Paper short abstract:

Our paper questions how the last Indigenous resistance movements in the USA and Canada against extractivism projects deal with white majority, local migrations and artistic practices, through the examples of the pipelines DAPL (Standing Rock Reservation) and Kinder Morgan (Secwepemc Nation).

Paper long abstract:

From April 2016 to February 2017, one of the most important Indigenous gatherings took place in the Sioux Reservation of Standing Rock (North Dakota, USA). More than 300 tribes joined together to fight the DAPL pipeline project (now built). In parallel, since June 2017, another Indigenous resistance movement grows up in the Secwepemc Nation (Canada) against the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

These projects have much in common. They impulse local migrations from the inside of the country; secondly, they are associated to Indigenous artistic practices. At Standing Rock was an art tent dedicated to the creation of screen printings for the Water Protectors can put it everywhere and dress it. The designs were made by Indigenous artists like Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch (Anishinabe). Art was a pacific way to express social and political claims during direct actions. Art still permits to Indigenous peoples to diffuse messages about their rights and their opposition to the building of other extractivism projects, like Kinder Morgan. The same artists are organizing art-actions in front of the main banks of North America to convince them to divest from these projects. Moreover, Indigenous artists develop new practices which mix architecture and paintings (the "Warriors Tiny Houses Project": some tiny painted houses are put on the road that would follow the Kinder Morgan Pipeline).

Then, these projects highlight the relationships between politics and Euro-American liberal economy which is based on the non-respect of the treaties signed with Indigenous peoples during the last centuries.