Candid Colonialism

  • A case study of Wet’suwet’en land defenders’ strategic digital communications use

  • Author(s) / Creator(s)
  • Canada, a nation-state founded on colonialism, “a form of structured dispossession,”
    (Coulthard, 2014, p. 7) has made efforts to amend for harms caused to First Peoples by its racist
    policies. Yet conflicts around Indigenous sovereignty continue to play out, often in remote
    territories where mainstream media seldom ventures. At the same time, a resurgence of
    Indigenous Nations has found expression in a movement to reoccupy traditional territories never
    ceded to the state, revitalizing Indigenous relationships with the land and increasing the potential
    for conflict with extractive industry. My Capstone Project examines these tensions through the
    lens of communications and technology. First, I present a review of contemporary,
    predominately Canadian, literature on the subject of conducting research ethically with
    Indigenous communities in the evolving context of Indigenous resurgence and struggle for
    sovereignty and decolonization in what is now known as Canada. Second, I present a case study
    of strategic communications undertaken by land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in
    their struggle to stop Coastal GasLink from building a massive gas and oil pipeline through their
    territory and under the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) in which I use the methodology of
    qualitative inductive analysis to identify some central themes in the data.

  • Date created
    2022-05-16
  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Type of Item
    Research Material
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-xz6v-3f84
  • License
    Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International