Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights: Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement

Abstract

Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights:Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement Anna M. Brígido-Corachán (bio) Introduction The 11-foot-tall mile-marker made by activists at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in 2016 is one of the most emblematic visual icons of the Standing Rock movement. Hand-carved from wood and pointing to Native American reservations, nature sites, cities, and foreign countries, among others, the mile-marker post bears witness to the multilayered preoccupations and collective strategies of the protestors against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The post highlights the value of overlapping places, Native territories, epistemologies, and concerns, while intertribal coalition building, solidarity, and the urgent vindication of sovereignty through visual resignification gain center stage.1 In line with this land-based, Indigenous-centered, and multivocal mile-marker, in this essay I explore Native American environmentalism through a historical and visual analysis of the 2016–2017 Standing Rock/#NoDAPL movement. I give a brief overview of the history of the movement and then focus on a specific set of the group's decolonizing strategies, which are articulated around three core issues: 1. A reassertion of Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK), human rights, and place-based solidarity—all of which are central to ongoing Native American struggles for self-government (Coulthard, "Land"); 2. A critical revision of historical imaginaries and decolonizing practices; and 3. The struggle for visual sovereignty (Raheja, "Reading" 1163). These practices aim to subvert shifting media portrayals of Native Americans that continue to feed from symbolic spatial settings and (neo)colonialist stereotypes. Significantly, the set of photographs examined in this essay (which are taken from social media sites managed by the #NoDAPL movement: Indigenous Rising and Indigenous Rising Media) rarely attempt to capture or represent water, even though this other-than-human person, a sacred but also material/physical being in Native American epistemologies, is key to understanding the plight of Standing Rock and of other Indigenous communities [End Page 69] today (see Hallowel). Instead, the movement's visual displays in social media seem bound to the land itself and lay an emphasis on the domestic, revitalizing activities of the Native community through intimate and reciprocal interactions with the land. To understand the complex processes and nationwide media-shifts that have been triggered by Standing Rock activism, it is important to stress that, while #NoDAPL managed to garner unprecedented US and even international media attention during 2016 and 2017, most Americans are still ignorant of the fact that Native communities have been actively protesting toxic waste storage, open-pit uranium mine exploitation, contamination of soil, water, animal, and human life, hydroelectric dam flooding, and forced relocation for several decades. During this time, the Native American environmentalist movement has progressively disassociated itself from the New Age ecological Indian/mystical shaman stereotype.2 Moving away from colonialist tropes such as the mythologized wilderness, virgin landscapes, noble savages, and spiritual quests, First Nations today are instead concerned with material nature, that is, with the sheer materiality of soil, rock, and water as it relates to the governance of natural resources, which is too often tinted by environmental racism and its poisonous effects on Native bodies (see Adamson; Adamson, Evans, and Stein; Fitzgerald). Rooted in Indigenous histories and epistemologies, First Nations activists understand and engage these natural entities as spiritual and material beings, not merely as resources. Beyond the sacred status and polyvocal function they share in traditional Native epistemologies and praxes, water and land are embedded in and shaped by material processes and sociopolitical realities. As Native historian Donald Fixico has pointed out, "American capitalism, deriving from a tradition of Eurocentrism, has continued through the twentieth century to exploit tribal nations for their natural resources, thus forcing Indian leadership to adopt modern corporate strategies to ensure the survival of their nations and people" (x). And, indeed, although many Native tribes embrace capitalist practices such as casino management, uncontrolled forest exploitation, mining, and others, Native environmentalist groups consciously grapple with these contradictions in their pursuit of a more respectful and balanced relationship with our natural surroundings. In the twenty-first century, they have also introduced new visual formats and digital channels to present these complex...