Standing rock and the Indigenous commons

ABSTRACT

A new cycle of communications commons has become part of the contemporary repertoire of Indigenous first nations in North America. The mobilization of the Standing Rock Sioux is perhaps the best-known example of a continent-wide cycle of resistance in which Indigenous communities have employed a combination of collectively governed land-based encampments and sophisticated trans-media assemblages to challenge the further enclosure of their territories by the state and fossil fuel industries and instead represent their political and media sovereignty, and prefigure a more reciprocal relationship with other humans and with nature. Although their practices of commoning resemble other radical commons projects, the contemporary Indigenous commons begs for a reassessment of the critical framework of the commons. In this article, I discuss the critical commons literature and compare it with the practices of commoning in the anti-extractivist encampments of Standing Rock.

KEYWORDS:

• Commons
• communications commons
• indigenous media
• indigenous history
• social movements
• environmental justice
• extractivism
• extra-activism
• anti-colonial
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The river’s Lakota name is Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa or “river that makes the Sacred Stones.” This area was home to historically important burial grounds, sacred sites and trading places of the Standing Rock Sioux, the Arikara, the Mandan and the Northern Cheyenne (Brígido-Corachán, 2017, p. 72).

2. This includes the Mi’kmaq Blockade and Elsipogtog (Howe, 2015) on the Atlantic coast of Canada and campaigns against Line 9 in Ontario) Line 3 in Minnesota, as well as campaigns of the Lummi in Washington State, the Houma in Louisiana, the Navajo, Tohono O’Oodham, the Yaqui and Apache in New Mexico and in Arizona (Brígido-Corachán, 2017), and the current anti-pipeline struggles of the Secwepémc and Wet’suwet’en in British Columbia, Canada. It also includes similar anti-extractivism movements of the Sami in Norway.

3. Inspired by them, I began a longer research project about the communications practices of extra-activist movements. First, I reviewed the historical and current extra-activist struggles, and conducted a content analysis of dominant news representations of extra-activist struggles (Kidd, 2014a, 2014b, 2016). Secondly, I conducted case studies of communications practices used by extra-activist movements in Latin America and Canada (videos (Kidd, forthcoming); and counter-mapping (Kidd, 2019).

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Dorothy Kidd

Dorothy Kidd teaches media studies at the University of San Francisco. One of her principal research projects is the documentation of communications practices by anti-extractivist movements.