(Not so) crude text and images: staging Native in ‘big oil’ advertising

Abstract

Transnational energy companies' representations of Indigenous bodies and landscape in corporate advertising and social responsibility reporting can be thought of as staged and operating on more than one level of meaning. Understanding these representations as performative makes clear these are ongoing social and cultural constructs embedded in a body of discourse that is marked by White culture's own desire for permanence and fixity in relation to a privileged positioning. The staging of Native bodies and landscapes, in part intended to allay growing public concerns about environmental impacts associated with fossil fuel production, is achieved through the strategic use of images and text. Semiological analysis helps to make explicit the manner in which oil and gas transnationals' displaying of a racialised Native subject in the context of ‘partnership’ serves as a greenwashing strategy consistent with Canada's own dominant national narratives. Recognising advertisements and corporate social responsibility reports not as neutral knowledge but as sites of knowledge production reveals myths and stereotypes that serve to prevent, rather than encourage, true sustainability.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank the Visual Studies editor and anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. The author would also like to thank Brenda Spencer, Alison Taylor and Amy Scott Metcalfe for helpful suggestions in the early stages of writing this article.

Notes

1. I italicise the term Native to reflect the performative power inherent in the social, cultural, historical construction of Indigenous bodies. An un‐italicised Native refers to those individuals and groups making up the diverse, heterogeneous descendants of Canada's original peoples. Other terms commonly used to identify Canada's first peoples are: Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Nations/Non‐Status/Métis/Inuit or Indian.

2. By ‘White’, I mean the social construction of non‐ethnic Canadians that Mackey describes as ‘The state of being unmarked (and therefore “normal” or “ordinary”) is both constitutive of, and an effect of, structural advantage and power, and the cultural authority that that power brings’ (1999/2002, 21). While ‘dominant’ is also often used to refer to those holding power, ‘White’ and ‘Whiteness’ is commonly used by critical scholars such as Michelle Fine, who notes that whiteness is produced with other colors … in symbiotic relation: ‘Where whiteness grows as a seemingly “natural” proxy for quality, merit, and advantage, “color” disintegrates to embody deficit or “lack”’ (1997, 58).

3. Judith Butler (1993) relates social actors to stage performers and, in so doing, articulates the performative constitution of different subject identities, making clear how power operates on and through the creation of such identities: ‘For discourse to materialise a set of effects, “discourse” itself must be understood as complex and convergent chains in which “effects” are vectors of power. In this sense, what is constituted in discourse is not fixed in or by discourse, but becomes the condition and occasion for further action. This does not mean that any action is possible on the basis of a discursive effect. On the contrary, certain reiterative chains of discursive production are barely legible as reiterations, for the effects they have materialised are those without which no bearing in discourse can be taken’ (187).

4. Mirzoeff describes visual culture as defining the possibilities of representation – that is, ‘the product of the collision, intersection and interaction … between capital's picturing of the world and that which cannot be commodified or disciplined. “Culture” is used in the charged sense that it had in the nineteenth century’ (2006, 14). In other words, visual culture is both a mode of representing imperial culture and a resistance to it.

5. Seele explains that activists coined the term ‘greenwash’ to identify companies who go green without being green (2007, 4). In Seele's view, greenwash is a rhetorical misuse of ethics in business. In some contexts, greenwash has been replaced by bluewash, a corporate focus on humanitarian and environmental concern in the global context. Like greenwash, bluewash is seen as a tactic of corporate publicity campaigns.

6. The Alberta government recently announced a three‐year, $25 million public relations campaign to counter the province's reputation as environmentally irresponsible, a producer of ‘dirty oil’ regarding oil sands extraction and processing (‘Alberta fights “dirty oil” stigma’, Calgary Herald, 26 April 2008).

7. The recent purchase by energy corporations of full‐page newspaper advertisements and television spots during Alberta's oil and gas royalty rate deliberations was a display of massive lobbying and media power. A six‐member government‐appointed panel released the results of a review of royalties and taxes on oil and gas development in the Our Fair Share report. In the time between the report's release in September 2007 and the government's response approximately one month later, the debate over royalties in Alberta accelerated significantly and prompted a number of energy companies to respond through public media outlets.

8. Quote accessed from the Shell Canada website: http://www.shell.com/home/content/ca‐en/society_environment/social/aboriginals/engage_aboriginals.html.

9. From page 38 of Nexen's 2006 Sustainability Report, available at: http://www.nexeninc.com/files/Sustainability/2006/2006Nexen_CSR_Social.pdf.

10. From page 1 of the Syncrude 2005 Aboriginal Review, available at: http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp?FolderID=5641.

11. Wotherspoon highlights that globalisation has led to contradictions and tensions within a diverse Aboriginal population, creating opportunities for some and restricting and excluding others (2007, 148). Many Indigenous people choose non‐renewable resource sector occupations, often as skilled and unskilled labour and less often in management positions (see Voyageur 1997). There are also a number of Indigenous groups who have entered into partnerships with oil and gas companies as a means of improving the economic situation for their collective membership. This article does not seek to examine these phenomena; rather, its aim is to make explicit the myth structure underlying corporate advertising and publicity reports.

12. Schick and St Denis make clear that despite limited encounters between them, on the Canadian prairies it the production of a Native ‘Other’ upon whom a dominant Canadian public relies for symbiotic creation of its own White identity (2005, 297).

13. According to Pollution Watch, a partnership between Environmental Defense and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, in 2005 Syncrude Canada was among the top ten air polluters in Canada. This includes the emission of greenhouse gases that contributes to global climate change (see http://www.pollutionwatch.org/pressroom/factSheetData/PW%202005%20Fact%20Sheet_FINAL.pdf).

14. Quality of life gaps between the Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal population are evident in statistics relating to overcrowding (housing) and water contamination on reserves as well as more generally in the area of health, employment, education, and the criminal justice system (Statistics Canada 2004, 2006; Treasury Board Secretariat 2005).

15. For more information on current and projected emissions, see the Pembina Institute/World Wildlife Federation report Under‐Mining the Environment: The Oil Sands Report Card, released January 2008: http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/OS‐Undermining‐Final.pdf.

16. The semiological approach used in this article is based on the seminal works by Roland Barthes (1964, 1972) and C. S. Peirce and their later interpretation within qualitative research paradigms (see, for example, Mick 1986; Penn 2000).

17. According to the Alberta Aboriginal Multi‐Media Society (AMMSA; available at http://www.ammsa.com), circulation figures for Windspeaker nationally include approximately 25 000 paid subscriptions and an additional 5000 copies of the business quarterly magazine which are distributed to Aboriginal business groups and associations who in turn provide access to their membership.

18. Syncrude Canada Ltd is a joint venture involving seven transnational energy companies: Canadian Oil Sands Limited, Imperial Oil (Exxon), Petro‐Canada, Nexen, ConocoPhillips, Mocal Energy and Murphy Oil.

19. From the inside cover of Syncrude Canada's 2005 Aboriginal Review, available at http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp?FolderID=5641.

20. While Smith looks primarily at environmental racism in the United States, there are a number of current examples of the contamination of Native bodies in the Canadian context, most particularly the Cree of Fort Chipewyan in northern Alberta, located downstream from Alberta's major oil sands development. For more information, see the March 2007 issue of the National Review of Medicine, available at http://www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com/issue/2007/03_30/4_policy_politics1_6.html. Westra (1997) argues that in Canada, questions about environmental racism and Indigenous people cannot be separated from issues of sovereignty and treaty rights.

21. St Denis (2003) argues that the denial of racism as this pertains to Aboriginal peoples in Canada often results in their being blamed for the impacts of racial oppression – for example, poverty.

22. Daniels and Cosgrove offer a definition of landscape as ‘a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing or symbolising surroundings’ (1988, 1).