IF THE WATERS WERE TO SHRUG EXTRACTIVE VIOLENCE, ERASURE AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTING IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL PRESENT DILLON OZUNA THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE M.A. DEGREE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN FALL 2019 IF THE WATERS WERE TO SHRUG EXTRACTIVE VIOLENCE, ERASURE AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTING IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL PRESENT DILLON OZUNA THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE M.A. DEGREE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN FALL 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis is based on my multi-sited fieldwork (January–September 2018) surrounding an anti-pipeline resistance camp led by four indigenous women in southwest Louisiana opposing the new Bayou Bridge Pipeline; the southward extension of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline that spurred mass protests at Standing Rock from mid-2016 to early-2017. The four women are of Diné and Cherokee, Sicangu Lakota (Sioux), Choctaw, and Houma descent respectively. The Bayou Bridge Pipeline, financed by banks such as Norway’s DnB, would transport crude oil to the black church community of St. James—an impoverished community long inundated with toxic pollution in one of the most densely industrialized regions in the Western Hemisphere, named Cancer Alley—for the manufacturing of plastics and various consumer commodities. The women operate as allies to the black community of St. James and other Cancer Alley communities who are themselves stark opponents of the pipeline, highlighting solidarity across marginalized social groupings. The allies of these women that I lived among and studied hail from other indigenous communities across the country, while others that I lived among are non-indigenous sympathizers with politics that are primarily leftist- oriented or anarchistic. As such the combined politics of those that I studied are mainly anti-capitalist and anti- colonial. Throughout the thesis, I explore the politics of water mobilized by activists—i.e. a politics focused on rights to clean-water as well as aimed at protecting surrounding environments that communities depend on— examining primarily how they employ their politics of water as a vehicle to resist what they perceive as settler- colonial processes of dispossession engendered by projects of the fossil fuel industry, the US government and the Louisiana government in the present. I combine theories from resistance studies, social movement studies, environmental studies, political anthropology, linguistic anthropology, gender studies, kinship studies, indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, a sub-field of indigenous studies that analyzes phenomena pertaining to settler colonialism, to examine the mobilizations of these activists and the overarching power dynamics, i.e. the political corruption and the structural relations that promote the construction of this pipeline network, against which they employ various forms of resistance. Using various news articles and the work of investigative journalists, I examine the discursive landscape surrounding the activists and this pipeline. Moreover, I use life-histories and lived-experiences from qualitative interview material, ethnographic scenarios and field-notes to examine the turmoil of the contemporary United States, the everyday lived-realities of activists here as low-income citizens, people of diverse ethnicities and women of diverse backgrounds in a society that since president Trump’s inauguration in 2017 has steadily become more alienating and hostile toward the intersecting social groupings of these activists. As the thesis explores, their lives are subject to diverse modes of oppression and domination connected to industrial projects and pollution. Any mistakes written in the thesis are my own. Keywords: resistance; water; politics; environment; settler colonialism; indigenous; pollution; dispossession; anti-capitalism; anti-colonialism. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to begin here with a land acknowledgement of the territories that I lived on as a guest in the fieldsite. It is an emic practice among my interlocutors to acknowledge the original inhabitants of a place either still existing or who were violently dispossessed during the colonization period, and whose histories are largely erased in school textbooks in the United States and unacknowledged by the settler-majority population. The southwest Louisiana prairies that I lived on were once occupied by the indigenous Atakapa people, whose communities stretched from present-day Texas to Louisiana. The main tribes were largely decimated by the mid-19th century, and of their contemporary descendants there are no remaining fluent speakers of the language. The southern swampland territories of the Atchafalaya that I frequented were once occupied by the Chitimacha people, one of the four federally recognized tribes in Louisiana besides the Coushatta, the Choctaw and the Tunica-Biloxi. These are among the many original peoples of the land, and the dispossessions and injustices against indigenous communities in the United States are still ongoing. For six to eight months I had the undying privilege of living amongst some of the most organized, fiercest and dedicated collective of people who continually put their bodies on the line in their struggle for justice; for those who are denied access to clean water, for the right to defend their lands from incursive fossil fuel companies and who seek accountability from an affluent class of Americans that render poor communities of color disposable for their profit. Of the basic principles that these activists adhere to, one of prominence is voluntary association: whereby different individuals mobilize together on the basis of mutual interest, and here, in resisting the destruction of several communities in which they either live or to which they express solidarity and common struggle. As I attempt to explore in this thesis, the forces that they resist are not reducible to a single issue such as this pipeline; but rather attributable to the structural arrangements and coercive authority that permits the ongoing dispossessions of their communities. To Cherri Foytlin, Anne White Hat, Monique Verdin, Sonya Bratlie and this stellar assembly of activists, the Movement Mothers and Trash Punks as they call themselves, I have the utmost gratitude for allowing me to live among you and to document your fight during this pipelines construction; sharing the confined spaces of cars, sharing meals, experiencing environments mostly unseen and hearing stories mostly unheard of by the world. By acknowledging the names of the women of the council, I am breaking anonymity here for the purpose of giving credit to those whose tireless environmental work I studied. Thank you for enduring any tedious interviews on my part and for the immense insight you all have provided along the way. A very special thank you to those activists in particular that I spent the most time with, for the humorous impressions of Rust and Marty from the television-series True Detective, based in Louisiana, for inviting me to experience activist culture behind the scenes as an unfamiliar researcher, for allowing me to join you to scavenge junkyards and roadsides, for the boat-trips, and for the daylong road-trips accompanied by rest-stop naps and the sharing of music. Thank you for the times around fire-pits, in meetings, motels, swimming in the bayous, getting devoured by bugs together and most of all seeing you all in your elements as hardcore activists, resisters and direct actionists. To local Louisiana activists such as Travis London, and to the Standing Rock crew, the so-called Texas crew, the so-called Missouri and Midwest crew, the Rhode Island crew, the Westcoast crew, and all others who mobilized in Louisiana, I am forever honored to have met you and thank you for allowing me to share the spaces of court-rooms, direct actions and the wildest of landscapes. To the people of 350 and Louisiana Bucket Brigade of the wider network, I thank you for allowing me to attend meetings and to share space with you in the beginning of the fieldwork and for the work you all continue to do. To Thom Davies, a fellow ethnographer that I met in the field-site and whose work I admire, I thank you for the advice during the fieldwork and for the work that you do. To Nora, the person who listened, discussed, supported and pushed me beyond my limitations and who has been a rock in my life—who endured time spent apart while striving beyond your own limits at home with new responsibilities as a psychologist on the rise—I owe all and am forever proud to know you and of your accomplishments. Without you, this work would not at all have been possible. To family who lent me a vehicle long-term and a wonderful extended family that opened up their home to me in New Orleans in the beginning of my fieldwork, I thank you for the time shared together around dinner tables and in the city. To my parents who each supported this endeavor, I am indebted and thank you all. To New Orleans family living in Norway, I thank you for the moral support and I hope to shed light on issues in Louisiana and in the US that were perhaps unknown to you. To Joel and other friends back home, I thank you for the support. To my first assigned advisor, professor Tone Bringa, whose work ethic and professionalism is a source of inspiration, I thank you for approving my research proposal in the fall of 2017 and for sending me off into the field with words of encouragement. To my later-assigned advisor, Kerry Ryan Chance, whose extraordinary work I admire and respect, I am extremely lucky for your guidance in the beginning of the fieldwork and I thank you for the skype meetings, for your mentoring that went into revisions of chapters, and for the overall support that helped shape this thesis. To Erik, Axel and Marte, I thank you all and I am deeply indebted to you for undergoing the grueling process of reading the earlier drafts that helped shaped this thesis.