Indigenous Energy Justice: Multitemporalities, Natural Law, and Decolonial Governance in Anishinaabeg Pipeline Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From Standing Rock to Unist’ot’en, battles over proposed oil and gas pipeline projects are mounting across Turtle Island (North America). Given the level of colonial violence surrounding these projects and the tensions that arise from diverse worldviews conflicting in decision-making, there is an urgent need to better understand Indigenous law on its own terms, not framed by colonial legal systems. To do this, I focus on two case studies in Anishinaabe Akiing (territory), Line 9 (Sarnia, Ontario to Montréal, Québec) and Line 3 (Hardisty, Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin). I ask what is Indigenous energy justice? What does it look and feel like to Anishinaabe people engaged in pipeline resistance? To answer these questions, I take a decolonizing approach to process tracing techniques including document analysis, participation in community life, and in-depth interviews while visiting with Anishinaabe pipeline opponents.\nThis dissertation is divided into three papers rooted in Anishinaabe ways of living and multiple temporalities that have been largely supplanted by a single, linear colonial temporality. The first paper begins by considering tensions between Anishinaabe and settler temporalities reflected in the 2012-17 Line 9 pipeline dispute. While colonial temporal modes result in narrower and more short-sighted project reviews, Anishinaabe temporalities open possibilities for Indigenous self-determination in energy decision-making. In the second paper, I examine one of these possibilities further. I explore how traditional harvesting protocols can be applied to energy governance, focusing on the Line 3 expansion plan. I identify four overlapping key concepts: rights, responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity. These principles are then mapped onto Anishinaabe understandings of oil, hydro, wind, and solar energy. The resulting analysis challenges extractivist narratives of energy production and provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between people and energy. The last paper describes decolonial process tracing as a way to bridge dominant process tracing techniques with Anishinaabe ways of knowing based in multiple spatiotemporalities. A decolonizing approach to process tracing is more expansive than dominant forms and can change both the actors and power dynamics involved. One possible framework for Indigenous energy justice draws upon principles of Natural law that can be applied to energy governance and strengthen communities’ capabilities to choose their own decision-making structures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".