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This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines and Indigenous peoples. The Enbridge Corporation has applied to construct a pipeline system to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, but the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council and their member communities have asserted the authority to prevent this project from passing through their unceded territories. Studying Carrier Sekani contestation of Canadian regulatory assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, we examine how the processes of Indigenous becoming exceed notions of Indigenous being that are included in the permitting process as traditional knowledge. We focus both on the performance of legal obligations to consider Aboriginal traditional knowledge and the emerging politics of Carrier Sekani resistance. Our intention is not to question the integrity of traditional knowledge that the regulatory process incorporates, but to highlight how traditional knowledge functions as an anchor for a field of governmental inquiry and action. Providing a historical and geographical context of Carrier Sekani relations with development and the state, we argue that the coding of Indigenous being as traditional works to disavow contemporary processes of Indigenous becoming that are surplus to the spatial ontology of capitalist energy development for global markets. Against efforts to sanction development on disputed territory through formal recognition of a constrained Indigeneity, Carrier Sekani people assert the sovereign authority to prevent or permit development on their lands and waterways using traditional governance systems. Broadly, this paper suggests that recognizing the ontological politics at stake in this permitting process provides a useful opening to understand continued colonial captures at work in the inclusion of traditional knowledge in environmental governance. But it also demonstrates the capacity of Indigenous resistance to these enclosures to challenge and reshape global geographies of energy, capitalism, and climate.

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Despite increasing institutionalised recognition of Indigenous and Black environmental concerns in governance processes, the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in North America continue to normalise dispossession and disproportionately burden marginalised communities with environmental harms. Engaging recent critiques of the inability of Indigenous rights frameworks to reverse ongoing colonial dispossessions and the failure of environmental justice policies to address racialised environmental inequalities, this article argues that political ecologists must contend with the limitations of institutionalised recognition of historically marginalised communities in North American environmental governance. We argue that institutionalisation of such concern, while putatively redressing injustices or reconciling dispossession through environmental governance, functions more to elide historic drivers and geographic processes of marginalisation than to disrupt white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Drawing inspiration from popular efforts to connect a wide array of political struggles, this symposium examines the ways that racial‐colonial politics unfold through nature and environmental practices linking past, present, and future across the United States and Canada. By way of introduction, we ask: What does it mean to do political ecologies of race in Canada and the United States? For us the response cannot be additive—merely grafting attention to racial/colonial politics onto established scholarly conventions. Instead, we aim for a deeper analysis that challenges and enlivens the field of political ecology. This introduction highlights what is at stake, and identifies the ways that the contributors' research pushes the field. Ultimately, we argue that political ecologies of race can help reinvigorate intellectual projects and build liveable futures by recognising and supporting the connections between ongoing struggles. We hope this symposium contributes to the task.