Energy East and Dakota Access: Pipelines, Protest, and the Obstacles of Mutual Unintelligibility

Abstract

This comparative article examines the controversies surrounding the Energy East pipeline in New Brunswick and the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. It analyzes four key texts, one from an Indigenous leader and one from an elected or business leader in each place. It employs a heuristic tool that describes speakers’ frames as “scenes of thought” to discover the assumptions underpinning each group’s worldview about (1) the actors involved in the controversies and (2) their spatial and temporal relationships to each other. Two pictures emerge. The first is of two groups—Native and non-Native leaders—with incommensurable perspectives on the continuity (or discontinuity) of time and space. From within their worldviews, the other group’s arguments appeared unconvincing or incomprehensible. The second is of two modes of engagement, shaped by Canadian and US approaches to securing consent for resource extraction, that prompted different forms of interaction between Indigenous peoples and the companies that wanted to lay pipeline across their land.