Abstract
In early 2019, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intervened at the Gidimt’en Access Checkpoint in northern British Columbia (BC) and arrested 14 land defenders, garnering global media attention. To explore the ways that settler common sense ( Rifkin 2013 ) is assembled and perpetuated in Canada, this paper examines how Wet’suwet’en mobilization is framed in news media coverage. Situating our work in relation to settler colonial studies and informed by the writings of Indigenous scholars, we use critical discourse analysis to assess mainstream news media framings of the Wet’suwet’en struggle. Drawing from literature on social movement suppression, we discern three main themes in these texts that work to validate the RCMP’s excessive use of force against land defenders and delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en’s claim to sovereignty. While this framing set the stage for sustained corporate incursions, police surveillance, and occupation across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, we suggest negative framing as well as activist use of social media to visualize state repression may have created the conditions for what Hess and Martin (2006) call backfire.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Cited by
5 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献