Abstract
This article explores the politics of digital protest and emergent forms of sociality in the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement using Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of geontopower. I begin by situating the concept of geontopower in relation to a range of biopolitical, decolonial, and ecocritical theory in order to show its importance in conceptualizing the interconnectedness of decolonial and environmental interests. I use this theoretical framework to analyze several instances of what I call ‘digital decoloniality’ in the #NoDAPL movement, cases where the particular affordances of social media technologies and the efforts of Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies disrupted normative assumptions regarding the boundaries of the digital and ‘analog’ worlds and resisted the geontopolitical structuring of life and nonlife. I argue that the #NoDAPL hashtag works to enact the prerogatives of Western science-based environmentalism and Indigenous epistemological tenets in common, performatively generating new possibilities for conceptualizing social struggle and shared history.
Introduction
The conflict over the construction of the final segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) claimed a central place in the American political landscape from the summer of 2016 to the winter of 2017. Starting with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s efforts to block the pipeline project, which they posed as an environmental hazard and threat to tribal sovereignty, the opposition to DAPL grew into the mediated phenomenon and protest movement widely referred to as #NoDAPL. #NoDAPL (short for No Dakota Access Pipeline) encompassed a wide set of objectives including, first and foremost, the defense of Native land rights, as well as environmental protection and critiques of neoliberal governance. Taking its name from the hashtag most commonly used to express opposition to the pipeline on Twitter, #NoDAPL not only marked a digital space in which divergent interests became conversant but also called attention to the formative role the platform played in forging a social movement out of diffuse political sentiment. How to treat this collectivity and the revision of representation it entails? Does the proliferation of voices and the varying degrees of presence social media technologies enable detract from or amplify the voice of the Standing Rock Sioux, the Indigenous tribe at the center of the movement? What is the form and quality of the social and political changes that the movement is tied up in?
These questions will guide the paper to follow and serve as an entry point in to what Elizabeth Povinelli (2011: 8) has called ‘the virtual space that opens up between the potentiality and actuality of an alternative social project’. By tracing what she calls the ‘quasi-event’, Povinelli’s picture of power under late liberalism foregrounds the struggle of the most vulnerable to endure the stilted distribution of life and death that has been known for some time as ‘biopolitics’. Michel Foucault’s (1978) notion of ‘biopower’, the power to ‘make live and let die’, is the means through which the modern state secures political legitimacy against the antiquated sovereign right to ‘let live and make die’. In her most recent book, Povinelli argues that the Foucaultian biopolitical paradigm and its bio-centric basis on the administration of life and death is inadequate for addressing a contemporary political climate in which power increasingly intervenes on the distinction between life and nonlife. This reflects a shift from a relatively narrow biontological outlook which sees life as the primary object of power to an expansive geontological outlook which tethers the animate and inanimate alike to its control.
Povinelli’s argument grows out of her experience of living and working for over 30 years with Indigenous people in Australia’s Northern Territory. ‘Geontopower’, the concept she creates to call attention to the ways in which power increasingly intervenes upon this distinction, is one that derives from the ‘cramped space’ that her Indigenous colleagues exist in under late liberalism (Povinelli, 2016: 4). Crucially, then, geontopower is as much about power as it is a particular experience of power. In this paper, I work through Povinelli’s concept of geontopower, and the careful re-orientation of perspective it entails, in order to trace the politics of life and death, as well as life and nonlife, at play in #NoDAPL.
The standoff at Standing Rock between Indigenous activists and their allies and the pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, and the cadre of state police and private security officers that supported it became one of the largest and most high-profile Native protests in US history (Meyer, 2017). While the months-long occupation of Oceti Sakowin camp (the site of the protests) was the most visible part of the #NoDAPL story, the conflict extends well beyond the relatively short period when the sights of media outlets, major political actors, celebrities, and a wide swath of the American public were trained on Standing Rock. At the time that this article was written, oil had begun flowing through a completed DAPL, and the hundreds of state and federal charges brought against protesters had only begun to be aired in courts. Moreover, the successful completion of the pipeline has not meant the end of Native resistance as Standing Rock has since lent its support to the opposition of other pipelines across the country and pursued legal action against the parties that approved DAPL’s construction and surveilled #NoDAPL protesters. The scope of this paper, however, is largely restricted to an analysis of the movement’s mediation through the #NoDAPL hashtag. Its aim is to investigate how social media may have contributed to the distillation of a shared social and environmental consciousness and tie this to a theoretical consideration of the bio- and geontopolitics that animate the history of settler colonialism and the neocolonial present.
With this in mind, I begin by setting up a theoretical framework that relates biopolitical and decolonial theory. I argue that it is important to read Povinelli’s notion of geontopower alongside a larger body of work that critiques the hegemonic Western discourse of modernity and the representations of history that follow from it, and that grapples with a postcolonial world in which a state apparatus that makes live and lets die brushes up against other epistemologies and ways of being. In the second part of this paper, I analyze the #NoDAPL movement through this theoretical framework and present it as an instance of digital decoloniality that complicates any easy split between the ‘real world’ of protest and embodied acts and the virtual one of posts, hashtags, and other digital artifacts. I treat #NoDAPL as a quasi-event that works to subvert the present grounds of possibility through its enactment of the prerogatives of Western science-based environmentalism and Indigenous epistemological tenets in common. As part of this central claim, I argue that the full implications of this performative cross-referencing are made visible through a multifaceted picture of power, one that attends to techniques of governance, modes of resistance, and economies of endurance alike.
Decolonizing Biopolitics
In his vision of the onset of biopolitics, Foucault makes modernity a matter of life and death rather than reason, progress, and Enlightenment. For him, ‘what might be called a society’s threshold of modernity has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’, when ‘knowledge-power’ takes life as its object (Foucault, 1978: 143). This biopower co-emerged alongside Western humanism and its constitution of man as a reason-driven political subject and seat of agency. For the new subjects of humanism (and their present-day inheritors) this meant simultaneous subjection to an individuating disciplinary power and a biopower that managed life at the level of the population. But what about those who were left out of the humanist project, those who were never permitted to become the subjects of humanism? According to Walter Mignolo (2010), colonized peoples figured as
What might the reconceptualization of modernity in terms of a logic of coloniality mean for biopolitical theory? Centering the plantation and the colony in his account of late modern terror, Achille Mbembe (2003: 39) argues that the ‘notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’. Postcolonial ‘death-worlds’ are sites of ‘necropower’, the flip side of biopower in which killing does not have to be rationalized by the imperative to ‘make live’ (Mbembe, 2003). But how has the necropolitical ‘anti-economy’ of death (against the biopolitical economy of life) depended on or been inflected by the geontopolitical category of nonlife? To answer this, I start by considering postcolonial scholar Sylvia Wynter’s re-narration of modernity and coloniality with an eye less to life and death than the terms of humanity itself. 1 Shaped by the mid-20th-century Caribbean anti-colonial struggle in which she took part, Wynter’s work reflects an experiential dimension that I believe makes it particularly well-equipped for addressing contemporary decolonial projects like #NoDAPL.
Spanning the disciplines of philosophy, history, and biology, Wynter’s oeuvre is defined by her attempt to recuperate humanism at the planetary level by situating the hegemonic Western history of man as part of a larger human history of collective ‘self-inscription’ and ‘self-instituted genres’. According to Wynter, all human societies throughout history abstract their own societal structuring principles onto the stars such that these principles can appear supernaturally or extra-humanly determined rather than products of human invention. The naturalization of social difference is re-inscripted at the neurophysiological level so that humans are quite literally adapted to their sociogenic principles or ‘genres of being human’ (Scott, 2000: 190). Recognizing that the history of colonialism means that the Western paradigm of political subjectivity (man) has irrevocably shaped global history, Wynter pays close attention to the manifestation of Western genres of the human. She recognizes a series of epistemic breaks that loosely map onto the distinctions Foucault draws between sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower. Beginning with medieval Christian Europe, she shows how the premise of non-homogeneity between heaven and earth was used to maintain non-homogeneity between the spirit and flesh. With the Copernican refiguration of the cosmos during the Renaissance and the collapse of the ontological distinction between heaven and earth, however, this outmoded notion of non-homogeneity was discarded to make way for a new epistemological protagonist that both Wynter and Foucault recognize as man. Wynter shows how, ultimately, the same structuring principle of non-homogeneity was recoded in Enlightenment terms, yielding a rational/irrational divide between humans and animal others. Where Foucault would trace the consequences of this within Europe, she emphasizes how this distinction was spurred by early colonial encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people considered to be incapable of attaining rational political subjecthood. The next epistemic overhaul she pinpoints keeps pace with Foucault, matching the inception of biopolitics in the 19th century. Here, what she calls man(2) emerges after Darwin’s theory of evolution works to undo the recodified premise of non-homogeneity between human and animal. Non-homogeneity is re-introduced at this juncture in terms of natural selection versus dysselection, evolved and non-evolved, to the effect that the more rational and less rational of the Enlightenment era comes to mean more and less human in the industrial era.
A postcolonial subject herself, Wynter describes her departure from Foucault as a matter of perspective, saying, ‘Where Foucault brings up the idea that each episteme institutes a new and discontinuous “politics” or regime of truth and leaves it at that, from my different terrain, I see each such politics of truth as both the effect and the proximate function of a more fundamental politics, one that institutes a regime of
Reading Povinelli through Wynter’s historical framework, the crumbling of the biontological outlook of biopower and the increasing relevance of the geontological outlook of geontopower is the result of another epistemological breakthrough with ontological consequences. Indeed, the basis of geontopower’s primacy is the growing public consciousness of anthropogenic climate change and the heightened cultural currency of what has been called the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene was coined to describe a ‘geologically defined moment when the forces of human existence began to overwhelm all other biological, geological, and meteorological forms and forces and displace the Holocene’ (Povinelli, 2016: 6). Even while it speaks to the catastrophic consequences of human incursions on the environment, the Anthropocene provides the conceptual footing for challenging the notion of total non-homogeneity between
But Povinelli insists that geontopower (even while it is fueled by the Anthropocene concept) predates our collective climate change consciousness. By her logic, it was geontopower, and the ontological distinction between life and nonlife it rests on, that created the conditions for the necropolitical subjugation of the colonized. She writes, ‘The attribution of an inability of various colonized people to differentiate the kinds of things that have agency, subjectivity, and intentionality of the sort that emerges with life has been the grounds of casting them into a premodern mentality and a postrecognition difference’ (Povinelli, 2016: 3). With this, Povinelli refers to animistic Indigenous epistemological traditions which contravert the hegemonic Western life/nonlife divide and the related understanding of nature as timeless and unchanging passive object of human intervention. The logic of coloniality and the (pre)modern temporal construct, then, are agents of geontopower, policing the bounds of what properly belongs to the domains of life and nonlife by maintaining the ahistorical nature of Indigenous culture and natural world alike.
This is why Povinelli focuses on the distribution of tense in her account of settler colonial social difference, the ways in which ‘the society of potentiality (demos) seemed to demand societies of fixity (colons), as if the future anterior of freedom demanded the clawing determination of the customary to make its difference visible and palpable’ (Povinelli, 2011: 28). Her aim is not to say that the biopolitical management of life (or the necropolitical rationalization of killing) wasn’t at play in the colonies, but rather to show how biopolitics becomes the prerogative of a society that understands life and death in terms of temporally inflected notions of nature and culture. Wynter’s conception of genre is useful here in attending to the specificity of the terms by which life and death are determined and distributed. If, as Foucault (2003: 255) describes it, race served as biopower’s means of ‘establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain’, it makes sense that similar exclusions are carried out under an ascendant geontopower via the rhetoric of culture (Mamdani, 2004). 2 The geontopolitical register that defines the present genre of the human points to the persistence of a premise of non-homogeneity between nature and culture, one that ties climate change to the logic of coloniality under what Povinelli (2011, 2016) calls ‘settler late liberalism’. Her choice of terminology makes modernity synonymous with what she recognizes as the motor of settler colonial expansion: the geontopolitical management of the distinction between life and nonlife.
The heightened visibility of this interconnection between climate and colonialism explains why the rhetoric of ecology and environmentalism has come to matter outside the issue of climate change, and why, in a related manner, the rhetoric of decoloniality has trickled into environmental justice discourse. Along these lines, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) calls for an ‘ecology of knowledges’ against the ‘monoculture of scientific knowledge’. He argues for the importance of considering the possible contributions of a wide range of other epistemologies, given that ‘scientific knowledge has intrinsic limits in relation to the types of real world intervention it makes possible’ (De Sousa Santos, 2014: 193). Indeed, scientific knowledge is always bound up in the workings of bio- and geontopower, particular structuring regimes of life and death, and life and nonlife, and the naturalized notion of social good that stems from them. In this regard, it is interesting that De Sousa Santos borrows a term from Western science itself (ecology) to formulate his alternative epistemological model. T.J. Demos (2016) recounts how the discipline of ecology had its inception during the height of European colonialism and describes the ways in which the new science of nature was bound up with the exploitation of all that was considered to be nonlife. As such, we need to ‘decolonize our conception of nature in properly political ways’ (Demos, 2016: 18). If, in the words of David Scott (2000), Wynter ‘re-enchants’ humanism through her efforts to redress the incompleteness of its vision, De Sousa Santos’s work could be seen as a re-enchantment of ecology, an effort to wade through its particular history in an attempt to realize the breakthrough it promised.
The issue of naming and Demos’s ‘properly political’ imperative are at the heart of discussions surrounding the validity of the Anthropocene concept in the environmental humanities. A number of scholars have recognized that the
Against the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway (2016: 2) imagines the Chthulucene, ‘a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’. Like Povinelli, Haraway recognizes the importance of tense in marking out present modes of power-being like geontopower. Critiquing the fetishization of the future that normative climate change discourse often entails, Haraway advocates ‘staying with the trouble’ instead. An exercise in ‘learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures’, staying with the trouble requires making kin across the boundaries of knowing and being in a ‘thick present’ (Haraway, 2016: 1). The temporal recalibration that this project entails is coupled with a broad multi-species scope that suggests we should be looking further than human-wrought environmental degradation and impact. While the human remains central in Anthropocene terminology, Haraway’s use of Chthulucene formulates an alternative ontology of relationality in recognition that it is precisely the limits of anthropocentrism which become clear in the face of climate change. This expansive vision of kinship, which crosses not only the boundaries between species, but also between the living and nonliving, will be crucial in my reading of the ethical and political ramifications of the #NoDAPL project. Also crucial is Haraway’s focus on tense, or the time of trouble, which serves both to illuminate structures of power and emphasize the power of endurance.
Digital Decoloniality
I begin my investigation of #NoDAPL ‘digital decoloniality’ with a brief account of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict and its fallout. Stretching 1172 miles, the now completed Dakota Access Pipeline carries oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota across several state lines before terminating in southern Illinois. As early as 2014, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe contested a short segment of the pipeline that was to cross under the Missouri River just north of the reservation, claiming construction would destroy a number of culturally and spiritually significant sites and put drinking water at risk in the event of an oil spill. With construction imminent in the spring of 2016, the tribe built Sacred Stone Camp (later renamed Oceti Sakowin) near the construction site as a rallying point and staging grounds for sustained resistance. Over the summer, their efforts drew support from thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across the country who converged on the camp and, taking their cue from the people of Standing Rock, called themselves ‘water protectors’ (Sammon, 2016).
This rhetorical switch from protester to protector served to picture the pipeline in terms of violation rather than a legitimate object of political debate, a representation that was born out by the actions of the highly militarized force of police officers, state troopers, and soldiers of the National Guard summoned to quell peaceful demonstrations at the camp throughout the fall. The use of pepper spray, attack dogs, tear gas, and water cannons on water protectors in under-freezing temperatures garnered extensive media coverage and, indeed, signaled a crisis of democracy to a growing international audience. These violent incursions on civil liberties were aided by the surveillance efforts of TigerSwan, the private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners to collect information on protesters. Conducting aerial surveillance of the camp and smear campaigns against Standing Rock participants, TigerSwan deployed counterterror tactics with an impunity that points to a nationwide ‘trend towards the criminalization of dissent’ (Carpenter and Williams, 2018). Despite these efforts, Standing Rock won a provisional victory in early December when the US Army Corps of Engineers denied the easement necessary for continued construction and announced it would look into possible alternative routes (Hersher, 2017). Victory was short-lived, however, as a month later, under the new Trump administration, an executive order called for construction to resume immediately along the original route. Soon after, on 23 February, the remaining protesters were forcibly evicted from Oceti Sakowin and the camp was destroyed.
Following this, #NoDAPL objectives and tactics necessarily shifted. Marches across the country maintained the movement’s visibility for a short time, while the call (again formulated on Twitter) to #defundDAPL reflected the strategic choice to target the pipeline’s investors. Much of the #NoDAPL battle post-Oceti Sakowin, however, has since been fought in court. Around 800 people faced criminal charges associated with their participation in the protests at Standing Rock, 200 of whom are still awaiting trial (Carpenter and Williams, 2018). Felony charges were brought against a number of the central figures in the movement, including Standing Rock activist-attorney Chase Iron Eyes. A recent email update on his trial reported that the presiding judge granted his legal team permission to obtain information from Energy Transfer Partners and the law enforcement and security contractors active during the protests, an allowance that could swing the court decision in his favor. From the midst of a conflict that could still be seen as ongoing, it remains difficult to project to what extent the effects of the #NoDAPL movement will be felt in future disputes over Native land rights, struggles for environmental justice, and attempts to extricate notions of social good from the free market. Inhabiting this uncertainty, I do not plan to make projections but rather, returning to Povinelli’s notion of the quasi-event, to stay attuned to micro-processes and unexpected outgrowths in my analysis of some of the material aspects of social and political change in the course of the #NoDAPL fight.
The hashtag’s public is an ‘ad hoc public’, an impromptu assemblage around an issue or interest that forms in the moment it is first tweeted (Bruns and Burgess, 2011: 7). What happens when the lightning quick instantiation of a hashtag becomes the means of reference for an entire social movement? To answer this question, I consider how the hashtag reforms traditional notions of representation. According to Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2015: 5), hashtags serve as intertextual linkages of a diverse range of content and ‘function semiotically by marking the intended significance of an utterance’. It is difficult to refer to a hashtag’s user base as a ‘public’ in the traditional sense because the hashtag, as the trace of a relation and discursive performance, indicates a different kind of social body. In the case of #NoDAPL, I argue that the hashtag provides not just a common forum for various political priorities, but an enactment of these priorities
In order to attend to these questions, it is important to address the uneasy split between the digital sphere and the ‘real world’ that becomes particularly problematic in the case of contemporary social movements which increasingly unfold in both dimensions. In her recent book on collective assembly, Judith Butler (2015) argues that bodies assembled in the street evince the performative power to extra-vocally articulate political demands. Though she nods several times to the importance of social media platforms in instituting new forms (or at least layers) of assembly, she makes no conclusive link between what she refers to as ‘heightened bodily exposure’ and the sort of visibility afforded online. Povinelli, on the other hand, draws a distinction between the apprehension of protest as ‘political demand’, a category that implies working
Outlining a set of critical practices that relate loosely under the heading of ‘non-representational theory’, Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison (2010: 8) argue that a ‘world’ is not an ‘extant thing’; rather, it is ‘a mobile but more or less stable ensemble of practices, involvements, relations, capacities, tendencies, and affordances’. The dynamic assemblage they picture suggests the becoming in concert of the material and the discursive domains usually separated along the lines of real and representation. Their insight complements Stefania Milan’s (2015) argument that the material products of digital interaction (hashtags, tweets, likes, etc.) are ‘immanent to cyberspace’ and thus serve as ‘the process through which the symbolic takes form, rather than its mere physical (or virtual) representation’. Troubling the distinction between real and representation, this notion of ‘worlding’ raises the question that if digital interactions are indeed immanent to cyberspace, should we understand them as forming a novel but contained world all their own, or re-forming the world as we know it? Kevin McDonald’s (2004) notion of the ‘experience movement’ would suggest the latter. He argues that the experience movement increasingly displaces the collectively-organized, traditional social movement, ushering in a ‘grammar of action’ that is non-identitarian and exists in the spaces between subjects, places, and political spheres. Largely a product of the coalescence of the virtual and the analog worlds, the experience movement emphasizes ‘presence’, doing away with a directly representable ‘we-ness’ in favor of the experience of ‘oneself as another’.
Looking at the #NoDAPL movement’s strategic use of a certain product of digital interaction, the Facebook ‘check-in’, I will show how the revision of presence this entailed had ‘worlding’ effects. The ‘check-in’ function on Facebook allows users to specify where they are in a visual, map-based post that will appear on the news feeds of friends. In an effort in late October 2016 to confuse police allegedly using check-ins to identify protesters onsite at Standing Rock, sympathetic Facebook users across the country began checking-in to the reservation en masse. In the space of a few days, more than one million had checked-in. Regardless of their effectiveness in thwarting possible surveillance, the check-ins worked to reconfigure the structure of solidarity and presence in the #NoDAPL conflict as a whole. Beyond the fact that the check-ins reached audiences previously unaware of the conflict, they framed the opposition of those onsite as part of a larger, unlocalizable network that was, paradoxically, trained on the local. In this sense, #NoDAPL supporters showed the terms of McDonald’s ‘grammar of action’ to be inflected by place: the presence of I
It’s important to emphasize that this happening is only visible from a perspective that departs from normative understandings of the digital as some sort of post-temporal non-space. Against such notions, Pinar Tuzcu (2015: 150) argues that ‘rather than being borderless by nature, the digital produces different kinds of borders, demanding a different kind of understanding of locations’. Under this digital politics of location, places function as ‘countermemories’, forming ‘affective networks that accelerate connections and activate actors at a distance, turning bodies that occupy different localities into mediators and participants’ (Tuzcu, 2015: 153). The promise of such formations, however, is threatened by the evacuation of time and space that comes with the uncritical real-time platform in the sky model that Tuzcu claims reanimates universalist sentiment and too easily glosses over a persistent politics of difference online. I tie this sort of thinking to Mignolo’s notion of ‘zero-point epistemology’, the order of knowledge that sustains the logic of coloniality through its self-situation ‘always in the present of time and the center of space’ (Mignolo, 2011: 80). The erasure of its own geo-historical specificity is what allows zero-point epistemology to serve as ‘the site of observation from which the epistemic colonial differences and the epistemic imperial differences are mapped out’ (p. 80). With this, Mignolo shows how Western universalism is implicated in colonialism and demonstrates its dependence on a register of dislocation. I am arguing that rather than forming a lofty new virtual zero-point, the digital serves as an additional dimension of timespace that is increasingly linked to political praxis on the ground. The parallel I draw between zero-point thinking and the sort of digital exceptionalism that would see the virtual as a domain free from the constraints of the ‘real world’ means that, in the digital era, decoloniality works at the boundaries of the digital and the analog as well as the living and nonliving.
I look now at how the entanglement of digital presence and physical presence generates a more complex entanglement of interests. This is particularly evident on the #NoDAPL Twitter feed where calls for environmental accountability figure nearly as frequently as calls for Indigenous rights. This raises a question: by what logic and to what extent is the interconnectedness of interests posited and felt? Is the potential for deep coalitionality this seems to imply realized in a substantive way? Theory that would address these questions must do more than formulate an ‘associative account of the social’ populated by ‘relational bodies’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 13). It must attend to the ways in which such an account has been forestalled historically and consider the layered political consequences of these obstructions. This is why Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd (2016) is critical of the sort of post-anthropocentric ‘cosmopolitics’ Bruno Latour proposes and his failure to acknowledge Indigenous epistemological precedents which have long forwarded a radical climatological vision. Her wry observation that ‘it is easier for Euro-Western people to tangle with a symbolic polar bear on a Greenpeace website or in a tweet than it is to acknowledge arctic Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems and legal-political realities’ (Todd, 2016: 6), highlights the ways that geontopower emerges to recolonize the distinction between life and nonlife at the very moment they are shown to be deeply enmeshed.
If, as I discussed previously, climate change is tied to a logic of coloniality that manipulates the geontological categories of life and nonlife for the purpose of capitalist value extraction, a logic that has resulted in the subjugation of Indigenous people and the natural world alike, then we need to center Indigenous thought in the struggle for climate justice. Along these lines, I consider the alternate geontology pictured in the account LaDonna Brave Bull Allard (founder of the Sacred Stone resistance camp at Standing Rock) gives of the history of the Sioux’s relationship to the Cannonball and Missouri river ecosystem compromised by the pipeline. Allard (2016) connects the present-day construction of the Dakota Access pipeline with the 19th-century Whitestone Massacre of the Sioux perpetrated by the US Army, as well as the damming of the Cannonball River by the US government in the 1950s. With this, she ties the destruction of a people to the destruction of the rivers in a manner that plays at the limits of Western notions of life and nonlife. Referring to the losses incurred as a result of the damming, diversion, and manipulation of the rivers and surrounding ecosystem, Allard writes: ‘The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas. And as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple.’
Her formulation imagines the livelihood of the river beyond its capacity to sustain human life in biological terms. Picturing the eradication of a culture and its history in tandem with the destruction of the natural world, she precludes the possibility of their separation and shows such acts to be no less genocidal than the eradication of a people themselves. Crossing the biological, cultural, and natural domains, Allard’s account subverts Western systems of valuation based on (biological) life and death, as well as life and nonlife. The ethics of environmental care and social justice she imagines pertains equally to the living and nonliving, an alternative ontological ordering with the potential to go beyond Western reform-based measures like sustainability.
De Sousa Santos (2014: 201) recognizes this sort of potential when he claims that ‘for an ecology of knowledges, knowledge as intervention in reality is the measure of realism, not knowledge as a representation of reality’. Given that it’s the product of a digital epistemological cohabitation, what sort of intervention does the #NoDAPL hashtag imagine? And what sort of reality does it enact? Both as performative punctuation and intertextual link, #NoDAPL discursively and structurally cites two strands of knowledge that should have been ecologically related but were historically hierarchized. Haraway (2016: 94) argues for the importance of this sort of work, using the example of the Navajo concept of
It is important to note that this sort of decolonial work does not make the #NoDAPL hashtag a utopic site of boundless conceptual and political solidarity. Indeed one tweet from early March of this year demonstrates how epistemic hierarchies are often reinscribed in the digital sphere. It reads: ‘Block the final phase of the DAPL on religious grounds? Is that the strongest argument? #WaterIsLife #NoDAPL’. The notion that #WaterIsLife is one that itself reflects two different cultural logics. The Western interpretation of the concept holds that water is life
The stakes of this are higher than ever as geontopower moves to the forefront and ‘a long-standing biontological orientation and distribution of power crumbles, losing its efficacy as a self-evident backdrop to reason’ (Povinelli, 2016: 4). Whereas the primacy of biopower meant that the Indigenous concept of animism was a ‘safe form of “the Other”’ in that such a belief could be bracketed as impossibility (Povinelli, 2016: 4), the ascendency of geontopower and the destabilization of the foundational categories of life and nonlife means these beliefs no longer fall outside the domain of power proper. In one sense, this introduces a potential ground of legitimacy for Indigenous perspectives. But there is also the possibility – one that I think the above tweet demonstrates all too well – that Indigenous concepts and cultural practices will be salvaged from irrelevance only to be represented as harmful to or obstructive of Western science-based notions of proper environmental intervention, which too often take the form of techno-fixes that skirt structural change. Decoloniality, then, digital or otherwise, must figure centrally in actualizing ecological breakthrough in order to combat the persistence of historical wrongs and the narrow vision of proper environmental care associated with the distinction of nonlife.
Conclusion
While the outcome of Chase Iron Eyes’ trial is yet to be determined, the recent acquittal of a number of environmental activists who had protested the construction of a pipeline in the northeastern part of the country suggests he may prevail by means of the precedent-setting defense strategy used in that case (Mundahl, 2018). By pleading necessity, those activists succeeding in convincing the court that their actions were necessary given the magnitude of the threat posed by climate change. This unconventional repurposing of the standard ‘necessity defense’ reflects the shifting of a hegemonic system of valuation which has heretofore failed to acknowledge the environment in the capacity of claimant, entitled to justice in its own right. It represents, in the spirit of Wynter, a re-enchantment of the existing legal framework, creatively redefining the terms of necessity after the Anthropocene. The possibility of redress this strategy might offer Chase Iron Eyes and the Standing Rock Sioux is only partial, however, given that his arrest, along with those of many other #NoDAPL activists, took place on land originally ceded to the tribe by way of the 1851 and 1858 Fort Laramie treaties (Lennard, 2017). The ‘grim irony’ of this circumstance, in which native protesters were made into trespassers on what was once rightfully their land, is ‘one that animates the history of this country’ (Lennard, 2017). I would argue that it is also one that animates the current geontopolitical terrain of environmental reform under which the environment finds increasing avenues for legal redress, while its longstanding Indigenous advocates struggle to secure remuneration on their own terms.
Like the #NoDAPL tweet I discussed previously, Chase Iron Eyes’ case illustrates the importance of drawing out the tensions that underwrite progress, or, to restate Povinelli, ‘the virtual space that opens up between the potentiality and actuality of an alternative social project’ (2011: 8). In this paper, I have traced a parallel between the work of thinkers like Povinelli, Wynter, and Haraway, and their endeavors to negotiate the uneasy relation between setback and breakthrough in a postcolonial and post-anthropocentric context. This perspective is particularly relevant to the case of #NoDAPL, which I have argued works as an instance of digital decoloniality in its status not just as an act of resistance to the machinations of bio- and geontopower, but also of cross-conceptual and cross-ontological world-making. Demos (2017) recognizes the movement’s worlding potential when he writes: ‘The event at Standing Rock represents not only a remarkable Indigenous convergence … but also a structural transformation of the conditions of cultural practice.’ I have considered how this structural transformation has materialized (or failed to materialize) in #NoDAPL, the digital space that, for a time, became synonymous with Standing Rock. In doing so, I have demonstrated some of the ways in which decolonial practices have been inflected by digital technologies and explored the implications of the co-mediation of decolonial and environmental prerogatives. The ability of these fledgling alliances to endure the current geontopolitical exploitation of both life and nonlife will determine the movement’s legacy in the ongoing, interrelated struggles for Native rights and ecological well-being.