Clear-Cutting and Colonialism: The Ethnopolitical Dynamics of Indigenous Environmental Activism in Northwestern Ontario

• Main Author: Anna J. Willow
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: anishina*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.572.7423; http://anthropology.osu.edu/docs/faculty/Willow_Anna_ClearCutting.pdf

maintained a blockade to slow the pace of clear-cut logging in their traditional ter-ritory. This article situates contemporary anti-clear-cutting activism at Grassy Nar-rows in its ethnohistorical and ethnopolitical context. It considers the blockade not as a manifestation of inherent indigenous environmentality but as a complex phe-nomenon predicated on Anishinaabe people’s desires for self-determination, rec-ognition of rights, and the power to decide what takes place on land they perceive as theirs. More broadly, it suggests that acknowledging indigenous environmental activism as a fundamentally political project challenges stereotypical images of eco-logical nobility and, concurrently, calls into question mainstream conceptions of a just modern society that has long since done away with colonialism. December third of 2002 was a cold early winter day in the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario. That day, three young members of Grassy Narrows First Nation dragged a fallen tree onto the snow-covered logging road just north of Ontario Provincial Highway 671 to impede the movement of log-ging trucks and equipment within their community’s Traditional Land Use Area. Witnessed and supported by dozens of friends, family members, and neighbors, their act marked the beginning of the Grassy Narrows blockade. Grassy Narrows First Nation is known to the Anishinaabe people who live there as Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek.1 The community is located 50 miles north of Kenora, Ontario, and approximately 170 miles northeast of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Although the band’s reserve is only four-teen square miles, the area that Grassy Narrows residents consider their traditional territory covers twenty-five hundred. Just over thirteen hundred