ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes a similitude in the uses of the drone view by the Sami and the Sioux tribe is, in itself, part of an endeavor to consider how the use of an aerial perspective might be made into an alliance of a radical politics that is neither obdurately local in terms of identity nor neglects the local trajectories and histories of minority indigenous communities. An overtly partisan inclusion, the footage reminds the viewer of the political potentiality of drone technology as an infrastructure of protest, that connects the time and space of protest to the spatial politics of the network. For the Sioux tribe the drone view was a critical tool in the documentation and dissemination of the police and private security firm’s use of attack dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons against the protestors exposing the scale of the police operations and pipeline construction.