Pipelines,permits,and protests: Carrier Sekani encounters with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project

Introduction

This essay examines the political contestation between the territorial claims of the Carrier Sekani people and the development agendas of the Canadian nation-state and a transnational energy distribution company. Enbridge, a Calgary-based energy transport company, has proposed building the Northern Gateway Project, a pipeline system that would greatly increase market access for bitumen extracted from the Alberta tar sands by connecting it to the Pacific coast of British Columbia. The project consists of two 1172 km pipelines that would deliver an average of 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen per day to a Pacific port in Kitimat, British Columbia. ¹ If constructed, the pipeline will cross the territories of more than 50 Aboriginal communities. ² The Carrier Sekani Tribal Council (CSTC) is an alliance of eight First Nations who assert the authority to prevent this development project from passing through their territories. ³

The outcome of this conflict is of considerable geopolitical significance for two primary reasons. First, if the pipeline is permitted, Canada’s vast bitumen reserves could be marketed globally without first passing through the United States. According to government estimates, almost 170 billion barrels of crude oil – 95 percent of Canadian oil reserves or about 12 percent of global reserves – lie in the Alberta tar sands. ⁴ Expanding Canadian pipeline capacity to enable further export of bitumen from the Alberta tar sands rests at the centre of the current government strategy for economic development. ⁵ The second main concern drawing international attention to this project stems from the claims of leading climate scientists who believe that expansion of bitumen extraction enabled by greater pipeline capacity will push anthropogenic drivers of climate change beyond tipping points, past which carbon reduction strategies, such as those discussed in the Kyoto Protocol, will be of no consequence. ⁶ The high carbon cost of extracting bitumen at this scale from tar sands in itself will mean ‘game over’ for the climate, according to the director of NASA’s Godard Institute, James Hansen, because these deposits ‘contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.’ ⁷

While the Enbridge project is the focus of international controversy primarily for these reasons, our paper focuses on the politics of Indigenous resistance to and inclusion within the Northern Gateway permitting process. We are particularly motivated by a concern about the exclusion of Carrier Sekani claims to jurisdiction over their territories from Canadian regulatory processes. If a project will affect the traditional territories, reserve lands, or settlement areas of an Aboriginal group, the National Energy Board (NEB) Filing Manual requires that proponents consider traditional land and resource use in their regulatory application. ⁸ The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) also provides guidance on how to include Aboriginal traditional knowledge (ATK), a concept broadly defined as ‘a body of knowledge built up by a group of people through generations of living in close contact with nature.’ ⁹ To fulfill these requirements, Enbridge has submitted detailed information on Aboriginal traditional land use, potential effects of the proposed development, and plans for mitigation with its Northern Gateway application. Querying the Indigeneity supposed by and engaged through the ATK framework, our intervention builds upon scholarship on Indigenous peoples and environmental governance. ¹⁰

Carrier Sekani communities have opposed permitting the Northern Gateway project since the project was first proposed for Canadian regulatory review. Despite formal mechanisms to incorporate Carrier Sekani traditions and interests, the permitting process neither recognizes Carrier Sekani claims to regulatory authority nor accommodates their demands for a role in decision making about the regulatory process. This doubling creates a bifurcation between recognized and unrecognizable practices of Indigeneity. In late 2009, under the National Energy Board Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, Canada established a Joint Review Panel (JRP) tasked with evaluating the balance of social, economic, and environmental impacts of the proposed pipeline before recommending whether the project should be approved and suggesting conditions to mitigate negative impacts if approved. ¹¹ The Carrier Sekani have countered the legitimacy of this permitting process through oral testimony by keyoh (territory or trapline) holders, research conducted by the CSTC emphasizing the centrality of territorial jurisdiction in traditional knowledge and practice, and various forms of public demonstration or protest that mobilize tradition and territorial practices in global arenas. Each of these challenges betrays excesses of Indigeneity surplus to the JRP frameworks for recognition.

Our empirical engagements in Carrier Sekani territory indicate the capacity of ATK to situate the ‘place at the table’ of Indigenous peoples, reinforcing colonial relations between Indigeneity, territory, and development. ¹² Despite considerable efforts to recognize Indigeneity in environmental governance, the history of colonial impositions on Carrier Sekani territories and jurisdiction over these territories is excluded from the formal recognition process. We address colonial practices that continue to shape environmental governance in Carrier Sekani territory using a theoretical approach to epistemology and ontology that locates politics in their zones of indiscernibility. ¹³ Focusing on how possibilities of Indigenous being are framed by the regulatory process and challenged by Carrier Sekani resistance, our paper contributes to a growing body of work examining the politics of Indigeneity and ontology. ¹⁴ Aspiring to resist ‘the deeply political confinement of particular peoples to particular cultural, intellectual, and spatial locations,’ our argument traces global movements in local processes of Indigenous becoming and development permitting in order to diagram material assemblages of nation-state, colonialism, and capitalism. ¹⁵ We posit Indigeneity and development, not in terms of social construction and economic structures, but as deeply political and materialized achievements emerging through embodied practices and contingent events alongside networks of resource extraction and consumption. ¹⁶

This research emerges from fieldwork conducted between June 2010 and August 2012. Living for over two years in northern British Columbia, the lead author traveled along the proposed pipeline corridor observing the permitting process in different communities at JRP procedural meetings, community information sessions, community oral evidentiary hearings, and community statement hearings. Additional fieldwork with Carrier Sekani and surrounding communities provides empirical evidence about events organized in opposition to the pipeline during this period, including, community meetings, rallies, film screenings, public talks, and feasts. Combining these observations from the field with textual analysis of the voluminous Northern Gateway project application – particularly focusing on more than 400 pages addressed to ATK – and reading these documents against the Aboriginal Interest and Use Study (AIUS) conducted by the Carrier Sekani in relation to the pipeline, this paper provides an ethnography of the permitting process that clarifies both margin and center of the regulatory move to recognition. The first two sections contrast forms of Indigeneity emerging through dynamic traditions of protest and resistance with those recognized by the federal review process, and a final section situates this contrast with a brief history of Canadian natural resource governance in the region. Through this analysis of the political stakes and promises of ontology and Indigeneity, we hope to contribute to geographical understandings of the dynamics of Indigenous being alongside, within, and against a modernity of global capitalism, itself born of these sorts of colonial entanglements and continuing to bear them.

Indigeneity as becoming

The regulatory inclusion of ATK in the Northern Gateway JRP calls forth a particular Indigenous being that forecloses recognition of surplus forms of Indigenous becoming. The tendency to constrain recognition to traditional land use frequently elides the colonial heritage of Indigenous peoples as well as former regimes of recognition in capitalist development. Particularly obscured are Indigenous practices established through more than 200 years of resistance and response to colonialism, practices that have previously and continue to shape capitalist energy development. These excesses of Indigeneity have had considerable impacts on the Northern Gateway permitting process, and yet they have not achieved formal recognition as part of the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples.

When Enbridge first contacted potentially impacted Indigenous communities, the company engaged the CSTC on behalf of its member communities, who in late 2005 accepted Enbridge funding to conduct an independent study of the impacts of the Northern Gateway. ¹⁷ In October 2005, Enbridge released a preliminary information package and requested the NEB and CEAA form a joint review panel. ¹⁸ Emphasizing that member communities maintain sovereign control of traditional territories, the CSTC expressed concerns that they had not been consulted about the format of the regulatory process. ¹⁹ Tribal Chief Harry Pierre requested that the review process be constituted with the full involvement of the CSTC. ²⁰ When the NEB chair recommended the formation of a JRP without addressing Pierre’s concerns, the CSTC filed a writ claiming that the Crown had failed in its duty to consult. The case was dropped in late 2006, when Enbridge delayed the project. When the JRP recommenced in 2008, the CSTC boycotted it, and refused to sign a communications protocol agreement with the company. ²¹ Two CSTC communities decided to participate in the regulatory process, but another five member communities formed the Yinka Dene Alliance to network with other First Nations, environmentalists, and the broader public to establish, in the words of Saik’uz Chief Jackie Thomas, ‘the wall that Enbridge cannot break through.’ ²²

On 8 September 2010, more than 500 people marched through downtown Prince George, British Columbia in a protest led by the Carrier Sekani against the Enbridge pipeline. In December, the Yinka Dene Alliance issued the Save the Fraser Declaration asserting, along with 61 First Nations who had co-signed the document, ‘We will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar Tar Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or the ocean migration routes of Fraser River salmon.’ ²³ Referring to the Declaration, which now has more than 130 signatories, and the growing repertoire of resistance strategies initiated by the Alliance, Chief Jackie Thomas explains, ‘We have banned oil pipelines and tankers using our laws, and we will defend our decision using all the means at our disposal.’ ²⁴

While this opposition is in excess of Indigeneity considered by the JRP, in fact, Carrier Sekani identity is contoured by a colonial history that allied local Indigenous communities and by the mobilization of traditional connections to the land in political and legal negotiations. The name Carrier Sekani is a hybrid, representing two cultures that joined politically with the 1979 formation of the CSTC. Sekani is an anglicization of the name Tsek’ehne peoples call themselves, which means people of the rocks or mountains. The term Carrier was originally introduced by newcomers to their territory, and different Carrier communities variously refer to themselves as Dakelh, Yinka Dene, or Yinka Whut’en. Dakelh translates to people who travel upon the water, while Yinka Dene and Yinka Whut’en translate into people of the land. The CSTC study defines Carrier Sekani origins ‘in terms of the mythological values imbued in the natural surroundings’ and explains that ‘ancient traditions of the Carrier Sekani link the people with the land through kinship, both with one another and with the animals that inhabit the land.’ ²⁵ These connections are continually re-enacted through practices of being on the land, traveling the territories. This dynamism of Carrier Sekani territorial identity-in-movement suggests an Indigeneity better understood as iterative becoming than as essentialized being.

The Dakelh word for territory is keyoh, literally meaning ‘within the feet’ but translating roughly to ‘the area in which one walks.’ ²⁶ Family heads, known as deneza, traditionally travel their territories, hunting, trapping, and gathering plants, and through these processes maintain their knowledge of and reaffirm relationships to their keyoh. On this basis of these relationships, extended family groups develop powerful attachments to their keyoh, and connect crests to their identities and territorial claims. ²⁷ These crest affiliations draw upon the stories and songs within the history of a family group and connect to the broader network of clan identities that spread throughout the region. The territories, stories, and songs of an extended family are traditionally reaffirmed through the balhats or potlatch system within a decentralized arrangement of power where deneza direct activities on their distinct keyoh. ²⁸ Colonial practices outlawed potlatching, imposed reserve and band governance systems, and employed residential schools to disrupt Indigenous traditions, but balhats and the keyoh remain vitally important to Dakelh identities today. While traveling the territory and local stewardship practices are at the heart of being Dakelh, conceptualizing Dakelh Indigeneity as becoming allows us to recognize the capacity of this territoriality to travel, to transform, and even to reshape assemblages more commonly understood as global – colonialism, capitalism, and climate change.

The Carrier Sekani report on the Enbridge pipeline explains that their ‘[t]erritory is not a commodity to be bought and sold’ but a landscape to which ‘Dakelh people hold both rights and responsibilities to ensure territorial integrity and ongoing stewardship and use.’ ²⁹ Carrier Sekani leaders and activists mobilize these traditional territorial responsibilities in exercising counter-claims to the jurisdiction of the Canadian state. In May 2011, the Yinka Dene Alliance traveled to Enbridge’s annual general meeting in Calgary wearing traditional regalia bearing symbolic connections to their territories. Dakelh activists also protested at banks funding development, allied globally with protests against the Alberta tar sands, and travelled to international climate talks. In February 2012, the Yinka Dene Alliance initiated a campaign to bring their stories to the Chinese media to pressure the Northern Gateway’s intended markets. Rather than a simple juxtaposition of fixed traditions and globalizing modernity, such movements involve reterritorializing the geographies of resource development and environmental governance by stretching the geographic responsibilities of Dakelh law, and engaging companies and governments as subject to this traditional body of law.

Beyond challenging governing representations of Indigeneity, these movements call into question colonial practices that constitute environments and Indigeneity as objects of knowledge within paradigms of development and regulation. Such moments of political agency and resistance demonstrate that Indigeneity cannot be understood simply as local, place-based, and rooted in timeless traditions left behind by globalized capitalism and modernity. Instead, recognition of Indigeneity means acknowledging the global capacities of such Indigenous territorial movements, a possibility that cannot be admitted to a framework that includes Indigeneity as epistemological difference in a world that is already determined by forces of capital and a teleology of development.

Indigeneity before the law

Attaining permits for large scale industrial development is a complex bureaucratic process, for which Canadian law increasingly requires a role for Indigenous peoples in projects impacting their traditional territories. The JRP is tasked with including ATK in its assessments and accounting for Aboriginal interests in its deliberations. However, the development of these regimes of recognition can be understood as advancing through a series of expulsions continually narrowing the scope of Indigenous claims. While the motivation to include ATK stems from Indigenous activism and critical academic work aimed at addressing the most bald-faced exclusions of Indigenous peoples from resource management decisions, colonial relationships of power and knowledge continue to frame recognition of ATK. ³⁰ We argue that attention to the exclusions that supplement the inclusions of the review process reveals how this mode of recognition confines Indigenous beings to an already ontologically situated framework.

Conventional histories of recent developments in Canadian Aboriginal law and policy highlight the turn that occurred following the 1973 Calder decision. ³¹ In the Calder case, the Nisga’a pursued a ruling that Aboriginal title in the province of British Columbia had never been extinguished. Although the case was dismissed on a technicality, the Supreme Court recognized that Aboriginal title existed prior to the colonization of the continent. Canada subsequently reoriented its policy to recognize Aboriginal peoples as distinct polities with distinct rights and claims. Parliament constitutionalized Aboriginal rights in 1982, ³² and the Supreme Court established the current doctrine of Aboriginal title in the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, which also established the validity of Indigenous oral history as evidence of Aboriginal title. ³³ In the 2004 Haida case the Supreme Court ruled that the Crown possessed a duty to consult and accommodate Aboriginal peoples regarding developments on any claimed traditional territories that could negatively impact Aboriginal rights or title. ³⁴

While these legal developments are often celebrated as grounds to reconcile Aboriginal claims with development of the land by non-Aboriginal people, they also exemplify a record of continual expansion of state authority to designate specifically bounded forms of Indigeneity. ³⁵ Canadian courts have conceptualized Aboriginal title as a burden on the underlying Crown title. In this framing, the dominance of Crown sovereignty – a claim based on the suspension of Indigenous jurisdictional claims – serves as the only basis for recognition of Aboriginality. Within the framework of Canadian law, Aboriginal rights are restricted to the customs, practices, and traditions that a particular group of Aboriginal people exercised at the time of contact with continuity through to the present. Inequality is maintained through recognition of difference, as Indigenous peoples are required to uphold an impossible and confining standard of authentic traditions. ³⁶ This notion of cultural legitimacy eschews recognition of practices that lie outside colonial conceptions of being Indigenous. ³⁷ Thus, it is unsurprising that the vast majority of Aboriginal rights victories in the courts involve hunting and fishing, basic sustenance activities that accord with colonial imaginations of Indigenous peoples. It is precisely such a limited conception of Indigenous being that review hearings call forth as evidence in the form of traditional knowledge. In procedural directions for the oral evidentiary hearings, the panel clearly indicates that these hearings were for oral traditional knowledge, not ‘recommendations to the Panel on whether or not to approve the Project or terms and conditions that should be applied if the Project were to proceed,’ which it considers argument not evidence. ³⁸ Recognition of traditional knowledge only as evidence dismisses the relevance of Indigenous jurisdictions and traditions as frameworks for decision.

Such moments demonstrate the JRP’s inability to recognize that traditional knowledge includes Indigenous systems of territoriality and jurisdiction that have not been relinquished to the state. The CSTC report, keyoh holders presenting at oral evidentiary hearings, and public protests each stress the distinction between traditional use and traditional jurisdiction. The AIUS begins with a reproduction of the 1982 Carrier & Sekani declaration of ‘continued original ownership, occupancy and use of, and jurisdiction over the . . . [Carrier and Sekani] lands and all its resources.’ ³⁹ The declaration is explicit that beyond occupancy and use, the Carrier Sekani people ‘have exercised jurisdiction as a sovereign people over . . . [their] lands since time immemorial.’ ⁴⁰ Similarly in his oral evidence before the JRP as part of the keyoh Daiya-Mattess, Victor Sam stressed that ‘[t]he Nak’azdli have never been under treaty. We’re here to tell the National Energy Board that we’re totally rejecting this proposed pipeline going through our territory.’ ⁴¹ Jim Munroe, providing evidence to support Daiya-Mattess, explained how usage of particular keyoh or territories was restricted to keyoh members: ‘They don’t have rights to go to another territory. They can ask, but they don’t have rights. We don’t have rights to go to another territory. Use is by permission, and it’s by consent. There are strict rules traditionally about the use of somebody’s territory. It’s exclusive use and occupancy. And traditionally, trespass is [met] by death.’ ⁴² While these territorial claims regularly appear in evidence presented to the company and the review panel, neither has a capacity to meaningfully consider them.

While Enbridge sponsored Aboriginal communities to conduct Aboriginal traditional knowledge research programs either independently or in collaboration with the company, these studies are contoured by ‘the aim of providing information for project planning and fulfilling regulatory requirements within mutually acceptable funding parameters.’ ⁴³ Enbridge’s summary of the ATK research programs in volume 5B of its application focuses largely on information related to traditional land use and using traditional ecological knowledge to help identify baseline conditions, potential impacts, and mitigation strategies. Focusing on sites of cultural significance within Aboriginal traditional territories, the application delineates areas used for travel (trails, waterways, landmarks), harvesting (registered traplines, resource use areas, fish camps, berry-picking areas, medicinal plant collection areas), habitation (occupation sites, gathering places, camp sites, cabins), and spiritual practices (burial sites, sacred sites, sacred landscapes). The application presents this information as supplemental to environmental and socio-economic assessments, claiming that it provides ‘additional context to baseline descriptions and the analysis of potential project effects.’ ⁴⁴ In particular, Enbridge emphasizes how sharing the locations of identified traditional use sites aided the company in its constraints mapping, rerouting assessments, and watercourse crossing analysis.

In contrast, the independent CSTC ATK research emphasizes jurisdictional claims in addition to cataloguing potentially impacted traditional sites. Nonetheless, in summarizing this report in their application, Enbridge neglected these central concerns, focusing on the 90 traditional sites potentially impacted by the development. ⁴⁵ Despite considerable detail about these potential impacts, Enbridge provides no mitigation strategies because the CSTC report recommended none and instead insisted on the inappropriateness of the federal permitting process because it violated traditional jurisdiction: ‘Regulatory authorities should not proceed further with this project unless free, prior and informed consent is received from the CSTC and its member communities.’ ⁴⁶

The problem, then, with the inclusion of Carrier Sekani ATK in the Enbridge application is not simply that it fails to translate Indigenous geographies with sufficient detail. Rather, it is that the terms of recognition normalize an ontology in which Indigenous difference becomes, above all, a different way of knowing, not a way of being on the land that makes that land something different, that renders that land subject to other modes of not just use but also governance. As Paige West describes, what often gets sidelined in technological attempts to bridge between Indigenous knowledge systems and ‘western’ ones is the fact that these knowledge systems ‘constitute different ways of making “self” and “other” and of being-in-the-world.’ ⁴⁷ Because they are unable to acknowledge this difference, efforts to account for sites of Indigenous cultural importance in Enbridge’s ATK report effectively compartmentalize Indigenous geographies to a set of discrete legible places worthy of protection. Incorporating an Indigeneity presumed to lack sovereign authority in order to sanction development on unceded territories, this move to recognition works quietly to reestablish a terra nullius open again to development but mildly constrained by discrete, localized patches of Indigeneity.

The development of recognition

Contemporary permitting processes normalize the jurisdiction of Canadian colonial sovereignty by privileging Indigenous traditions of subsistence over those of territorial governance, incorporating Indigeneity as a set of delimited practices abstracted from colonial history. Indigenous peoples are thereby separated from present-day decision making and historic attempts to dispossess them of jurisdiction. Unable to bear witness to colonialism, the permitting process is bound to recognize an Indigeneity of anachronism, in the sense of belonging to an earlier time in history, the time before time, the time before contact. The development of recognition in environmental governance attends to cumulative impacts of development on Indigenous peoples through a framework that situates Aboriginal traditions as inert matter, impacted upon but incapable of evolving through a history of response and resistance to colonial impositions.

The discussion of cumulative effects on Indigenous peoples in the Northern Gateway application relies upon and reproduces an essentialized imagination of Indigeneity as precarious remnants of pre-contact traditions in need of protection, much like patches of old growth forest. In the volume of the application dedicated to ATK, cumulative cultural impacts are basically conflated with cumulative environmental impacts on traditional territories. This highlights decreased land and resource access and increased concentrations of toxins in traditional food and water supplies. But recognition of cumulative impacts on culture – ‘irreversible changes to cultural traditions necessitated by changing environmental and economic circumstances over time’ – is free of reference to the cumulative impacts of colonialism on Indigenous sovereignty. ⁴⁸ Instead, issues of self-determination are reduced to economic registers with the simple suggestion that ‘long-term mitigation measures to assist in the development of alternative livelihoods (economic systems)’ may be required. ⁴⁹ Thus, impositions on Indigeneous territorial authority is supposed to be offset by economic opportunities to invest in the project, secure servicing contracts, or access job training and employment related to the pipelines.

The absence of recognition of the cumulative impacts of colonialism not only on Indigenous environments but also on the ability to govern their lands is salient because it elides central concerns of the CSTC protests and research in relation to the application: the long history of not only environmental impacts but also territorial dispossessions from development without Carrier Sekani consent, and the long struggle to realize Carrier Sekani jurisdiction and title. Historical geographies of colonialism demonstrate how colonial projects of opening frontiers link to the articulation of particularly constrained conceptions of Indigeneity, ⁵⁰ but the Enbridge ATK volume, nonetheless, depicts an Indigeneity purportedly better understood through the collection of traditional knowledge than through explicit engagement with these historical geographies situating the conflict over the pipeline proposal.

While colonial constructions cast Indigenous peoples as belonging to the past, and while colonial practices geographically confined Indigenous peoples to local reserves, Indigenous peoples have continually resisted these incarcerations. Drawing upon Indigenous traditions and appropriating elements of colonial regimes of knowledge and practice, Indigenous peoples have levied claims that exceed the terms and work at the fissures of colonial discourse. So, just as the history of Dakelh oppression and resistance should not be absent from the ontology of Indigeneity supposed by the ATK framework, the putative inclusion and consultation of Indigenous peoples by state regulatory bodies should not be conducted without explicit recognition of colonial practices that have situated previous territorial disputes and exchanges. Attention to this history demonstrates that recognition of Indigeneity has always played a supplementary role to colonialism and development, contrary to the rationale for ATK assessment that tacitly assumes colonial dispossessions happened because Indigeneous people were not recognized.

The fur trade created a regime of recognition on which future colonial and state administrators could draw. After Alexander Mackenzie established contact with the Dakelh in 1793, traders began to build forts in their territory in the early 19th century. ⁵¹ Traders paid considerable attention to the aspects of Dakelh culture that impacted the fur trade, particularly the land tenure system through which Dakelh people governed their territories. ⁵² After the establishment of the colony of British Columbia and its subsequent integration into the Canadian dominion, new mechanisms to manage the territory and Indigenous populations were introduced. The 1876 Indian Act subjected Indigenous communities across Canada to a common regime of state management, ⁵³ and, in 1884, Northwest peoples such as the Dakelh were targeted by an amendment banning traditional governance systems such as the balhats. ⁵⁴ Provincial land policies sought to confine Indigenous space to parsimoniously allocated reserves, ⁵⁵ and children were obligated to attend residential schools that purposefully disrupted intergenerational transmission of knowledge including territorial traditions of governance. ⁵⁶ These strategies for policing Indigenous peoples were not born of a calloused ignorance of Indigenous traditions; rather, nearly 100 years of attentiveness to Indigenous knowledge and practices enabled and contoured efforts to secure settler resource extraction through the surveillance, restriction, and disruption of Indigenous practices.

Through the early twentieth-century, as settlers and land speculators moved into Dakelh territories, innovative strategies of Indigenous resistance provoked changes to Canadian policy and law. When Indigenous delegations lobbied the government to resolve outstanding title claims, Prime Minister Laurier instituted the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, eliding the question of title and shifting focus to reserve allocations. ⁵⁷ When the Allied Tribes began exploring the possibility of an Indian title case in British Columbia the government enacted a 1927 amendment to the Indian Act banning the legal pursuit of Indigenous land claims. ⁵⁸ Precluded from seeking territorial claims in the courts, Dakelh families strategically turned to a provincial trapline registry, established in 1926, as an alternate means of securing their territorial relationships. Although registering keyohs as traplines had disruptive social effects such as introducing systems of patrilineal inheritance, through these actions Dakelh families maintained aspects of traditional territorial governance.

When Canada repealed the most severe legal restrictions to Dakelh territorial practices in 1951 – the ban on the potlatch and the pursuit of Indigenous land claims in courts – there were no regulatory measures for development projects to protect the interests of Indigenous peoples (or other local residents). With the post-war boom, development in Dakelh territories intensified and Canada permitted the Alcan Corporation in the Kemano I project to dam the Nechako River and divert a substantial portion of its flow to a hydroelectric facility needed to power an aluminum smelter in Kitimat. ⁵⁹ The massive project involved damming the Nechako River, and subsequently routing of much of its flow through a 16 km tunnel through the Coastal Mountain Range to the coast. The project was promoted and permitted by federal and provincial governments without a formal process to assess or mitigate its considerable social and ecological impacts, including the displacement of the Cheslatta, a Dakelh people whose homes and graveyard were flooded with only 10 days notice. ⁶⁰ As with previous development projects in their territories, from the fur trade to the assimilationist policies and practices of the early 20th century, the Alcan development had devastating effects on the livelihoods and cultural practices of Dakelh peoples.

When Alcan proposed another phase of development to ‘complete’ the Kemano project through a second major diversion of the Nechako in the 1980s, the CSTC allied with environmentalists to challenge a provincial decision releasing the project from obligations for environmental review. ⁶¹ After an initial federal ruling in the alliance’s favor in 1991 calling for a full environmental review, the decision was appealed and the provincial government was sanctioned to implement a more lenient review of the project. Indigenous communities refused to participate in the ‘hearings because the narrow terms of reference precluded examination of the project’s impact on the Fraser River, the impact of the original Kemano project, or the economic justification for the Kemano Completion Project.’ ⁶² In 1995, due to strong public resistance and the potential impacts on the salmon fishery, the provincial government announced the cancellation of the Kemano Completion Project. Soon after the CSTC succeeded in blocking the Kemano Completion Project, the Canadian parliament passed the first act requiring environmental assessment and consideration of local concerns in permitting processes like those underway at present for the Northern Gateway. Situating the development of recognition historically, the Northern Gateway application’s inclusion of ATK represents the trace of reforms pressed upon Canadian permitting processes by Indigenous resistance. But, as we have argued, this development of recognition also attempts to fix problems of legitimacy posed by increasingly mobile forms of Indigenous resistance through a regime of recognition fixing Indigeneity in time and place.

Closures and openings

In the spring of 2012, the Yinka Dene Alliance organized the Freedom Train tour. Members of the alliance traveled by train across Canada to oppose Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. Making stops and holding rallies in Jasper, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, members of the Yinka Dene Alliance mobilized their traditional responsibilities to engage with a broader solidarity network resisting tar sands pipeline development. The tour ended with a march on Enbridge’s annual shareholders meeting in downtown Toronto. Following the contours of capital to Toronto and pressing their demand that the pipeline be stopped, alliance members and allies developed broader geographies of responsibility by mobilizing traditional territorial practices.

Appearing at the stakeholder meeting in traditional regalia was not simply a strategic performance of identity; geographically stretching traditional territorial practices, these Dakelh people carried out responsibilities to defend their lands and issued competing jurisdictional claims to those of the state. In the context of the global financial relations underwriting development, Dakelh practices of ‘walking the territory’ to maintain knowledge and secure the health of the land involves continually widening circuits. Beyond challenging governing representations of the environment, the train tour and other resistance to the Enbridge permitting process construct new geographies of responsibility, calling into question the underlying system of structures and practices in environmental governance that constitute nature and Indigeneity as objects of knowledge and calculation. A tension between being and becoming is at the heart of the conflicts over territory that ATK research is purported to address. Framed as a pragmatic politics, this form of inclusion in governance effectively stifles the ontological nature of politics by cultivating a world that recognizes difference only in its return to the same, with Indigeneity as an exception to the rule of modernity.

In this paper we have insisted on the need to recognize the ontological politics at work in permitting a tar sands pipeline through Indigenous territories in British Columbia. We have been interested to draw out the contingencies that Indigenous processes of becoming press on colonial processes of development that attempt to negotiate stable associations with Indigenous being. The inclusion of ATK in Canada’s permitting process for the Northern Gateway pipeline has been shown to reify Indigeneity to a politically constrained and knowable condition. We hope it is clear that, while such reification of Indigeneity in environmental governance threatens to continue traditions of colonial dispossession, these politics of recognition cannot fully contain the contingent processes of Indigenous becoming.

To think about the politics of the Enbridge application in terms of ontology means recognizing Carrier Sekani resistance to this mode of governance as possible interruptions to what Joel Wainwright has called ‘the becoming-space of the territorial nation state.’ ⁶³ These politics are ontological inasmuch as the mobilization of traditional territorial practices as resistance can be seen to counter the spatial ontology of the state in the unfoldings of capitalist development. However, recognizing the becoming-spaces of Carrier Sekani territorial practices precisely necessitates resisting a slip into a salvage ethnography that captures Carrier Sekani being in an ontology that refuses the movement and agency of becoming. This is the aporia that traps the move to include ATK in the permitting process. Indeed, this is the aporia of postcolonial ecopolitics that we must resist, but cannot expect to transcend.