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Abstract

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, as in the #NoDAPL campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This paper explores affective engagement in online activism, including the Standing Rock ‘check-in’ campaign on Facebook. Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of embodied vs digital activism, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shields Project employs digital media in order to support direct action at Standing Rock. Patricia Clough draws a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body in her concept of biomediated bodies. This helps explain how physical and digital activism are linked: the digital and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well. Luger’s Mirror Shields Project functions as a form of alterlife, in resistance to biopower, recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also creating new possibilities for resistance.

Keywords

affect art biopolitics climate change digital activism environment Indigenous activism

Introduction

In November 2016, over a million people ‘checked in’ to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation on Facebook in order to help protect activists protesting the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. A viral post of unknown origin claimed this would shield protestors from police surveillance. However, the Morton County sheriff’s department denied that it was monitoring Facebook check-ins and, while protestors had shared a variety of possible support actions, checking in on Facebook was not among them. Despite not being of practical use, according to protestors it was a welcome show of solidarity, though it would have been better to see people show up and provide direct support. Largely ignored by the media until this point, the Facebook check-ins prompted a dramatic increase in coverage of the protests, while also demonstrating that protestors and supporters could communicate directly with each other. This virtual action demonstrates some of the potential and the pitfalls associated with affect-driven digital activism.

The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile (1,886 kilometer) Dakota Access pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota–South Dakota border. Running from North Dakota to Illinois with a capacity of 570,000 barrels of oil a day, it is instrumental to the growing oil industry in North Dakota and neighboring states. It was subject to months of protests in 2016 and 2017 since the pipeline’s route threatened the water supply and important Indigenous cultural sites and ancient burial grounds. Physical protests halted when the pipeline began carrying oil in June 2017. The protests at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation have included members of more than 100 tribes and are considered to be one of the largest Native American protests in recent times. Despite successive legal challenges by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe claiming that the environmental review conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers was insufficient, the Dakota Access pipeline was built and is currently operating. However, a federal appeals court has upheld the order of a full environmental impact review of the Dakota Access pipeline. This will not require the pipeline to stop operating.

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, particularly Twitter, as in the #NoDAPL campaign. Resistance to the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline also relied on affective response: a sense of shared nationhood, forged through histories of anticolonial activism, as well as a more-than-human sense of community and responsibility. Oceti Sakowin (all the Lakota and Dakota nations allying together) arose through shared histories of colonization dating back to the 19th century and the dispossession of land through environmental devastation couched in terms of economic development, including the building of a dam and flooding of Indigenous lands. This resistance was both centered in place – Mni Sose (the Missouri River) had long been the center of an ‘Indian war that never ends’– and also deeply global and technologized, since through social media and technology ‘the world had come to #NoDAPL’ (Estes, 2019: 7, 10). The prolonged protest garnered widespread and consistent attention on social media, amplifying possibilities for similar protests elsewhere (Steinman, 2019). #NoDAPL tactics – resistance camps, prominent use of social media, and online fundraising – have been taken up against other pipeline projects, such as the blockades against the Coastal GasLink in northern British Columbia led by the Wet’suwet’sun hereditary chiefs (#WetsuwetsunStrong), which sparked cross-Canada blockades and demonstrations.

This paper explores the relationship between the virtual realm and the offline world, considering how affective engagement in activism is shaped by social media. Communications technologies do not merely transmit pre-existing information and affect; they play an active role in forming what they ostensibly merely express (Blackman, 2019; Derrida, 1998). In the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter protests that involved both extensive online activism as well as mass protests in the streets, it is even more urgent to understand the relationships between embodied standing-with and digital activism. The challenges for activism are clear: when proximity with other humans is a direct threat due to a global pandemic, with a Canadian politician openly asserting that this is a great time to build pipelines because of restrictions on public protests (Bracken, 2020), digital activism takes on a renewed importance. How does commitment and empathy arise, circulate, and develop in and through physical and digital protests?

This paper draws on a variety of non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous theorists. As a white settler reading Indigenous activism through different theoretical lenses, I begin from Million’s (2014) assertion of the worthiness of Indigenous lives as the ‘stuff of theory’ and the value of affective experiences or ‘felt knowledge’ of Indigenous peoples independent of legitimation by Western academia, which is inextricably linked to settler colonialism (p. 32). Rejecting binary oppositions of Indigenous and modern/technological (Nelson, 1999), I draw from Native Studies scholars who argue for conversations between Native Studies and other fields, and the ‘intellectual sovereignty’ (Warrior, 1992) of Indigenous scholars and activists: both being informed by other disciplines and shaping scholarly discourse as a whole (Morgensen, 2011; Smith, 2010).

Social media activism such as checking in on Facebook is limited in its impact, since it is inseparable from biopolitical modes of surveillance and limitations on Indigenous access to cyberspace (Duarte, 2017). Technology has been used to surveil and limit Indigenous-led activism: law enforcement agencies have access to a wide range of tools to monitor geo-tagged posts on social media, such as Geofeedia (Levin and Woolf, 2016; Waddell, 2016). Patricia Clough’s concept of biomediated bodies is helpful in understanding how the repressive effects of biopolitical racism are deployed through technologies of the body, which also simultaneously give rise to potential resistance. Clough (2008) argues that affect is at work in biopower.

Practices of ‘standing-with’ (TallBear, 2014) are hampered if activism is understood as purely digital: Indigenous people gathering in the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock were essential to the protest actions. The action of ‘standing’ is absolutely embodied, involving a powerful connection to the land, in its specificities. There have, however, been important critiques of ‘standing’ as ableist, including Peers and Eales (2017). As well, the collective ‘standing with’ at Standing Rock is enabled and promoted through forms of technology – social media in particular. The virtual and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well (Karatzogianni, 2012b: 57). In order to avoid false dichotomies of ‘real’ (embodied) vs virtual activism, I follow Judith Butler’s argument that ‘What bodies are doing on the street when they are demonstrating is linked fundamentally to what communication devices and technologies are doing when they “report” on what is happening in the street. These are different actions, but they both require the body’ (Butler, 2015: 93–4).

Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of bodily vs digital activism, I turn to a discussion of the art/activism of Luger’s (2016) Mirror Shields Project. Luger is a Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota multidisciplinary artist who was born on the Standing Rock reservation. He employs digital media in this project in order to support direct action, challenging conventional divisions between virtual and embodied. The Mirror Shields Project is a form of what Michelle (2018) calls alterlives, in resistance to biopower, both recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also envisioning new futurities and possibilities for resistance and transformation.

Biomediated Bodies and ‘Standing-with’: Biopower, Media, Affect

The ‘affective turn’ (Clough, 2007, 2008) moves away from dichotomies of mind/body and passion/reason, away from subjective states of emotion contained within discrete subjects, exploring instead how emotions and affect move between bodies, connecting them in ‘new configurations of bodies, technology and matter’ (Clough and Halley, 2007: 2). Clough (2008) analyzes affect in relation to what she describes as ‘the biomediated body’ (p. 207), drawing a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body. Clough views affect as encompassing areas of information, surveillance, and capital, extending Foucaultian biopower to a Deleuzian-inspired thinking about bodies in terms of openness, complexity, and becoming. She moves beyond thinking of bodies as merely biological organisms, to analyze how they are increasingly technologized. New media and digital technologies expand the capacities of bodily matter invested with capital, mapped through DNA sequencing and bioinformatics, and reduced to informational substrates under advanced capitalism. Clough’s biomediated body recognizes the biopolitical deployment of racism – locating the Dakota Access Pipeline through the Standing Rock reserve, moved from its original route due to concerns about possible contamination of drinking water in the mostly white municipality of Bismarck, North Dakota – along with the ways in which bodies, work and reproduction are being reconfigured.

Clough builds upon Eugene (2003) formulation of biomedia. Thacker defined biomedia as a relationship between the technological and the biological, through which the biological remains biological while always taking on new capacities. This is not a hybrid of body and machine, nor is it a virtual body. Instead, the body is mediated through a relationship with technology, increasing the capacities of what the body can do but in such a way that technology seems to disappear. As Thacker (2003) puts it, ‘the body you get back is not the body with which you began, but you can still touch it’ (p. 53). Clough expands Thacker’s concept of biomedia by reading this technological expansion of bodily capacity through the lens of affect: building intensities through historically specific modes that give rise to new potentialities of becoming.

Clough draws on Deleuze’s conception of the virtual, in which the virtual can be real without being actual. In the virtual, objects and states exist but are not tangible or ‘concrete’; the virtual is known only indirectly, through its effects (Shields, 2006). The virtual is real insofar as it can be interacted with and is generative. For Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual are fully real – the former has concrete existence while the latter does not, but this does not make it any less real. Affect operates at the level of the virtual, the potential and the emergent; it links across senses, events and temporalities. The reality of the virtual is the reality of change: it operates in terms of openness and indeterminacy (Massumi, 1998).

The militarized response to the protests and the intensive use of technologies of surveillance (to which the Facebook check-ins were responding) represent what Massumi (2015) calls ontopower, a pre-emptive power beyond the biopolitical control of life. Ontopower is the governance of affect, ‘or its modulation when assembled with new technologies of time/memory, new media technologies, bio- and neuro-technologies as well’ (Clough, 2012: 25). Ontopower, Massumi claims, is a new type of power encompassing both soft power (surveillance) and hard power (military interventions). It subsumes and transcends biopower. Ontopower refocuses on what may emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling: it is based on an affective mode of pre-emption. As such, ontopower can help explain criminalization of anti-pipeline protests: the feeling that protests may pose a violent threat even in the absence of any evidence.

Affect challenges conceptualizations of matter as inert in contrast to active subjects; instead affect moves through and between organic and inorganic bodies, without inhering in them. The Standing Rock slogan, ‘Mni Wiconi’ – water is life, or more accurately, water is alive – can be understood in these affective terms. This understanding of water may be described as what Bennett (2010) calls ‘vital matter’: things having the capacity to not only ‘impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (p. viii). There are risks, however, in reading Indigenous worldviews through a posthuman theoretical lens. Todd (2016) notes that posthuman theories often fail to recognize extremely long histories of Indigenous worldviews with their complex relationalities of humans and nonhumans. As Estes (2019) notes, ‘Concepts such as Mni Wiconi (water is life) may be new to some, but like the nation of people the concept belongs to, Mni Wiconi predates and continues to exist in spite of white supremacist empires like the United States’ (p. 15).

Social Media, Bodies in the Street, and Digital Assembly

Emotions can motivate people to become involved in social movements, keep them involved, or lead them to stop participating; activists also appeal to emotions strategically in order to incite people to take action (Jasper, 1998; Gould, 2004). Affective transmission occurs both within and beyond digital realms and may be intensified or muffled in the process of digital circulation (Kuntsman, 2012: 1). Technologies do not faithfully transmit ideas, data, and feelings, which are instead mediated and constituted through their transmission. Consequently, the effects of technological transmission are not predictable. As Massumi (2002) puts it, ‘what the mass media transmit is not fundamentally image-content but event-potential’ (p. 269). Networked affect (or networked virtuality) involves trends, feelings, and processes spreading across social media in ways that ‘appear to defy rational logic and understanding’ (Blackman, 2019: 11). Affect is not reducible to rationality and thus affective engagement in digital activism cannot be fully predicted or controlled; nevertheless, its power and potential are increasingly apparent.

#NoDAPL is certainly not the only recent protest to rely heavily on digital activism. From the Arab Uprising, to Occupy, to the Worldwide Women’s March, to Black Lives Matter, to #MeToo, to anti-lockdown protests (Schradie, 2020), to rent strikes (Massarenti, 2020), to the GameStop Redditors’ complicated challenge to capitalism, increasingly digital platforms are integral to social activism. #NoDAPL, building on the Idle No More movement for Indigenous sovereignty, drew heavily on social media use, particularly Twitter. The widespread use of digital platforms in Idle No More meant that ‘an aspect of Indigeneity, as a paradigm of social and political protest, had become digitized, infrastructurally through broadband internet, personally through consumer mobile devices, socially through social media adoption, and discursively through flash mobs, hashtags, and memes’ (Duarte, 2017: 5). #NoDAPL and Idle No More attained widespread visibility as mass movements through their use of digital platforms, yet they both emerged from hundreds of years of ongoing Indigenous resistance (Estes, 2019; Simpson et al., 2018).

The profile of the #NoDAPL protests increased dramatically at the national and international level as a result of checking in on Facebook. During the protests, a rumor started that the police were using Facebook to track and arrest activists involved in the protests (Kennedy, 2016). Individuals were asked to check-in to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Facebook in order to confuse local authorities and provide anonymity for protestors. This rumor was denied by local police and the action did not actually protect protestors, but the show of solidarity that resulted from the campaign increased attention to the protests generally and to the fact that protestors were being attacked and arrested (Kennedy, 2016). The role of the ‘check-in’ function on Facebook in this campaign made the use of social media itself newsworthy (Hunt and Gruszczynski, 2019: 5). Both NPR and The Guardian reported that the number of check-ins to Standing Rock went from 140,000 to over 1.5 million almost overnight (Levin and Woolf, 2016; Hunt and Gruszczynski, 2019; Kennedy, 2016). According to Hunt and Gruszczynski (2019), ‘the attention garnered through this interaction of social media and traditional forms of media could have broader impacts, such as priming attention to pipeline protests and concerns in the future’ (p. 12). Social media played an important role in increasing affective engagement with the protest. Since ‘the largest spikes in attention’ occurred following violent clashes at protests, it may be that regardless of the media form, vividness is a currency necessary for social movements to acquire attention, lacking sustained, large-scale protests that tend to capture attention over the long term (Hunt and Gruszczynski, 2019: 13; Jennings and Saunders, 2019). Alexandra Deem argues that regardless of their effectiveness, the Facebook check-ins reconfigured the structure of solidarity and presence, redefining place and reconstituting the virtual and the analog (Deem, 2018: 12). According to Deem, while ‘embodied presence provided the model for the disembodied presence enacted by the check-in, it was this disembodied presence that lent a new sort of visibility to the bodies actually present at Standing Rock’ (Deem, 2018: 12).

Karatzogianni (2012b) calls for further theorizing the revolutionary contribution of social media in light of the affective structures and politics of emotion (p. 68). She argues that the affective structures of social media and digital cultures more broadly allow the transformation of the ‘digital virtual’ into the ‘revolutionary virtual’, which can materialize revolution in the offline world (Karatzogianni, 2012b). However, digital activism does not necessarily promote progressive social change. Conservative digital activists often gain an advantage online. A widening digital activism gap is ‘reproducing, and in some cases intensifying, preexisting power imbalances’ due to the tremendous amount of labor required (Schradie, 2019: 7). Organizations rich in resources are better positioned to make use of digital technologies, while grassroots organizations with less time, money, personnel, and structure risk falling behind (Schradie, 2019: 7). Digital activism also tends to reinforce existing inequalities by relying on class privilege, horizontal organization, and simplified ideology (Schradie, 2019).

The 2016 US presidential election and accompanying Cambridge Analytica scandal have exposed the risks of digital advertising in political campaigns. Facebook and Google’s dominance in the market for online advertising has significant repercussions for the private regulation of paid political speech, since these decisions are being made in the absence of transparency and accountability (Kreiss and Mcgregor, 2019). Facebook’s algorithms are far from politically neutral or progressive in their effects, creating echo chambers by showing users similar content and thereby increasing political polarization (Thorson et al., 2021). This leads to political extremism, toxic political rhetoric, misinformation, and ideologically motivated violence (Uscinski et al., 2021). All digital platforms do not create echo chambers to the same degree, however: there are significant differences between platforms that allow users to tweak their feed algorithm (such as Reddit) and platforms that do not allow this (Facebook and Twitter) (Cinelli et al., 2021).

There are also barriers to online activism that reflect histories of colonization. A deep ‘digital divide’ exists between Native Nations of the United States and the rest of the country; according to the Federal Communications Commission, only 53% of people living on tribal reservations have access to broadband internet, with access particularly low in rural tribal areas (Mack et al., 2022; Wang, 2018). Although Simpson et al. (2018) recognize the incredible utility of the internet for Indigenous activism, they are concerned about the lack of reciprocal relationships between bodies and land on the internet, which may constitute a ‘digital dispossession’ (p. 79). They also remain wary of the asymmetry of large corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, where Indigenous peoples can be content providers but are unable to structurally intervene in digital technologies, reinforcing settler colonialism (Simpson et al., 2018: 79).

Technologies of Resistance: Biomedia and Art

In contrast with the largely passive Facebook check-in campaign, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shields Project enhanced creative capacities: online instruction for individual makers of the shields and collective, embodied resistance deploying the shields at Standing Rock. The project spans the fields of art and activism, physical and digital resistance; through affective resistance to biopower, it produced new forms of intensities that create possibilities for change. The mirror shields (16 x 48 inch reflective boards) were designed, developed, and deployed for use at Standing Rock, where they transformed notions of place and space while remaking the boundaries of bodies. Luger (2019) described the shields as ‘poetic armour’ (p. 262), providing physical protection for Standing Rock protestors while reflecting back the violence of police and security forces.

Luger took inspiration from mirror shields used by the EuroMaidan movement in Ukraine. Protests broke out in late 2013 after then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich scrapped a pending trade agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties to Russia (Scherker, 2014). After a brutal crackdown by Ukrainian riot police, mirror shields were used by protestors to remind police that underneath all their riot gear they were still human beings. The EuroMaidan mirror shields also inspired use of similar mirror shields in 2017 during protests against President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela (Rawlins, 2017).

Luger’s mirror shields were modified from those used in Ukraine, constructed from Masonite boards and reflective adhesive foil rather than glass to be more durable and less likely to cause injury. Luger worked with students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is an artist-in-residence, to design the shields and posted a video online providing instructions on how to build them. The shields linked the makers, across the United States, with water protectors in North Dakota. The shields were used on the frontline of the protests, protecting hundreds of people and behind them a camp of thousands. Luger (2016) hoped that the mirror shields would inspire the demonstrators to ‘hold ground and not panic’, promote solidarity among protestors and disrupt the violence of uniformed security and police through reflecting their shared humanity.

Creative tactics, imagery and theatricality are increasingly features of political movements and struggles (Serafini, 2018: 1), with affect a key aspect of art activist practices (Serafini, 2018: 174). As Clough (2012) describe, ‘The measure of affect is an aesthetic measure, understanding aesthetic measure to be singular, non-generalizable, particular to each event, or each capture of the not-yet’ (p. 29). The combination of art and digital technologies in Indigenous resistance has an extensive history. De La Garza (2016) describes how digital technology ‘resembles and even parallels traditional Indigenous means of producing and sharing knowledge and of experiencing time and space’ (p. 49). Nelson (1999) coins the term ‘Maya-hacker’ to describe the vital importance of information to political strategies of Indigenous resistance in Guatemala. The Zapatista movement also relied on virtual protests, drawing together theatre and activism in the digital realm (Lane and Dominguez, 2003).

Performativity provides a way of understanding the complex, iterative relationships between digital and physical protest and between art and activism (Vlavo, 2017). In her analysis of assembly, Butler (2015) describes how collective actions of various kinds performatively produce ‘the people’. Bodies protesting are essentially making a performative claim to belong there, to have a right to exist and assemble, both prior to and in addition to any of their specific political demands. These modes of assembly are not limited to physical gatherings for Butler (2015), since ‘not everyone can appear in a bodily form, and many of those who cannot appear, who are constrained from appearing or who operate through virtual or digital networks, are also part of “the people”’ (p. 8).

The mirror shields represent an opening to an affirmative biopolitics (Esposito, 2008), which involves recognizing that harming one life harms all lives. The shields protected protestors from the rubber bullets of DAPL security guards while reflecting back the securitized, uniformed forces not just as instruments of biopower but as affected and affecting humans. The mirror shields produce what Massumi (2002) terms intensity, which he equates with affect (p. 27). Intensity is

associated with nonlinear processes: resonance and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static – temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption . . . It is not exactly passivity, because it is filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation. And it is not yet activity, because the motion is not of the kind that can be directed (if only symbolically) toward practical ends in a world of constituted objects and aims. (Massumi, 2002: 26)

Luger’s Mirror Shield Project represents perceiving the present in the past, observing current protests in a historical mirror. Unlike linear notions of time dominant in settler worldviews, Indigenous conceptions of time understand the present as structured by the past and ancestors, with alternative futures made possible through relationship to the past (Estes, 2019). Resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline was inspired by the Lakota prophecy of Zuzeca Sapa, the Black Snake, that would stretch over the land and threaten all life, beginning with water (Estes, 2019: 14). Estes (2019) describes such prophecies as a ‘revolutionary theory, a way to help us think about our relationship to the land, to other humans and other than humans, and to history and time’ (p. 14).

The use of mirrors in Indigenous resistance has a long history. Carcelén-Estrada (2017) traces a genealogy in a Zapatista story which explains how to kill a lion not with a gun but with a mirror, which is used to deflect the lion’s power and direct it against itself (p. 104). The 2016 Water Serpent Action built on this tradition, as well as reflecting the prophecy of the Black Snake. Conceived and enacted by Luger and Rory Wakemup (Ojibwe), it involved more than 150 protestors holding the mirror shields above their heads as they marched along the snow-covered Oceti Sakowin camp near Standing Rock, creating a moving river or serpent-like formation, documented from above by drone camera. The audience for this action were police surveillance planes constantly flying overhead; it was intended to provide evidence of the water protectors’ resilience and reflect back the harms of police surveillance. In walking the shape of the river, light reflected off the shields like water, the lines between human body and nonhuman nature were blurred, challenging extractive views of the natural world and asserting Indigenous sovereignty over the land (Davis, 2019: 149; Morris, 2019).

The Mirror Shield Project produced new affective and bodily capacities, transforming the relationships between bodies and landscapes and challenging biopower. Many other actions involving the mirror shields were organized by anonymous communities online, including one of over 1000 US veterans who came from across the country to guard water protectors from the police with mirror shields and other handmade protective shields. The mirror shields continue to be made anonymously and used in frontline actions around the world, including Black Lives Matter protests across the United States in 2020.

Conclusion: #NoDAPL’s Alterlives

Affect can be a powerful driver of action. Technology provides both opportunities and obstacles, promoting empathy by giving us a glimpse into the lives of others but also potentially misrepresenting our capacity to share the embodied experiences of others. To what extent do social media strategies such as checking in at Standing Rock on Facebook constitute a form of solidarity? How much of this is a technological buffer between a passive audience and committed activists, an example of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011): a fantasy of effortless allyship possible through the click of a ‘like’ button disguising underlying apathy and perpetuation of privilege? Is there a need to recognize the limits of empathy along with the limits of a decentered, posthumanist subjectivity?

Clough (2008) describes biomediated bodies as operating at the postbiological threshold. This threshold is indeterminate, however: it is ‘the limit point beyond which there will have been change irreducible to causes’ (p. 19). Clough notes that the affective turn has already been mined by capitalism: capital accumulates in the realm of affect and racism helps realize this accumulation economically. Nevertheless, Clough (2008) sounds a note of cautious optimism: ‘it is important to remember the virtual at the threshold. Beyond it, always a chance for something else, unexpected, new’ (p. 19). In the title of his history of Indigenous resistance, Estes (2019) claims that ‘our history is the future’. Through relationship to the past it is possible to imagine new possibilities for the future. This is a time of what Murphy (2018) calls alterlife: ‘the struggle to exist again, but differently when already in conflicted, damaging, and deadly conditions, a state of already having been altered, of already being in the aftermath, and yet persisting’ (p. 113). Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline can be thought of in terms of alterlives – a state of already having been altered by environmental violence that is nonetheless a capacity to persist and to become something else (Murphy, 2017). Alterlives resist colonialist biopower through imagining futurity and ways of being otherwise that are rooted in local communities and intimate relations, that build on past and current political projects of resistance (Murphy, 2018: 122). Luger’s mirror shields show us both what is – the racist history of settler colonialism, dispossession of Indigenous lands, environmental destruction – while also creating new possibilities, new forms of relationality, rerouting of affect, and reconfigured boundaries between us and them, protestor and police. Time and space are transformed through relation to the long history of Indigenous resistance to dispossession from their land and damage to Mni Sosa (the Missouri River). The biomediated body is rooted in biopolitical racism, and yet it is transformed through art, community, technology, and embodied resistance in Standing Rock. New potentialities and forms of emergence have become possible.

US President Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL project raised hopes that DAPL will meet a similar fate. The environmental review by the Army Corps is ongoing and, whatever the outcome, the losing side is likely to continue the fight in the Supreme Court. Even if #NoDAPL is not able to shut down the pipeline in the near future, in periods of abeyance social media can help retain ‘the people (resources) needed to accumulate and maintain the power to carry on the movement’ (Leong et al., 2019: 191). Social media use in #NoDAPL is described by Clark and Hinzo (2019) as ‘digital survivance’, combining aspects of survival and resistance (Vizenor, 1999). This digital survivance involves ‘the digital and visual practices of Indigenous peoples and their allies as they have drawn upon and advanced Indigenous epistemologies and storytelling traditions within the contexts and constraints of social media’ (Clark and Hinzo, 2019: 94). #NoDAPL digital survivance includes networks of online and embodied solidarities enabling future Indigenous-led resistance against pipeline development. The biomediated body has changed through protest, standing-with, and checking-in. New potentialities and forms of emergence have become possible. Through interconnections of fluids and circuits, water protectors and Twitter-users, affective expansions of bodily capacities give rise to solidarity and new forms of ‘standing-with’ between biomediated bodies.

Footnotes

TCS Online Forum:

Robyn Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She is the author of The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding: Power, Pleasure, Poetics (University of Toronto Press, 2018) and has published articles in a variety of journals including Feminist Theory, Hypatia, and Environmental Politics. Her work explores theoretical issues of embodiment, subjectivity, gender, and reproductive and environmental health.

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Art,Affect,and Social Media in the ‘No Dakota Access Pipeline’ Movement

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Biomediated Bodies and ‘Standing-with’: Biopower, Media, Affect

Social Media, Bodies in the Street, and Digital Assembly

Technologies of Resistance: Biomedia and Art

Conclusion: #NoDAPL’s Alterlives

Footnotes

References