“They're treating us like Indians!”: Political Ecologies of Property and Race in North American Pipeline Populism

What is it about?

While political ecologists have analyzed the role of private property in creating and sustaining ecological inequalities, this approach does not often take property as a foundational element of racial capitalism. I argue that the defense of private property in contestation of North American oil pipelines demonstrates the centrality of property not only to the structural reproduction of capital, but also to its Euro-American subject. Emphasizing their affective attachments to land and resentment at dispossession, landowners and populist environmental organizations in the Great Plains frequently compared individual, white experiences of eminent domain to the historic and ongoing dispossession of Native Nations by suggesting “they’re treating us like Indians.” In order to account for the reproduction of white supremacy in environmentalism, I argue that we must understand how its oppositional politics are linked to economic interests-in-land and affective desires-for-land that maintain landed private property.

Featured Image