ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at the conflicts between various groups engaged in the struggles for or against the commercial seal hunt in Canada over the past few decades. Together, the tensions that Indigenous peoples experience when confronting the Western animal advocacy movement, neoliberal global capitalism, settler colonialism, Eurocentric white supremacy, and reciprocal relationships with the land make up the main object of my analysis. Two main arguments are proposed. First, I argue that all efforts going towards defending wild animals and the ecological habitat they depend on will likely be rendered ineffective if settler-colonial capitalist processes of dispossessions and destructions go unchallenged. To challenge these processes would require Indigenous communities and settler solidarity to fight for Indigenous self-determination and sustainable economies, while the failure to do so involves legitimizing state powers and relying on state legitimacy to either sustain or collapse capitalist industries. Secondly, I argue that while Eurocentrism, white supremacy, and racism certainly played a significant role in the tactics that animal advocacy NGOs employed to drastically weaken the commercial seal hunt, the role that nonhuman animals (i.e. the seals themselves) played in their own resistance and struggles against capitalist industrial massacres should not be erased or downplayed.