Decolonizing blockades: Settler-citizen solidarities with Indigenous blockades

Abstract

In the Winter 2020, Canada witnessed an extraordinary number of blockades and solidarity protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Wet’suwet’en had for years been fighting against the construction of an oil pipeline across their traditional territories. After a police raid dismantled their blockade, the traditional chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en issued a call for solidarity and support. The response was overwhelming with an enormous number of solidarity actions, including blockades of critical infrastructure, organized across Canada and internationally. This paper critically examines how settler-citizens engaged in acts of solidarity with Indigenous people, with a particular focus on how these acts of solidarity can contribute to the decolonization of Canadian citizenship. Since the Wet’suwet’en struggle involved the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, the solidarity actions of Canadians raise important questions about the meaning of settler forms of citizenship. This paper takes a relational and decolonial perspective on solidarity blockades. Such an approach allows us to ask questions that are outside the scope of assessments concerned with the efficacy of a particular blockading action. The paper investigates the forms of solidarity found at the blockades, noting that a wide range of antagonistic, agonistic, and spatio-temporal relations were enacted at the various blockading actions. These relations allowed for a contentious production of new political subjectivities, collectivities, and citizenships.

Now this is a pipeline I can support! A pipeline of Indigenous and Canadian solidarity to stand against genocide and breach of native sovereignty, land rights and the right to say no.

– Pam Palmater, Mi’kmaq scholar and activist

Introduction

It was Saturday February 8, 2020 and I had just returned from my son’s basketball game when my partner told me that there was a railway blockade a few blocks from our home in Toronto. The blockade was set up in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and their struggle against the $15 billion 670 km Coastal GasLink pipeline project. My partner and our daughter had already visited the blockade. Soon we all went up again and joined several hundred others to block the Canadian Pacific (CP) freight line. By the time I arrived, the speeches were wrapping up but there was still plenty of chanting (“when justice fails, block the rails” and “Wet’suwet’en, we got your back! Close the roads and block the tracks!”) and lots of banners expressing solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en (“No Pipelines: Stop RCMP Invasion on Indigenous Lands”). I noticed quite a number of pendants with the Extinction Rebellion symbol on them, which I learned later was because the environmental group Rising Tide was one of the organizers of the action. Fallen branches from nearby trees were placed on sections of the track, but clearly the political force of the blockade came from the assembly of human bodies.

The solidarity blockade in my neighbourhood came just days after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested 14 people at a Wet’suwet’en blockade, and a day after Tyendinaga Mohawks in eastern Ontario set up a solidarity railway blockade on their territory. Indeed, for most of February 2020, Canada witnessed an extraordinary number of blockades and solidarity protests across the country in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Wet’suwet’en had for years been fighting against the construction of an oil pipeline across their traditional territories (Midzain-Gobin, 2019). On February 6, 2020, the RCMP began what would be a multi-day violent raid on the Wet’suwet’en, making arrests and dismantling blockades established to prevent the construction of the pipeline. All five chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation rejected the construction of the pipeline on their territory and issued calls for solidarity and support. ¹ This call for solidarity was met with dramatic and sustained actions across Canada and internationally. Of particular note were the rail blockades set up by various Indigenous peoples, including the Mi’gmaq of Listuguj, the Kahnawake and Tyendinaga Mohawks, and the Gitxsan near New Hazelton. Solidarity rail blockades by settler-citizen allies were set up in Halifax, Coquitlam, and Toronto, including the one I participated in with my family and neighbors.

While the blockade in Toronto lasted for about 6 hours, the Tyendinaga Mohawk blockade turned out to be the longest Indigenous railway blockade in Canadian history, lasting until February 24, 2020 when police forcibly dismantled it. The Tyendinaga Mohawk blockade was located on a strategic “choke point” on the Canadian National (CN) rail line, disrupting passenger train service between Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa as well as freight traffic for most of central and eastern Canada. Meanwhile, the Gitxsan blockade shut the Port of Prince Rupert, affecting 150 freight trains and 18 container ships. The Port of Vancouver – Canada’s busiest – was blockaded with 48 ships affected. In addition to these actions, dozens and dozens of other blockades of highways, roads, bridges, ferry terminals, government buildings, and ports were set up in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en. As well, there were literally hundreds of round dances, protests, rallies, marches, traffic disruptions, highway slowdowns, lockdowns, occupations, student walk outs, and fundraisers for the Wet’suwet’en. ² The blockades and solidarity actions dominated the national news for weeks and were the central focus for the federal and many provincial and local governments. Hashtags like #ShutCanadaDown and #WetsuwetenStrong began trending on social media as there was a renewed public debate about settler-solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty in Canada. Decried by political and economic leaders for creating a “crisis” for the Canadian economy, the blockades revealed the colonial underpinnings of supply chain capitalism (Cowen, 2018; 2020a). The blockade – an intensely local action – proved to be profoundly far-reaching in its effects. The political and economic pressure brought by these solidarity actions – in particular, blockades on railways and highways – were so intense that federal and provincial authorities agreed to renew negotiations with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, which resulted in a tentative agreement on March 1, 2020. ³

The solidarity blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en are but one dramatic example of the increased instances and impact of blockades in local, national, and global politics. From Standing Rock, to Hong Kong, to port cities such as Buenaventura, Colombia, the tactic of blockading has spread across many sites, issues, and domains – and has been accompanied by scholarly and activist analysis. This is an important change from when Nicholas Blomley (1996: 5) began his formative essay on Indigenous blockades by suggesting that their “very frequency and predictability” might explain “why blockades have not received much scholarly attention as a political phenomenon.” While the blockade is undoubtedly a powerful tool of protest, there are important limitations to seeing blockading as merely a tactic or technique of protest. Such a perspective encourages assessing blockades for how successful they are in achieving particular aims. It evaluates blockades on their relative success or failure in achieving a stated goal. Such evaluations can be quickly overlaid with normative assessments about the perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy of the blockade. Glen Coulthard speaks to this tension when, during the height of Idle No More activism, blockades were often branded as negative, threatening, and illegitimate. By contrast, so-called “legitimate” approaches placed emphasis “on formal ‘negotiations’ – usually carried out between ‘official’ Aboriginal leadership and representatives of the state – and if need be coupled with largely symbolic acts of peaceful, nondisruptive protest that abide by Canada’s ‘rule of law’” (Coulthard 2014: 166).

There are other ways of assessing blockades other than their perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy, success or failure. Naomi Klein (2014: 255) notes that the real importance of blockades comes not from their numbers as much as how they are representative of a “deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival of the health of the water, air, and soil.” Sasha Davis (2023: 1391–92) similarly insists on analysing blockades as “productive happenings” that seek to “nurture alternative social, economic, and political practices.” Deb Cowen reaffirms this point, arguing that the blockade is a site where “some of the most powerful forms of citizenship are emerging” (Cowen and Woznicki, 2017). Blockades, therefore, can be studied for the kind of relationships that people enact in the context of solidarity blockades. A relational approach to solidarity blockades allows us to ask questions that are outside the scope of assessments concerned with the efficacy of a particular blockading action. What forms of solidarity are enacted at the blockade? What kind of antagonistic, agonistic, or ambivalent relations are performed at the blockade? What kinds of political subjectivities, collectivities, and citizenships are produced at the blockade?

In this paper, I am interested in investigating the potentials and possibilities for decolonization that come out from participation in solidarity blockades. What is politically generative about investigating the blockade as a site of decolonizing practices? Anne McNevin (2020: 545) argues that “politically generative” refers to “productive ideas, practices, and discourses that challenge the givenness of subjects (citizens) and institutions (citizenship, the state) or that question whether those subjects and institutions must take the established forms they currently take.” In a similar way, I am interested in understanding if settler-citizens engaging in acts of solidarity with Indigenous struggles can contribute to a critical decolonization of settler forms of citizenship. Mindful of Walter Mignolo’s insight that “there is no proprietory or privileged master plan for decoloniality” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 108), this paper asks if these solidarity blockades are an example of “the thousands and thousands of decolonial projects” that Mignolo argues are being enacted across the globe (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014: 198).

It can be challenging to “see” solidarity blockades from the perspective of decolonizing citizenship. This is because the settler state, as Andrea Smith (2015: 26) argues, has historically constituted itself through a logic of “seeing” and “not-seeing.” A crucial element of this dialectic is that settler citizenship is “not-seen” in those terms at all. In Canada, for example, the discourse of citizenship is typically about “multicultural citizens” or “dual citizens” or “national citizens.” Solidarity with Indigenous struggles can be subsumed into liberal discourses that re-affirm, rather than challenge, an idealized version of Canadian citizenship as embracing diversity, compassion, and reconciliation. The idea of the “settler citizen” is largely absent in mainstream discussions about Canadian identity. And yet, the solidarity blockades with the Wet’suwet’en struggle forced the issue of settler-citizenship in the realm of visibility. In doing so, they raised critical questions about citizenship and sovereignty in Canada. As Kai Bosworth and Charmaine Chua (Bosworth and Chua, 2023: 6) note: “The settler state protects the ‘critical infrastructure’ of pipelines because their interruption threatens not only the continuity of capital accumulation, but also the stability of settler claims to past and present sovereignty. Importantly, the latter includes its citizens’ indoctrination into settler society.”

The paper proceeds by, first, providing an account of relational solidarity and how such actions can contribute to the decolonization of citizenship. The paper then provides a brief genealogy of blockades, focusing on both the resonances and dissonances between contemporary blockades and urban barricades. The barricade, like the contemporary blockade, is quintessentially spatial in its enactment of resistance, and also a site for the formation of collective political subjectivities. Next, I consider the ways in which blockades are formed, emphasizing the assemblage of local materials and human bodies, the spontaneity of their creation, and their openness to the participation of passers-by. The paper then goes on to consider the space-time of blockades, with a particular focus on the blockade’s relationship to movement. Blockades, we shall see, not only work to arrest mobility, but can also facilitate passage and even be mobile in their own right. This relationship to movement is, therefore, much more complicated than simple blockage or stoppage. Blockades can move from site-to-site in order to maximize both their strategic utility and also allow for a kind of blockade sociability to emerge. Moreover, since the blockade’s relation to movement also includes a relationship to individuals and groups who seek to defy or destroy the blockade, the paper goes on to critically consider the practices of “blockade running” and “blockade bashing” in relation to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockades. Finally, the paper reflects what goes on “behind” the blockade, and the new forms of connectivity, community, and world-making that lies beyond the blockade.

Relational solidarity

Acts of settler-citizen solidarity through blockading are compelling to investigate from the perspective of decolonizing citizenship because solidarity can contribute towards “flattening asymmetrical and racialised power relations” (Tazzioli and Walters, 2019: 180). Emphasizing the performative nature of solidarity - or what they call “doing solidarity” - Schwiertz and Schwenken (2020) argue that solidarity is an ongoing and continual process. Solidarity is not a finite resource or temporally bound act, but something that must constantly be reproduced in and through relationships. But what is relational solidarity?

Arguably, all forms of solidarity are relational by virtue of the fact that it involves a connection with someone or some cause. However, we can distinguish different forms of solidarity, not least on the basis of how passive or active the relationship. As Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández points out, there is a difference between being in a state of solidarity and taking action in a relationship to someone or some cause. Gaztambide-Fernández (2012: 54) names this as a difference between being in solidarity with someone and solidarizing oneself with someone. The later, he argues, involves performative actions that are transformative in their effects. Relational solidarity is, therefore, a way of emphasizing both the constitutive and transformative nature of relationality. It is constitutive because “individual subjects do not enter into relationships, but rather subjects are made in and through relationships” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012: 52). It is transformative because the act of solidarizing oneself with others provokes a series of questions: “how am I being made by others? What are the consequences of my being on others? What kinds of sacrifices are implied in the mythology of myself as being and my insistence in my individual freedom?” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012: 52).

Agustín and Jørgensen’s (2019) recent work on solidarity also emphasizes its relational quality, in a way that emphasizes the potential for the generation of political subjectivities and collectivities. Solidarity is relational, they argue, because “collective identities and political subjectivities emerge from solidarity practices, and contention is also a consequence of the politics that solidarity movements reject” (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019: 25–26). This contentious quality to solidarity is critical for how it “shapes new forms of politics and political subjectification which contest existing modes of exclusion and invisibilization” (28). Solidarity is also spatial, they go on, not only because it consists of acts that connect the “here” to the “there,” but also because “solidarities are shaped and shape spaces in which social relations are produced, and they can upscale and connect different space and geographies through trans-local networks and imaginaries” (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019: 26).

For solidarity to be a dynamic political force it must be creative. Solidarity requires experimentation, verve, and inventiveness. This allows acts of solidarity to be generative of “new alternatives and imaginaries” (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019: 34). Both blockading and solidarity involve spatial practices. Blockades spatially demarcate a “here” and a “there.” Solidarity, by contrast, is all about connecting the “here” to the “there.” One seeks to build spatial barriers in order to make a political claim; the other seeks to collapse spatial separations in order to connect with these political causes. Such an attitude towards solidarity, I would suggest, is especially necessary in the context of decolonizing citizenship. What is at stake here is not just connecting places and people within a state, nor is it about making connections to causes that are beyond national borders. Since the Wet’suwet’en were utilizing blockades to assert “sovereignty on the ground” (Simpson and Le Billion, 2021), the state’s claim to possess neat boundaries of inside/outside is revealed as something that is entirely uncertain and strongly contested. The point is not just that solidarities can traverse and intersect various borders, territories, and sovereignties, but that these borders, territories, are sovereignties are the subject to political struggles themselves (Simpson, 2014).

Lineages of blockades

The blockade has a long history as a tool, tactic, or technique of protest. But if the blockade is a quintessential emblem of protest, then it owes much to the revolutionary image of the urban barricade. The accumulation of objects as an act of political protest has its modern origins with the “Day of the Barricades” of May 12, 1588 in Paris. The phenomenon repeated itself in France and across Europe throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries and reached its apex in the revolutions of 19^th century, with as many as 6000 barricades erected in Paris during the 1848 revolution (Douglas, 2008: 32). During this time, “the very word ‘barricade’ had become all but synonymous with the concept of revolution” (Traugott, 2010: 9). While advances in military counter-tactics, as well as major urban redesign, has diminished the tactical efficacy of the barricade in urban insurgencies, the image of the barricade as a revolutionary symbol has endured. The barricade remains singularly notable for its “symbolic and figurative force in vocabularies of resistance, where it has come to signify insurgency, self-sacrifice, heroism, martyrdom, and a politics of antagonism” (Ertür, 2016: 97).

Despite their resonances with Parisian barricades, contemporary blockades have diverse lineages. The blockades that emerged in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en draw on multiple repertoires, including ones that are more connected to the tactics and strategies employed in the global south, both in cities and in non-urban areas, than those that were relevant to the narrow streets and alleyways of 19th century Paris (cf. Arcilla, 2023; Gilbert, 2023; Pasternak, 2017). It is, therefore, worthwhile to map out some of the similarities and differences that contemporary blockades have with barricading activity, especially in terms of how they relate to questions about protection, space, and political subjectivity. These issues are interrelated, but I will consider each in turn beginning with protection.

The earliest definitions of barricades emphasized their defensive function, with the 1694 Dictionnaire De L’Académie Française defining a barricade as a “type of entrenchment that is usually made with barrels filled with earth for the purpose of defending oneself or finding cover from the enemy” (cited in Traugott, 2010: 1). But while barricades were erected as a form of self-protection from military forces or from the violence of insurgency, the protective dimension of barricades became less important over time. This was due, in part, to technological developments in warfare and policing by state militaries and police forces. It was also a consequence of the spatial transformation of cities, most famously Haussmann’s transformation of Paris from a city of narrow, winding streets to one of expansive boulevards. While these boulevards made the city more navigable and facilitated the easy movement of commerce, industry, and people, they also had the effect of eliminating the narrow, cramped streets that made barricading such an effective tactic. As David Harvey (2003: 148–49) notes: “Many of the dens and rookeries and narrow, easily barricaded streets were swept away and replaced by more easily controlled boulevards.”

Second, both barricades and blockades are a spatial tactics of disruption and resistance. However, the space of the blockade can differ qualitatively from the space of the barricade. The literature on barricades is so focused on the lineages established by the barricades of revolutionary Paris that it tends to think about barricades as an exclusively urban political practice. While many acts of blockading – like the railway blockade that occurred in my downtown Toronto neighborhood – continue to take place in city spaces, contemporary blockades cannot be reduced to an urban phenomenon. Blockades can occupy a variety of sites, places, and locales. Blockades set up against resource extraction, for example, are often in remote sites far away from any Haussmann-style infrastructures that would diminish a blockade’s effectiveness. In the case Indigenous struggles or environmental protests, many blockades are erected in sites that are far removed by any city or urban infrastructure. Blockades can be a particularly effective tactic in Canada because resource extraction industries – timber, mining, oil and gas – are often located far away from major cities and towns. As a result, resources must be transported long distances and across often quite isolated and rugged terrain. This creates the ideal conditions for “choke-points” to physically block the movement of these resources. Because these resources often originate on First Nations’ territories, or are transported on roads or railways that cut across their territories, many Indigenous communities in Canada are well situated to put these “critical infrastructures” at risk through blockading activity (Temper and Bliss, 2015: 120–21).

Third, both barricades and blockades involve the formation of collective political subjectivities. Scholarship on blockades readily speak to the deep sense of connection, community, and collective solidarities that emerge on the blockade. Carl Douglas (2008) has argued that the barricade, as a form and tactic of urban insurgency in revolutionary Paris, involved collective subject formations. The very practice of barricade building involved the engagement of the public, where “passers-by were each invited to contribute a paver.” The effects of such a practice cannot be minimized as they convert the process of building a blockade into a means of “engaging the disengaged” or of “converting observers into participants” (Douglas, 2008: 39). From the perspective of understanding how collective subjectivities are formed and mobilized, barricades represent a tension between enmity and sociality. On the one hand, as Jason Frank (2021: 137, emphasis added) notes, the “most obvious way barricades enact sites of collective subjectivization is in the literalized line of antagonism they establish between the people and the regime.” On the other hand, what can only be described as a pervasive “barricade sociality” (Arenas and Dzenovska, 2010: 183) is a common feature of any barricade. This sociality brings people together through the act of creating, sustaining, and enacting the blockade. Barricade sociality speaks to the “collective social identities with transformative political possibilities” that emerged in the context of building, maintaining, and being on the barricade. Far from being merely an assemblage of objects, barricade sociality reminds us that barricades are also a site “where speeches were given, songs were sung, petitions were circulated, friendships were formed, and emancipatory visions of the future took shape” (Frank, 2021: 141).

A similar engagement with building a collectivity continues in contemporary blockades, but the “we” often exceeds the urban focus of barricade studies. Indeed, if participation in Parisian barricades allowed for an identification and articulation of a collective urban “we”, then what kind of collective identity emerged from the blockades set up in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en? While many of the solidarity blockades were set up in urban areas, most were not and were instead established in relatively remote rural areas. It would be a mistake, however, to replace the urban collectivity with a national one. To say these were cross-national or pan-Canadian blockades would be a misrepresentation. In the first place, solidarity blockades were not only set up in Canada, but were located internationally. Indeed, solidarity actions were organized in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. These solidarity actions speak to the well documented global reach of communication technologies, but also the global expanse of activist networks of solidarities. Crucially, they also speak to Indigenous traditions of internationalism and the Indigenous diplomacies (Beier, 2009) of the Wet’suwet’en themselves. Furthermore, a distinct ethos of decolonization ran through these blockades, undermining the claim that this was an example of national renewal or refounding. If anything, this was a moment of founding a transversal community of activists, a “we” that was in tension with the “we” of Canadian citizens.

Assembling blockades

Blockades are vernacular structures, constructed and built by whatever materials are on hand by whomever is present at the scene. Their construction is therefore versatile, using on-site materials and adapting them to the needs of the moment. In this way, Deena Rymhs (2019: 35) suggests that blockades are a kind of “desire lines,” a concept drawn from critical planning studies that describes “the space between the planned and the providential, the engineered and the ‘lived’, and between official projects of capture and containment and the popular energies which subvert, bypass, supersede and evade them.” Desire lines refuse to abide by the intended or expected uses of space, and twist them in unexpected directions. Stopping the flow of commodities, goods, and people by blockading railways is a good example of a subversion of the expected use of rail lines. Such subversive (mis)usages of transit infrastructure can also have the effect of revealing forgotten truths, of allowing things that were un-seen to be seen – for example, that a “public” access road is actually under First Nations jurisdiction. In this way, blockading involves a disruption of what Jacques Rancière (2004) calls the “distribution of the sensible” and allow new ways of seeing and new opportunities for the production of collective subjectivities.

The barricades of urban insurgencies once again provide guidance for understanding the ways in which contemporary blockades are assembled. When proffering a definition of the barricade, historian Eric Hazan (2015: ix) argues that it is “a heap of disparate objects, combined in the moment, its particular virtue is to proliferate and form a network that crosses the space of the city.” While Hazan is speaking specifically of the role of barricades in the urban revolutionary struggles of nineteenth century Paris, his definition can be productively extended, with important caveats, to contemporary blockading practices. In the first place, while most of the blockades erected in support of the Wet’suwet’en were “human blockades” – i.e. made of the assembled bodies of people on the blockade – the blockades also utilized a variety of material objects that were conveniently on hand. For example, the blockade I attended in Toronto in February 2020 was an assemblage of human bodies, pilons and fallen branches placed on the tracks, while a flare emitted green smoke throughout the intersection. Other objects commonly used in these blockades included wooden pallets, fire barrels, and tires. Protesters at a blockade in Saint-Pascal, Quebec used the most readily available resource: snow, which they piled in great mounds on the railway tracks. Conversely, a snowplow was part of the Mohawk blockade at Tyendinaga. Secondly, the blockades were nearly always an unprompted yet purposeful act by people. The important mobilizing and organizing work done by communities and activists was complemented by purposive acts of solidarity by people who participated without coercion or cajoling as autonomous subjects. Third, the blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en spread rapidly and proliferated across Canada and beyond. But whereas Hazan speaks of how blockades created a “network that crosses the space of the city,” the network of the Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockades occupied a transversal space that cut across and connected localities that cannot be reduced to the space of the nation-state.

Blockades as brake

Blockades work by putting a stop to motion. At its most fundamental level, what a blockade does is stop, interrupt, or slow down movement. They serve as a brake in a society that privileges motion and mobility. As the perpetrator of stillness or stasis, blockades are typically viewed as a negative irregularity. “Stillness,” Bissell and Fuller (2011: 3) argue, “is so often anticipated, more or less, as an aberration and thus a problem to be dealt with.” From an economic perspective, for example, immobility, stasis, stillness are all associated with the problem of missed productivity. This was a common refrain in the reaction to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockades among industry, government, and the media. The message here was that a “small number” of protestors were holding the Canadian economy “hostage.” As Arjun Appadurai (2006: 53) has noted, “small numbers represent a tiny obstacle between majority and totality or purity” thereby generating an “anxiety of incompleteness” for the majority. As a result, this minority is quickly turned into an antagonistic relationship of enmity. Arguing against this tendency, Bissell and Fuller (2011: 3) invite us to reframe how we think of stillness, and not just through the typical lenses of “mobility and immobility, speed and slowness.” They argue for a relational approach to stillness, one that foregrounds the unequal power relations involved in contemporary im/mobilities.

One obvious place to begin investigating these unequal power relationships is to note that blockades exist in tension with the citizen’s perceived right to freedom of movement. Blockades literally put that right to a full stop. Of course, this assumed right is often asserted with a mixture of hubris, ignorance, and historical amnesia. The colonial nature of the Canadian transportation system is revealed when once looks at the way that roads and railways have been built through First Nations territories, either to directly exploit their resources, or to transport resources extracted elsewhere. As Blomley (1996: 18) points out:

Not only are such transport corridors an obvious focus for First Nations, given their proximity and their strategic importance to the provincial infrastructure, but they are themselves a frequent source of irritation, given the presumptuous manner in which they were established. For example, temporary access routes, such as logging roads, can become so used by non-Natives that, over time, the assumption becomes that they are public rights of way, although access may, in law, be entirely at the discretion of a band council. Denied access by a blockade, aggrieved non-Natives may condemn Native actions as a violation of their right to travel when, in fact, they may themselves be in trespass.

Blomley goes on to note that mobility rights are as much a collective right as a right that resides solely with the individual citizen. Blockades become a way of reclaiming and reasserting an Indigenous community’s autonomy. Rather than a negative impediment to individual mobility rights, the blockade becomes a way of constituting “a form of positive mobility rights – that of staying in place and resisting the mobility forced upon it by cultural and economic dislocation” (Blomley, 1996: 28).

Blockades not only arrest mobility, they also have a relationship to temporality. How long does it take to assemble a blockade? How long will the blockade last? How do blockaders deal with boredom, the monotony of being at the blockade? A blockade’s duration can range from an hour or two to several weeks. Blomley points out that some blockades can be pan-generational. The fact that rail lines often cross Indigenous lands, as well as the contentious process by which reserve lands were established, has meant that rail lines often remain ‘a point of disagreement for generations’ (Blomley, 1996: 20). When the duration is lengthy and on a strategic spatial site – such as the main passenger railway line between three major cities in Central Canada, as was the case of the Tyendinaga Mohawks’ blockade – then the political and economic consequences can be very real.

If we investigate blockading as a form of stillness or waiting, then it is also a failure to wait in the way demanded by established authorities. The refusal to wait in the “right way,” or to move forward according to the horizons provided by mainstream institutions and governments. This form of waiting – the waiting of those who won’t wait – is generative of other political possibilities. As McNevin (2020: 556) observes, “This tension, this moment of pause, between denial and fulfilment, endurance and refusal, the not-yet and the yet-to-come, might be conceived as a disposition, a sensibility, an interruption and a space of imagination.” This pause, McNevin suggests, can “enliven collective futures” among people who were denied the promise of citizenship’s benefits. I would add that such a pause is also a kinetic moment of world-building. It is the pause, a moment of suspension, that precedes the unleashing of creative and generative possibilities.

Stillness is seen as a negative, an inconvenience. Certainly, the media reports on the blockades emphasized this negative image of blockades. Being stuck can be productive, however, and generative of new solidarities. Deb Cowen tells the story of a commuter whose train was delayed by the Tyendinaga Mohawks’ railway blockade. A reporter asked her pointed questions about her negative experience about being delayed.

In response, she explained that she was initially frustrated, but then used the opportunity of the stalled train to research the situation. She not only expressed her support for the Wet’suwet’en and the rail action, but expressed gratitude to the Mohawks at Tyendinaga for creating the opportunity for her to learn. (Cowen, 2020b)

Here, we can see that the commuter’s response did not follow the usual script of “disgruntled and inconvenienced passenger.” Instead, we hear about their experience of listening and learning, of refusing to be caught up in dominant narratives about their right as a citizen to unfettered freedom of movement, and instead appreciating how the blockade is a way of reclaiming and reasserting the autonomy of Indigenous people. In this way, if the function of any blockade is to act as a brake on movement, it is also to put a stop to time: the time of colonialism and justice denied; the time of unfettered, irresponsible resource extraction; the time of white settler nationalism/supremacy.

Mobile blockades

Blockaders have demonstrated some remarkable creativity and verve in finding new ways express their solidarity or to disrupt and impede the export of resources. Mobile blockades are an example of this inventiveness. A mobile blockade may, at first, seem to be an oxymoron, a paradoxical conjunction of terms. Blockades are meant to arrest mobility; it is a line that stops a vector of movement. The blockade is a static, grounded, territorial act in opposition to movement, mobility, and flows. Mobility, from this perspective, represents the failure or end of a blockade. This traditional understanding of the relationship between blockades and movement is being disrupted and overturned by the invention of the mobile blockade.

Examples of mobile blockades emerged when the hereditary leaders of the Wet’suwet’en issued a national call for solidarity actions in early January 2020. One action was a “rolling blockade” along Highway 401 outside of London, Ontario that took place on January 13, 2020. A rolling blockade consists of several vehicles coordinating themselves and their speeds on a highway so that they slow down all traffic behind them. About a dozen cars spread out across the three lanes of highway and dramatically slowed down their vehicle speed to between 50 and 60 km/h, causing traffic to back up for over 30 km. This form of blockade does not arrest mobility so much as create a long delay and disruption to highway traffic.

Another example of a mobile blockade can be witnessed in a January 20, 2020 solidarity action that shut down the Swartz Bay ferry terminal in British Columbia. This terminal is a key infrastructural site that connects the provincial capital of Victoria on Vancouver Island to the urban metropolis of Vancouver as well as the rest of the mainland. While banners with messages supporting the Wet’suwet’en were hung on overpasses approaching the ferry terminal, the blockade itself was accomplished through the use of kayaks. These sea based vessels were able to use their mobility to adeptly maneuver themselves around the large ferries in order to prevent their departure.

The idea that blockades can be mobile is not altogether new. During the barricade constructions of revolutionary Paris, it was not uncommon to pile cobblestones onto wagons. The cobblestones could then be integrated into the barricade, or moved elsewhere to another barricade when the need arose (Grace, 2021: 47). As a key tactic in urban insurgencies, the barricade needed to be responsive to the shifting requirements of the struggle. Ensuring that the building blocks of barricade could be quickly moved from site to site was a key advantage in terms of restricting the movements of opposing forces. In this sense, barricades do not just stop movement, but their materiality was already envisioned as being kinetic and mobile. The wagon (i.e., the vehicle that holds and transports the materiality of the barricade) makes the barricade not just a static political structure, but a mobile one – a site of viapolitics.

Viapolitics is a name that William Walters has assigned to the analytical move of privileging the role of vehicles (ships, trains, cars, aircraft, etc.) and infrastructure (roads, airports, shipping lanes, etc.) in understanding the politics of migration. Walters urges us to consider how vehicles themselves are sites of political action, arguing that “a whole field of otherwise overlooked struggles is brought into view once we investigate migration from the angle of its vehicle”’ (Walters, 2015: 480). To date, the concept of viapolitics has been principally applied to the experience of human migration (Walters et al., 2021). However, since Walters (2015: 478) states that viapolitics allows us to see “the interaction of humans and vehicles as an irreducible feature of migratory struggles,” I would suggest that we can extend his insight to other domains of struggle, such as the blockade.

An example of mobile blockades in contemporary Indigenous struggles in Canada is the Tiny House Warriors. The Tiny House Warriors are a group of Secwepemc land and water defenders who, since 2017, have mobilized to stop the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline project from crossing unceded Secwepemc territory. Their goal is to “assert Secwepemc Law and jurisdiction and block access to this pipeline.” ⁴ They have a creative approach to blockading by building mobile “tiny houses” and placing them directly along the pipeline route. In this way, the houses act as a physical barrier to pipeline construction. But the houses are also homes and provide community housing to Secwepemc families. The mobility of the homes is worth commenting upon. On the one hand, they are mobile out of necessity, in that they are constructed in Secwepemc territory and then moved to various points along the pipeline expansion’s 518 km route. On the other hand, the mobility of the homes is by design. It serves the purpose of the reviving traditional community practices, such as nomadic hunter-gathering ways of living (Spice, 2018). In this way, the homes serve political, aesthetic, and ecological purposes. Political, because they literally serve as the blockade against a massive extractive project, while at the same time reasserting Secwepemc sovereignty and lifeways. Aesthetic, because the homes are covered with beautiful Indigenous murals and paintings. As movement founder and Tiny House resident Kanahus Manuel explains: “A big part of our campaign is to build a culture of resistance through art and tiny house building is a creative art project” (quoted in Cantieri, 2018: 11). Finally, they are ecological because the homes are solar powered, heated by wood-burning stoves, and equipped with composting toilets.

Since the tiny houses are simultaneously homes and vehicles, they represent a unique conjunction of the politics of community and mobility. Here, Walters’ concept of viapolitics can be supplemented by his earlier conception of domopolitics (Walters, 2004). Domopolitics refers to how the governance of political spaces are done in the name of that space being a “home.” Domopolitics and viapolitics can be productively conjoined to analyze the relations of care, contestation, mobility, and home-building that are play with this particular blockading strategy. What is being protected is not just the land in an abstract sense, but a set of practices and lifeways that exist in relation to the land.

Through the blockade

If the blockade is relational, then all relations encountered at the blockade should be examined. Not all of these relations are positive. Some are destructive, negative, and violent. In the context of solidarity blockades with Indigenous struggles, this negative relation is embodied by the figure of the blockade runner (i.e. someone who defies the blockade by crossing it) or blockade buster (i.e. someone who attempts to dismantle, destroy, or otherwise attack the blockade).

The history of blockade is also the history of blockade-running. The attempt to break, breach, or run a blockade is as old as blockades themselves. When Sparta established a land blockade of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, Athens broke the blockade by receiving food via ships. The “blockade runners” of the American Civil War played a prominent, if only symbolic, role in that conflict. The Berlin Blockade was famously met with the Berlin airlift. Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza has been met by the Free Gaza Flotillas that have sent 35 ships between 2008 and 18 to attempt to breach the siege. Many of these historical examples paint the “blockade runner” in a positive light, as an underdog who through ingenuity, craft, and courage defy the blockade of a dominant, usually military, power. The blockade runners in contemporary struggles around the environment, racial justice, and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty need to be assessed differently.

On February 19, 2020 a group of individuals – suspected to be members of far right groups in Canada such as the Yellow Vests Canada (YVC) and Wexit (Western Canada exit movement) – confronted land defenders and tore down a blockade set up on a CN railway outside Edmonton. The following day, blockade-busters attempted to dismantle a blockade of suburban commuter train line in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. Viral videos began to spread on social media of transport trucks, at least one with a Confederate flag emblazoned on its dashboard, running through the solidarity blockades. On April 19, 2020 three individuals drove into the Tiny House Warriors encampment, shouted slurs, knocked down signs, tore down red dresses, stole a truck, and drove it through the owner’s “tiny house” (Turner, 2020).

According to the group Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the solidarity protests, actions, and blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en struggle is the “number one” topic of online conversations among hate groups and far-right groups (Boutilier, 2020). The blockade-runners quickly gained support from both mainstream Conservative politicians and the far right. Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Peter MacKay praised the Albertan blockade-busters in a tweet: “Glad to see a couple of Albertans with a pickup truck can do more for our economy in an afternoon than Justin Trudeau could do in 4 years.” Right wing media commentator Ezra Levant tweeted that he would send the blockade-busters a “case of beer on behalf of a grateful nation.” One blockade-buster launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign to help pay for gas while he “clears railway blockades across the country one at a time” (Clavel, 2020). Another Alberta man also realized he could cash in on this anti-blockade sentiment by selling a decal of train running over protesters for $5 each. The decal depicted a train with the words “Alberta Strong” emblazoned on its side driving through a crowd of stick figures, who are either scrambling aside, being run over, or hurled in the air after being struck. After controversy erupted at the violence depicted in the decal, its created denied culpability and claimed, “it’s a joke” (Mosleh, 2020).

Behind the blockade

As we have seen, the blockade cannot be reduced to a spatial line of antagonism. Blockading involves a dialect of closing/opening, stopping/starting, mobility/stasis. And yet, attention is often focused on what is happening on or at the blockade – and what injustice or wrong it is against. One of the consequences of this fixation is that we can miss out on what is happening behind the blockade – and what it is producing, creating, and generating anew. What unfolds behind the blockade? What starts after the stop?

What is behind the blockade is rarely investigated, with understandable reasons. Consider Blomley’s (1996: 6) assertion that “the blockade, in both its effects and its meanings, is directed outwards; it is aimed at the dominate culture – my culture.” Blomley is correct in his assessment: blockades are quite effective in attracting attention of the media and government to Indigenous issues, which is likely one reason for the persistent use of this tactic over time. His reminder – via the explicit reference to “my culture” – that blockades are directed not just at powerful institutions (government, industry, media), but at the Canadian settler-citizenship population in general is absolutely crucial. At the same time, to say that blockades are only “directed outwards” is to potentially miss the significance of some of the crucial developments that take place “behind” the blockade. The importance of correcting this absence can be found in the history of the barricade. In revolutionary Paris, behind the barricade there was the neighborhood. As Eric Hazan (2015: 126) remarks: “The traditional barricade was erected in a street by its own inhabitants, men, women and children, who also worked there or close by, and were ready to die there.” By all accounts, the history of the barricade is a history of asymmetrical power relations: it involves the actions of people who are “defending their street, their district, their way of life against forces that are always superior in both numbers and weapons” (Hazan, 2015: x). Given this history, we can ask: what is “behind” the barricade of contemporary Indigenous struggles?

Recall from the Introduction of this paper Deb Cowen’s observation that the blockade is a site where “some of the most powerful forms of citizenship are emerging.” It is worthwhile to include her next point, which is to insist that this power is not limited to the disruptive power of blockades. Cowen speaks of the power of convergence that takes place at, alongside, and beyond the blockade. The space of convergence, Cowen argues, can reveal “alternative relations of care and provision – alternative logistics – anchored in relations of reciprocity and solidarity that can emerge through acts of disruption” (Cowen and Woznicki, 2017). These “alternative logistics” are often hidden from view. They are part of a dialectic of what is “seen” and “not-seen” in the reportage of blockades (Nyers, 2019: 162-63). All too often it is the act of disruption that is front and centre – visible – in discussions and reportage of blockades. A blockade may involve bodies and objects assembled along a line, but sustaining these assemblages involves the mobilization of networks of care and support. What are the day-to-day, quotidian practices that go into erecting and sustaining a blockade? People on the blockade need to be fed; firewood is required for fire barrels; fundraisers need to be organized; communities need to be mobilized; children and elders require care. In this way, a blockade is not a static event, but requires continual work, energy, and labour to sustain itself over time. Taken together, LaDuke and Cowen (2020: 245) argue that these practices constitute a form of “alimentary infrastructure” – that is, an infrastructure that can sustain decolonial life and that is “life-giving in its design, finance, and effects.”

Tlingit scholar Anne Spice (2018: 40) relates a discussion she had with Wet’suwet’en spokesperson, Freda Huson, about the challenges of contesting “critical infrastructure” projects such as the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Huson noted that the proposed pipeline would run through the clan’s “best berry patches” and that “what we’re doing here is protecting our critical infrastructure.” To privilege berries, bears, salmon, and clean rivers is a radically different way of conceiving, relating to, and practicing critical infrastructures than those that define oil and gas infrastructures as well as those of other major extractive industries. Contrary to mainstream definitions of infrastructure that assume it to be an inanimate system of relations between things, Spice (2018: 42) argues that Wet’suwet’en infrastructures “are relations that are built through the agency of not only human but also other-than human kin.” All of these relations require care and are defined by their mutual respect.

Molly Wickham, a land defender and spokesperson of Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, also speaks to what happens behind the blockade. She notes that relatively soon after the roads were blocked and pipeline crews were denied access to Wet’suwet’en lands, the animals came back. Moose, deer, rabbits, wolverines – essential elements of the “critical infrastructures” of Indigenous life. Wickham explains:

when you are behind that blockade, when you have your whole territory, there’s not one other single person on there that you haven’t consented to being there and you know exactly what they are doing on new territory. It’s such a feeling of empowerment, it such a feeling of freedom. That is what it must feel like to be free Indigenous People. And that is something to fight for, and that is what this movement is all about. It’s like the more territory that we occupy, the more we live as Indigenous People, the more that we have, the more freedom that we have, the more we can envision the hope and the realization of our liberation as Indigenous People. And that is what is such a threat to the state, that is what is such a threat to the economy. (Klein et al., 2020)

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, 2021b describes these narratives as an attempt to build a “Wet’suwet’en world.” In this way, Simpson argues, blockades can be understood as involving both refusal and affirmation. Blockades are most obviously oppositional, an act of refusal, an assertion of a “No!” to an injustice or wrong. A fundamental element to the blockade is to impede or block the movement of resources being transported from the lands of Indigenous peoples. But it would be a mistake to equate this refusal only with a politics of negation. For Coulthard (2014: 169), direct action protests such as blockades are “the affirmative enactment of another modality of being, a different way of relating to and with the world.” ⁵ A similar emphasis on the positive and productive dimensions of negation run through theorizations of refusal (McGranahan, 2016). Tina Campt (2019: 83) argues that refusal not only involves a rejection of the status quo, but also involves “using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.” In a similar way, Simpson argues that we see blockades as representing a kind of “generative refusal” (Simpson, 2017). The act of blockading represents an “affirmation of a different political economy. A world built upon a different set of relationships and ethics. An affirmation of life” (Simpson ,2021a: 56). As Simpson sums up: “we are very busy building a different world” (Simpson, 2021b).

Conclusions

Wendy Brown (2010: 19) has observed that some of the most contentious politics today are caught up in a “fundamental tension between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription.” This dialectic of opening and closing, statis and movement, visibility and invisibility runs throughout the blockading activities examined in this paper. Whether it is blockading in a remote or urban area, blockading as a brake on mobility or a mobile blockade, or the diversity of practices and processes that emerge “behind” the blockade – the solidarities enacted in the blockade actions examined in this paper are relational, spatial, and contentious. Taken together, these practices combine to create new political subjectivities and imaginaries. As Sandro Mezzadra (2020: 424) argues, “the link between solidarity and the building of a new collective power as well as the emphasis on the need and possibility to radically transform the ‘world’ we inhabit continue to provide us with a powerful and effective framework for political theory and action.”

The question remains: are these blockades in solidarity with Indigenous struggles an example of decolonial citizenship? There may be some optimism for such a conclusion, especially if the blockade is viewed as an assemblage (Davis, 2023) that gathers together, amongst other things, both Indigenous and settler subjects and thereby challenges the line that is drawn between them. In this sense, solidarity blockades become a site of decolonizing citizenship. However, it is important to insist on the language of “decolonizing.” It would be too much hubris to suggest that a “decolonial citizenship” had been achieved. To assume a decolonial citizenship would be to infuse it with a stable ontological status. Such a move should be resolutely avoided as it runs the risk of reification, treating the “decolonial” as a condition or achieved status. The acts of solidarity witnessed during the blockading of Canada are more adequately described as decolonizing citizenship. Unlike the sureties associated with the decolonial, decolonizing emphasizes that something is being done, activated, or enacted. Decolonizing gives you a sense of process, of a political project, that is mobilized to critique, deconstruct, and historicize “citizenship.”