ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2016, women from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe set up a campsite to protect their land, their access to water, and their fellow Lakota Nation people from the environmental and therefore cultural destruction the building of an oil pipeline would cause. The discourse surrounding the conflicts leading up to this enactment of Indigenous sovereignty, as well as the increasingly violent events that followed as the pipeline was completed, is analyzed along three themes: (1) neglect of important historicizations of Indigenous conflicts with the American government, (2) representation of Indigenous experiences in a way that minimizes their claims to land-based culture and futures, and (3) discussion of related legislative factors that is similarly narrow in perspective. This analysis offers a chance to formulate political ecology and indigenous environmental studies as a cohesive field foregrounding decolonial environmentalism and one that can critically engage public relations. Such an intervention can leverage public relation’s ability to build communicative bridges, bringing varied Indigenous voices and epistemologies to spaces where climate change policies – often undergirded by harmful neocolonial ideologies – are formulated. Public relations can thus play a crucial role in designing policies that work toward environmental justice and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.
