colonialism
• settler colonial landscapes
• universality
• Dakota Access Pipeline

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Valérie Plante Lévesque, PhD student at Institut national de la recherche scientifique, for her constant support and thoughtful comments on this paper. We are also grateful to participants in the 2017 American Landscapes course at the University of Wyoming for opportunity to discuss some of the literature cited in this paper. We thank the Service des relations internationales de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, the University of Wyoming Office of International Students and Scholars, and the National Student Exchange for facilitating the study abroad semester during which we initiated this collaboration. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the Ministère de l’éducation et de l’enseignement supérieur du Québec, and les Offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec for financially supporting that study abroad opportunity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Guillaume Proulx is a master’s student in Geography at Université du Québec à Montréal specialized in political ecology. His research interests include cultural landscapes, resource frontiers, critical cartography, forest ecology, natural hazard mitigation and settler colonialism in the North American peripheries. He pursues his research as a PhD student in Indigenous studies at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue with a focus on Indigenous forest knowledge, participatory research and fire ecology.

Nicholas Jon Crane received his PhD in Geograpy from the Ohio State University in 2014 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wyoming. Crane's ongoing projects focus on social movements and protest waves in North America. He is also the section editor for political geography in Geography Compass.

ORCID

Guillaume Proulx http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2563-9372

Nicholas Jon Crane http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5470-747X