Thursday 26 September 9:15-11:00 in Hetta Mohr 0.26
Hosted by the Futures of Native American Studies atLeiden, North American Studies, LUCAS, and the
JEDI fund.
In this workshop, Laura de Vos (Radboud Univ.) will present their research with Marije van Lankveld on
the Unist’ot’en Camp and its resistance against the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline. They argue that a closer look at the activism of the Unist’ot’en Camp allows us to see how Indigenous resistance against extractive projects on Indigenous lands goes beyond ‘simply’ protecting the environment, and is, in its essence, about defending the continuation of Indigenous peoples, their rights, cultures, and
worldviews. It considers the conflict about the Coastal GasLink pipeline as a case study to
investigate three broader issues causally connected to extractive projects that find their origin
in the Canadian settler colonial project, and the specific ways in which these have affected the
Indigenous land defenders at Unist’ot’en: Indigenous sovereignty and landownership,
environmental racism, and gender-based violence.
Dr. de Vos joins us as a guest lecture in the North American Studies course “American
Identities: the present to 1850.” Members of the academic community are invited to join the
discussion.
Dr. Laura M. De Vos is an assistant professor in the American Studies program in the Faculty
of Arts at Radboud University in Nijmegen with an academic background in North American
Indigenous studies, US American literature, and gender studies. Born in Nicaragua to Belgian
parents, Laura mostly grew up in Belgium. Laura obtained their PhD degree at the University
of Washington in Seattle, where they initiated and helped create a Graduate Certificate in
American Indian and Indigenous Studies which is now being offered (since January 2020).
Laura’s work has been published in Transmotion and Settler Colonial Studies. Their article
“Spiralic Time and Cultural Continuity for Indigenous Sovereignty: Idle No More and The
Marrow Thieves” received the 2020 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures
Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Academic Essay. They are a co-editor for
“Transmotion: Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies.” Laura is a fellow of the Salzburg
Global Seminar. Outside of the academy, their organizing and public education work
concerns themes of abolition, anti-racism, and anti-colonial international solidarity.