Cosmopolitics of Dispossession and Displacement: Surfing and Environmentalism Impact on Land, Indigenous Peoples, and Sovereignty on “Vancouver Island”

On Vancouver Island, the “outdoors” have long been promoted as a source of economic stability through resource extraction, and an unpopulated wild space worth protecting for human enjoyment and recreation. While both ideas of consumption tend to be promoted by and for white audiences, resource extraction and outdoor recreation reflect different aspects of the white settler imaginary. This chapter contrasts the seemingly different notions of settler localism in the South Vancouver Island surf community with settler participation in Indigenous land defense, exploring how both perpetuate structural white supremacy and Indigenous replacement through (neo)colonization of Indigenous territory. Indigenous resistance to resource extraction is a visible means of manifesting sovereignty and opposition to colonial dispossession. Indigenous resurgence and resistance also offer a space where non-Indigenous peoples might come together to further anticolonial aims while turning to Coast Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakwakwa’wkw leadership on their territories. However, these spaces are not always safe for the Indigenous Nations, communities, and individuals who work closely with settlers participating in land/water defense, as white supremacist notions that situate the settler as savior, and participation in land defense as a means of achieving indigeneity, tend to be (re)produced by settler participants. At the same time and on the same territory, and rarely critically examined, Indigenous peoples are further erased through the importation of dis-placed Indigenous technologies like surfing, through which the construction of place-based localisms cast white settlers as the counterculture tribal body through which outsiders must negotiate in order to validate their occupation of Indigenous land.