Articulating Indigenous Law as “Environmental Protection”? The Piikani Nation and the Oldman River Dam Environmental Assessment Review Process

This article discusses the Piikani Nation’s attempts to challenge the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to articulate water and land relationships through the languages and structures of settler colonial law. Completed in 1991, the dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits and an attempt by community activists representing the Lonefighters Society to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this article, I focus on how Piikani Nation members attempted to assert their geographic relationships with the Oldman River through participation in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Review process. Within this process, Piikani elders, activists, and community advocates mobilized various conceptions of law, such as treaty rights and Piikani and Blackfoot legal traditions. This article therefore seeks to answer this question: How do Indigenous forms of jurisdiction articulate with Canadian legal and regulatory fora, such as the Environmental Assessment Review process? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous geographies, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Specifically, I use the concept of articulation from Marxian political economy, suggesting this theory, in conversation with legal pluralism scholarship, provides a generative framework for critically interrogating how Indigenous legal orders interact with Canadian law.