ABSTRACT
Images of blasted mountaintops in Appalachia, fracking elds in North Dakota, and tar sands mines in Alberta ood our screens, and climate activists warn us that we are approaching a point of no return. But the operations of neoliberal capitalism that generate these wastelands have been exposed and disrupted by recent Indigenous social movements in the United States and Canada.1 These movements employ expressive forms that combine cultural practices, direct action, and social media.2 In this chapter I think through the meaning and signicance of the body in these demonstrations, inspired by Susan Leigh Foster’s insight that bodies, individual and collective, are “articulate matter” (2003, 395). I also consider what it means for bodies to be “on the street, in the square,” based on the work of Judith Butler (2011). Beyond simply celebrating public demonstrations, Butler argues, we need to think about how certain bodies are policed in public space at all times (Butler 2014, 99-101). Indigenous demonstrations reveal the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, including the ways that environmental racism threatens cultural survival. Through these corporeal interventions in public and “sacred spaces” and in the sacrice zones of global capital, Indigenous social movements articulate a vision of community in the midst of colonial violence (including the violence of climate change) based on collective action and enduring inhabitation (Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014, 22). These demonstrations evoke the dance described in Spokane/ Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie’s poem, “The Powwow at the End of the World” (1996, 98).3 This poem describes the devastating changes wrought by colonialism and holds out the promise that Indigenous peoples will survive beyond the apocalypse.
