Turtle Island 2016 Civil Resistance Snapshot

From pre-European contact, when some indigenous nations were experimenting with nonviolent alternatives to war-e.g., counting coup-to modern nonviolent native resistance to US-Canada pipelines and other threats to indigenous lifeways, nonviolent resistance to invasion, occupation, genocide, environmental destruction and oppression has been far more successful than has armed resistance. Throughout this exegesis of Native American and First Nation civil resistance, I use examples from several struggles, but most pointedly and repeatedly from the one I immersed in for several years-the Anishinaabe struggle of 1976-1993 with the civil resistance at boat landings most massively from 1989-1992, when thousands of whites mobilized to attempt to stop Anishinaabe fishers and hundreds of nonviolent monitors and de-escalators trained and deployed alongside the tribal members. The efforts by some to create a pan-Indian identity as the next step toward assimilation into the dominant culture (e.g., Native American instead of Santee Sioux or First Nation instead of Wet'suwet'e) completely failed (McKenzie-Jones, 2010)-the terms are used by externals far more than by Native Americans, for example. Many factors contribute to the growing success of Native American and First Nation nonviolent campaigns and movements, not the least of which is the sense, informed by a burgeoning history, that tribes have agency, something occluded, arguably, by historical norms that ignored any agency except futile violent resistance. People were subjects of anthropological research, not participants with a role in determining methodologies, utilities, parameters or goals-this was a factor in essential erasure of indigenous agency in public policy considerations. [...]in the US,...