"Anishinaabe time": temporalities and impact assessment in pipeline reviews

Sakihitowin Awasis

doi:10.2458/v27i1.23236

Abstract

Indigenous ways of living that embrace multiple temporalities have been largely supplanted by a single, linear colonial temporality. Drawing on theoretical insights from Indigenous geographies and political ecology, this article considers how pipeline reviews come into being through contested temporalities and how dominant modes of time dispossess Indigenous peoples of self-determination in energy decision-making. In particular, Anishinaabe clan governance – a form of kinship that provides both social identity and function based on relations to animal nations – is undermined in colonial decision-making processes. Through analysis of documents from Canada's National Energy Board and interviews with Anishinaabe pipeline opponents, I explore tensions between Anishinaabe and settler temporalities reflected in the 2012-2017 Line 9 pipeline dispute in the Great Lakes region. These include divergent understandings of periodicities, timeframes, kinship relations, and the role of nonhuman temporalities in decision-making. Colonial temporal modes that have been imposed on Indigenous communities foreshorten timescales, depoliticize kinship relations, and discount nonhumans in decision-making – resulting in narrower and more short-sighted project reviews than Anishinaabe temporalities would support. I argue that the rich concepts of kinship, queerness, continuity, and prophecy embedded in Anishinaabe temporalities can inform strategies for decolonizing energy review processes and open possibilities for Indigenous self-determination in energy decision-making.Keywords: Anishinaabe studies, Two-Spirit, Indigenous geographies, temporalities, Indigenous knowledge, energy governance, pipeline, National Energy Board

Highlights

Anishinaabe Aki2, the homeland of the Anishinaabeg confederacy, stretches from the eastern woodlands of the Great Lakes to the prairie grasslands in the west, including territories shared with neighboring Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations
Political ecologists risk making the multiculturalist assumption that we exist in a world with many different cultural understandings of a single nature, while Indigenous knowledge systems entail multinaturalist ontologies that recognize a multiplicity of truths (Coombes et al 2012; Wilson 2008)
While walking among the poplar, walnut, and maple trees along Deshkan Ziibiing (Antler River), I visit with the same waters our ancestors interacted with, and the same waters that will be experienced by future generations

Summary

Introduction

Anishinaabe Aki, the homeland of the Anishinaabeg confederacy, stretches from the eastern woodlands of the Great Lakes to the prairie grasslands in the west, including territories shared with neighboring Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations. Political ecologists risk making the multiculturalist assumption that we exist in a world with many different cultural understandings of a single nature, while Indigenous knowledge systems entail multinaturalist ontologies that recognize a multiplicity of truths (Coombes et al 2012; Wilson 2008). This issue stems from a failure to account for ontological diversity and from assumptions about Indigenous peoples suffering an "ontological flaw", occupying a subontological position in both scholarship and everyday life (Ciccariello-Maher 2017; Sundberg 2014). In the analysis that follows, I make explicit the temporal aspects that were expressed in Anishinaabe engagement with the review process for the Line 9 pipeline reversal

Background

Discussion

Conclusions