This dissertation develops a theory of dual dispossession to identify the way in which the organizational forms of the Land Back movement, such as the Unist’ot’en Camp, sustain the frontlines of Water Protection and Land Defence. By maintaining the practical inseparability of colonial and capitalist social relations and thus their co-determination of Indigenous subjectivity, the analysis reveals that the frontlines of anticolonial struggle are sustained by an infrastructure of redistribution, whereby labour, money and goods are secured. This infrastructure functions to mitigate the mute compulsion of economic relations, which compel all those deprived of the means of production to sell their labour power to the owners of those means and thus sustains full-time Water Protection and Land Defence. As such, the infrastructure facilitates a semi-autonomous social practice that is determined by the norms of Indigenous culture, governance, and law to a larger degree and constitutes the objective basis for the rejection of the colonial politics of recognition in practice. However, the analysis also reveals that the infrastructure of redistribution is a mediated form of the social relations of capitalist production given that it does not eliminate but minimizes the determination of exploitation upon the activity of those on the frontlines and provides access to the means of struggle, which remain the social product of capital. Thus, the infrastructure only displaces the circuit of capital and the immediate compulsions of wage-labour. This implies that class struggle oriented by Marxist analysis is a critical condition for the development of Indigenous self-determination beyond the colonial politics of recognition. Moreover, this analysis is further developed by an historical argument that identifies the organizational forms of the Land Back movement as institutionalizing tendencies that have evolved throughout the broader Indigenous movement, especially during the Red Power movement and those theorized as Indigenous resurgence in the post 1990 Siege of Kanehsatà:ke era. Dual dispossession, I argue, is a theoretical intervention at the intersections of critical Indigenous Studies and critical political economy that enables the concrete development of these tendencies by foregrounding the way they are practically synthesized in the organizational forms of the Land Back movement
