Lecture
Environmental Activism, Indigenous Survival, and Settler Colonialism in the Unist’ot’en Camp’s Resistance against the Coastal GasLink Pipeline
- Laura de Vos (Radboud University)
- Date
- Thursday 26 September 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.26
Hosted by the Futures of Native American Studies, the North American Studies programme, the Leiden University Cente for the Arts in Society, and the JEDI fund.
In this workshop, Laura de Vos (Radboud Univ.) will present their research with Marije van Lankveld on the Unist’ot’en Camp and its resistance against the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline. They argue that a closer look at the activism of the Unist’ot’en Camp allows us to see how Indigenous resistance against extractive projects on Indigenous lands goes beyond ‘simply’ protecting the environment, and is, in its essence, about defending the continuation of Indigenous peoples, their rights, cultures, and worldviews. It considers the conflict about the Coastal GasLink pipeline as a case study to investigate three broader issues causally connected to extractive projects that find their origin in the Canadian settler colonial project, and the specific ways in which these have affected the Indigenous land defenders at Unist’ot’en: Indigenous sovereignty and landownership, environmental racism, and gender-based violence.
Dr. de Vos joins us as a guest lecture in the North American Studies course “American Identities: the present to 1850.” Members of the Leiden academic community are invited to join the discussion. Please email j.j.morgan-owens@hum.leidenuniv.nl for details.
About the speaker
Dr. Laura M. De Vos is an assistant professor in the American Studies program in the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University in Nijmegen with an academic background in North American Indigenous studies, US American literature, and gender studies.
Born in Nicaragua to Belgian parents, Laura mostly grew up in Belgium. Laura obtained their PhD degree at the University of Washington in Seattle, where they initiated and helped create a Graduate Certificate in American Indian and Indigenous Studies which is now being offered (since January 2020).
Laura's work has been published in Transmotion and Settler Colonial Studies. Their article "Spiralic Time and Cultural Continuity for Indigenous Sovereignty: Idle No More and The Marrow Thieves" received the 2020 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Academic Essay. They are a co-editor for "Transmotion: Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies." Laura is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar.
Outside of the academy, their organising and public education work concerns themes of abolition, anti-racism, and anti-colonial international solidarity.