Paper short abstract:

Emergent oil pipelines across Indigenous territories traverse treatied lands and waterscapes, impacting more-than-human constituents. Resistance to these projects emerge from the relationality and responsibilities Indigenous nations enact towards more-than-human beings across their lands.

Paper long abstract:

Increasingly, pipeline construction throughout the settler states of Canada and the United States are experiencing an intensification of vulnerabilities when attempting to traverse Indigenous territories, as these infrastructures present threats to ecological health and cultural continuity. The position of this paper argues that the current contingencies of Indigenous resistance and resurgence alongside the increasing transparency of extractive capitalism, offers an opportunity to exploit the weaknesses in continued oil and gas development through the enactment of Indigenous environmental governance across capitalist-desired lands. Through this, the tensions of structural ongoing coloniality (Wolf, 2013), Western onto-epistemological positions of dominance, and racial capitalism become transformational opportunities towards the deepening of ecological citizenship (Adkin & Miller, 2016). Through renewed emphasis on shared ecological relations, rights, and responsibilities, this paper intends to explore the potentialities of Indigenous environmental governance, operationalized outside the discursive framing of settler states, when confronted with emergent oil and gas infrastructure projects across a warming world.