Presentation short abstract

Reflecting on the 2021 logging blockades at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek in Canada, this paper explores the potentials and pitfalls of blockade infrastructures, prompting us to consider how distinctions between colonial and anticolonial infrastructures are made.

Presentation long abstract

In the summer of 2021, blockade actions in the remote watershed of Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island brought logging activities to a standstill in what became known as the largest civil disobedience action in Canadian history. Using creative lockdown techniques, blockaders exploited chokepoints along the province’s extensive web of logging roads – a settler infrastructural network designed for extraction stretching across and through the province’s mountainous terrain. However, just as blockaders immobilized material movements, they also made use of these same colonial infrastructures to produce new patterns of circulation. An elaborate and highly creative system of counter-infrastructures – including numerous strategically located camps, communication systems, governance structures, and protocols – was created to provision the thousands of forest defenders who converged on the territories of the Pacheedaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations.

Based on extensive interviews with forest defenders, this paper explores the potentials and pitfalls of blockade infrastructures. Blockades are spatial-political technologies intended to disrupt and inhibit certain targeted forms of movement while enabling other movements of bodies, materials, and information. This was true of many infrastructures of blockade at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek, including the digital and remote sensing platforms that made protesters geographically nimble while reproducing patriarchal relations and colonial onto-epistemologies. Through exploring the affordances and ambivalences of blockade infrastructures, we challenge easy binary distinctions between colonial and anticolonial infrastructures amid heated struggles over the political forests of the West Coast.