Policing Indigenous Movements
Dissent and the Security State
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction.
But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance.
In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crosby, coordinator of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, and Monaghan, a criminology professor, both at Ottawa's Carleton University, have put together a disturbing, painstakingly documented exploration of the role played by Canada's national security agencies in watching, harassing, and criminalizing indigenous people involved in land rights struggles. The authors uncover internal communications that paint an unflattering picture of a Canadian government that, working hand in hand with industry, has adopted an antiterrorism approach in its relationship with First Nations peoples. The language usually reserved for terrorists (extremism, violence, radicalization) is consistently employed by state bureaucracies to describe peaceful indigenous rights blockades and vigils. The book is divided into sections on specific conflicts: opposition to a British Columbia pipeline and shale gas fracking in New Brunswick, resistance from a Quebec Algonquin community to federal attacks on its traditional governance structures, and the decentralized, influential Idle No More movement. It is a well-argued study that clearly contrasts respectful government rhetoric with a coordinated strategy that views indigenous people as a potentially dangerous population who must be watched and, where possible, preemptively neutralized. The prose is somewhat academic in style, but this work is nonetheless an accessible must-read for all Canadians concerned about respectful relations with indigenous people and the decline of civil rights in the war-on-terror era.
