Why We Can't Afford Pipelines: State-Corporate Rentierism on Wet'suwet'en Territory

Abstract

Using the Shut Down Canada movement as a case study, this thesis engages in a critical analysis of the capitalist state and its response to the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests in February 2020. Much of the existing research tends to treat Indigenous resistance in binary terms (colonizer/colonized), which fails to situate Indigenous struggles within broader relationships of power, in this context rentier capitalism. This gap in the literature is addressed through Nancy Fraser’s concept of boundary struggles to understand the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests as a site of conflict between capitalism’s economic and non-economic features, and which secures the conditions for rent extraction. This study also relies on Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the ideologies that influenced the state’s response to the conflict, and how this response (re)produces unstable capitalist conditions. In doing so, this study found that dominant discourses overcame counter-hegemonic knowledge claims during the pipeline protests. These discourses relied on equity agreements signed by elected band councils and arguments of ‘clean energy’ to undermine Wet’suwet’en law and authority, and diminish environmental concerns. Taken-for-granted assumptions about the purported economic benefits of the pipeline further influenced which knowledge claims “won out”. Although a memorandum of understanding was signed between governments and the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, the pipeline conflict was never resolved and the Wet’suwet’en continue to resist resource extraction projects. This study concludes that in order to target and adequately critique the capitalist state, we need to develop a broader understanding of social transformation.