Water is Life: Resistance, Representation and More-than-human Relationships

• In Event: Decolonial Pedagogies: From the Reservation to the Street

Abstract

For the greater part of 2016, thousands of people descended onto the traditional territories of the Sioux nation, near Canon Ball, North Dakota, to take a stand for the Missouri River water’s rights. While traditional media attention on the Oceti Sakowin camp was sparse to start, the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline swelled on social media and continued to grow under the leadership of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. The reasons for the stand against the pipeline were many, but one key message emerged in hashtags and artwork, and on t-shirts and signs: water is life or mni wiconi. The discourse differed from other social movements in that the impact on human beings was not its central message. Instead, the focus landed on a human relationship to water based in reciprocity and responsibility. What kinds of epistemologies produce a social movement in which more-than-human beings are privileged?

This paper will explore more-than-human relationality within the context of the material and digital space of the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement (#NoDAPL). The concept of more-than-human relationality originates from pre-colonial imaginaries and the contemporary dialogue on the subject pervades social media, yet the academic literature considers these topics separately. By pairing scholarly literature by Indigenous academics from a variety of disciplines with writing on twitter, I examine the intersections of more-than-human relationality and what Cutcha Risling Baldy calls the “new Native intellectualism” at the site of #NoDAPL. I argue that both Indigenous intellectuals and the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, along with their Indigenous allied water protectors, are engaged in the ongoing act of inscribing their ways of knowing and being onto the land where water is a more-than-human relation. My examination of the #NoDAPL movement will also consider parallel assertions of Sioux, and broader Native American, sovereignty, and the barriers posed by American representations of ecological Indians in popular culture.

Author

• Mallory Whiteduck, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor