Injunctions suppress Indigenous movements to stop resource extraction on their lands and misrepresents their identity.

The settler colonial infrastructures of perception work to absorb and inculcate perception into attentive modes and sensible habits in which the settler state is always at the center of experience, reality, designation, interpretation, and orientation. Such are the selective attentions of White supremacy. As the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz writes, the “scheme of interpretation” and “scheme of orientation” for members of an in-group determine systems of experiential relevance (1970: 120–121). Experiences are named and understood in terms of pre-experienced horizons of feeling and meaning that occur at the commonsense level (117–120). It is at this “communal” everyday understanding of events that the “politics of distraction” attempts to dominate the perception of emergencies. For example, in response to the threat of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en land protectors set up Unist’ot’en Camp to obstruct the path of the proposed project in 2010. Between 2018 and 2020, the conflict escalated, and courts issued injunctions against the land protectors, empowering the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to make arrests. In acts of solidarity, allies of the Wet’suwet’en including the Mohawk and other groups blocked rail lines and ports across the country. Covering these events, Canada’s Global News announced that the disagreement was “again disrupting trade and travel in this country” (Global News, 2020). This manner of speaking names or typifies the situation with a structure of intention built around a horizon of relevance that refers back to the settler state. It is not the homelands of the Wet’suwet’en that are being disrupted by the pipeline. Rather it is the trade and travel of Canadax that are being disrupted. Furthermore, Global News emphasized supposedly internal disagreements between certain Hereditary Chiefs and the Band Councils, stating, “Who speaks for the Wet’suwet’en people and who has authority over the 22,000 square kilometers of land in northern B.C. is not straightforward. There is confusion and misunderstanding” (Global News, 2020). But the Band Councils themselves were created under the Indian Act and structured specifically by the Canadian government to deal with negotiations for natural resources. So, the conflict was produced by Canadian interventions in traditional governance structures that were seen as unconducive to resource extraction. The Hereditary Chiefs who, as the anchor puts it, “believe they have authority over the territory,” never ceded that authority. Furthermore, the land upon which the original camp was made does not belong to the Wet’suwet’en as a whole or any of the neighboring Band Councils or tribal nations. It is on Unist’ot’en Clan territory that has never been ceded. As their website states, “The Unist’ot’en homestead is not a protest or demonstration. Our clan is occupying and using our traditional territory as it has for centuries” (Unist’ot’en, n.d.). Settler media distorts this view, arguing that it is not Canada but rather the Wet’suwet’en who are confused and divided. disregarding the fact that they are not simply “Canadians.” Corntassel wrote of the UN position on Indigenous relations, “an Indigenous political agenda is shifted and altered to fit the dominant norms of existing institutional structures” (2007: 140). Political marginalization, therefore, will not be solved by “inclusion” that does not somehow fundamentally allow the “included” to set their own terms on the manner of that inclusion and allow for decolonized forms of governance to take first precedence over laws, land, and life. The Wet’suwet’en are a sovereign nation. Freeland’s language subsumes Native political action into a nationalistic multicultural framework of forced democratic inclusion