Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the coalition that the Standing Rock Sioux are leading against the Dakota Access Pipeline has brought indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, sustainable development, and neoliberal corporate interests into public and academic debate in the United States.

Paper long abstract:

Protests led against the Dakota Access Pipeline by water protectors from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota have brought human rights violations related to Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and sustainable development into the foreground of political debate in the United States. The struggle at Standing Rock has been strengthened by a coalition formed with activists from other Indigenous Nations, including representatives from the Amazon Basin, and from non-Indigenous movements and political organizations such as #BlackLivesMatter and the Green Party. This paper reflects upon the centrality of Indigenous Sovereignty within the broader struggle for human rights and democracy in their most inclusive and substantive senses, especially in societies whose development has been built upon the violence of colonial expansion, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. The paper also situates Indigenous rights within regimes of multiply articulated alterities in which the subjugation of Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples have been historically differentiated yet intertwined in the Americas. The paper offers a comparative framework for understanding the convergent and divergent points of reference in the logics of Indigenous and Afrodescendant identity, the relationship with the State and Market, and connections to the material and spiritual resources of land. Attention is directed to cases in the United States, Honduras, and Suriname (including those of communities that define themselves as "Afro-Indigenous") in which some notion of common ground, affinity, or alliance with past or present-day Indigenous peoples has been mobilized in Afrodescendants' collective claims on rights to land, development, and cultural resources.