Review of Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet'suwet'en Resistance by Tyler McCreary

When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided Wet'suwet'en territory in 2020, solidarity protests and rail blockades sprang up across the country -momentarily grounding the transportation of goods and people to a halt.This violent encounter is part of a long history of struggles around rights to land and settler colonial industrial development.In Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities, Tyler McCreary traces Wet'suwet'en engagement with and resistance to another pipeline project -the now cancelled Enbridge Northern Gateway.In doing so, McCreary tackles essential questions about the politics of industrial development and reconciliation in a settlercolonial context.Rather than looking at pipelines as 'cases of' or 'sites of' resistance as others (including myself) have done, McCreary focuses on how Wet'suwet'en territorial sovereignty encountered the authority of the Canadian state and power of pipeline giant Enbridge in the proposed mega oil sands pipeline project (xvii-i).In the mid-2000s, Enbridge proposed Northern Gateway to transport diluted bitumen over 1,100 km from the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta to the coast of British Columbia coast, crossing many Indigenous territories, including that of the Wet'suwet'en.Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities is a story about "how colonial forces seek to control Indigenous claims, and how the Wet'suwet'en resist" (xviii).McCreary carefully traces the historical and contemporary settler colonial dynamics and Wet'suwet'en law, governance, and resistance.McCreary describes how this book results from "deeply entangled personal and research contributions" as a settler growing up in Wet'suwet'en territory (vii).The book relies on his doctoral fieldwork between 2010 and 2012, though he also draws on over a decade of listening and relationships with members of the Wet'suwet'en nation.Methodologically, McCreary undertakes a close critical analysis of historical, regulatory, and legal documents.Though he does not describe his work as such, it is also a form of community-engaged research.If I had a minor quibble, I wish more was said about some of these methodological decisions and processes.The book opens with a key moment in the mid-2000s when Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared Canada a 'global energy powerhouse', and the oil industry was planning unfettered growth (1).Yet this was met with quickly forming opposition to tar sands expansion, and the seeds for Wet'suwet'en mobilization to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines project were planted.The book proceeds in three parts.The first situates Wet'suwet'en-settler relations' historically, moving through the fur trade, Wet'suwet'en territorial governance, the establishment of the settler-colonial administration and machinery of dispossession in the nineteenth century, including its 'regime of resource extraction' based on fishing, commercial forestry and its impacts on Wet'suwet'en societies and economies (22).The first chapter concludes with the (re)-assertion of Indigenous rights in response -including opposition to the 1969 White Paper and struggles for recognition of Aboriginal title in settler courts.Throughout the book, McCreary develops this kind of double tracing of settler colonial extractivism and Indigenous responses.The second chapter centres on the 1997 case, Delgamuukw, Gisdaywa v. British Columbia, which required the settler provincial government to recognize Indigenous forms of authority through Aboriginal title.McCreary describes the case as "monumental not only in Canadian history but also in the global history of anti-colonial legal struggles" (45).Still, these issues of land were far from settled -and the case set in motion processes that have shaped how Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en authority interact with colonial systems and institutions (84).In this context, McCreary traces Indigenous-settler relationships after this landmark case.