Introduction: a history of blockades

The history of the settler states of North America, Canada and the United States, can be told through stories of Indigenous peoples’ struggles to maintain their lands in the face of relentless colonial displacement and dispossession (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Daschuck, 2013; Harris, 2004). As settler states have relentlessly driven railways and roads through Indigenous homelands, while restricting Indigenous nations onto reserves, fractions of their former land-bases, direct actions to violate those colonial spaces can be a powerful act of resurgence for Indigenous peoples (Alfred, 2005; Simpson, 2011). In response, blockading has become an important tactic through which Indigenous communities reassert their traditional forms of place-based culture and governance. Blockades run the gamut from flashmob-style disruptions of urban intersections, highways and commercial spaces (Barker, 2015, 48–50) to what Dene political scientist Glen Coulthard calls the rarest form of blockade action: the ‘more-or-less permanent reoccupation of a portion of Native land through the establishment of a reclamation site’ (Coulthard, 2014, 166).

These reoccupations or reclamation sites may be comparatively rare forms of resistance, but they also represent some of the most important moments in Indigenous activism in North America. In the USA, the history of the American Indian movement and the resurgence of tribal sovereignty struggles in the 1960s and 1970s is inextricably wrapped around occupations: Alcatraz in 1969–71, the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, DC in 1972, and the town of Wounded Knee in 1973 (Deloria, 1985; Smith and Warrior, 1997). These occupations continue into the present, with the Winnimum Wintu, an ‘unrecognised’ tribe – meaning lacking official federal status – taking control of sacred river spaces in California (Fimrite, 2012), among many others.

Indigenous peoples in Canada are also a part of this history of anticolonial occupations. Canada is often falsely portrayed as a ‘peaceful’ nation, built on treaties rather than conquest (Regan, 2010), but the response of settler governments and communities to Indigenous activists tells a different story.