Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance

Review By Walter Lepore

July 29, 2026

Conflicts over pipeline development in western Canada have become central to debates about energy policy, environmental governance, and Indigenous rights. Pipeline proposals have increasingly turned into focal points for broader political struggles over climate change, economic development, and the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. A paradigmatic example of these tensions is Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline, announced in 2005, to transport diluted bitumen from the oil sands region near Edmonton to a marine terminal in Kitimat on the Pacific coast. The project would have crossed more than 1,100 kilometers of land, including major river systems and numerous Indigenous territories throughout northern British Columbia.

Opposition to the project emerged from several directions, including environmental organizations and political actors within BC. The most prominent opposition, however, came from the Wet’suwet’en Nation, whose unceded territory lies along the proposed inland pipeline route. In 2016, after more than a decade of Indigenous mobilization and legal battles culminating in the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision to reject the Northern Gateway approval, the Canadian government formally cancelled the project.

Tyler McCreary’s book Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance (2024) provides a well-documented and meticulously researched account of how “the alliance of small, northern Indigenous communities opposed to Northern Gateway had slayed the multi-billion-dollar behemoth” (p. 227). The book explicitly focuses on the past, ongoing, and emergent relations between Indigenous peoples, settler authorities, and transnational companies; the broader settler processes of accumulation by dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands; and the capacity of Indigenous mobilization and resistance to disrupt and challenge extractive resource development and governance. As the author reminds readers more than once, however, this book “is about more than a pipeline.” It is also a cautionary story about how the same regulatory and consultation processes that incorporated Wet’suwet’en voices were the processes that contained and constrained them, rendering Wet’suwet’en resistance manageable within settler governance frameworks.

The book is organized into three parts, each divided into two chapters. The first part situates Wet’suwet’en–settler relations within a longer history of colonial expansion, from early colonial incursions that systematically marginalized Indigenous authority over land and resources, to the landmark Supreme Court case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997). This historical grounding is essential for understanding the settler-Indigenous interactions, the Wet’suwet’en’s adapted systems of governance rooted in hereditary leadership and territorial stewardship, and the pipeline politics examined in the remainder of the book.

The second part turns to the regulatory review process for assessing Northern Gateway’s impact, and to corporate strategies for incorporating Indigenous peoples into industrial activity on their traditional lands. McCreary offers a detailed account of how environmental assessments, formal consultation procedures, and regulatory hearings functioned as mechanisms to absorb Indigenous knowledge into governmental processes, and to structure Indigenous participation in project planning. Rather than presenting these processes and mechanisms as neutral arenas of democratic deliberation, the author shows how they were shaped by underlying assumptions about sovereignty and jurisdiction, and by a “confined imagination of Indigeneity” (p. 119), which together constrained what Indigenous voices were permitted to say, which claims were considered legitimate, what counted as acceptable “evidence,” and what outcomes their participation could ultimately produce.

In the third part, McCreary examines a series of resistance strategies through which the Wet’suwet’en participated in the Northern Gateway review process without accepting the colonial presumption that settler authorities held final say over development on their territory, while simultaneously asserting a sovereign demand that no pipeline could proceed without their consent. The book closes by situating Wet’suwet’en opposition to Northern Gateway within a wider landscape of Indigenous activism across Canada in relation to extractive industries and environmental governance. McCreary makes clear, however, that these movements are not merely reactive protests against individual projects, but expressions of enduring commitments to Indigenous sovereignty and territorial stewardship and, ultimately, a form of legal and political practice in their own right.

For all its analytical strength, the book is not without limitations, although one of its most demanding features is, from my perspective, also among its greatest achievements. As a researcher, I most appreciate McCreary’s use of a parallax methodology in the Žižekian sense. Rather than settling into a single vantage point, McCreary holds Indigenous legal orders and settler-colonial/capitalist extraction in genuine tension, which is not resolved into a neutral, coherent synthesis. Thus, McCreary exposes the gap between the official corporate and governmental narrative of inclusion, consultation, and Indigenous self-determination, and the underlying colonial system of dispossession that narrative obscures. This is one of the book’s most valuable analytical contribution. It enables McCreary to demonstrate, for instance, that the same employment programs, training initiatives, and consultation hearings—presented by governments and industry as meaningful and well-intentioned opportunities for Indigenous participation and inclusion— simultaneously functioned, from within Indigenous legal and political orders, as mechanisms reproducing colonial relations of extraction and control, disciplining communities to serve the needs of global capital and secure the flow of resources from their own territories.

That said, this kind of methodological rigor has a cost. The prose is dense and the argument unfolds in a way that, while precise and detailed, can make the text demanding for readers outside academia. This is, perhaps, an inevitable trade-off of the parallax method: the analytical depth gained by adopting a dual analytical vision comes at some expense of accessibility. As someone who teaches research methods, I found this a worthwhile trade-off given the insights the parallax approach generates, but it is one worth flagging for other readers.

A second limitation is that the book remains largely an analysis of governance processes, strategies, and legal battles, and considerably less an account from Wet’suwet’en community members’ lived experiences and voices. This is not a fatal flaw as the book’s contribution lies precisely in its structural and historical analysis. Nevertheless, readers seeking a more ethnographic or oral-history-centered account of Wet’suwet’en perspectives, in their own words, will need to look elsewhere for a complementary perspective.

These limitations notwithstanding, McCreary’s book stands as a rigorous and important contribution to demonstrate that Indigenous political authority cannot be fully accommodated within colonial frameworks without fundamentally challenging the assumptions on which those frameworks rest. Whether the cancellation of Northern Gateway represents a genuine turning point in Crown–Indigenous relations or merely another instance of recognition politics will depend less on the fate of a single pipeline than on how future conflicts over land, jurisdiction, and Indigenous sovereignty are negotiated.