Land Rights in Mediatized Indigenous Legal Discourse

The Kinder Morgan Pipeline Expansion

Abstract

In the years 2016-2018 a number of protests conducted by the Indigenous peoples of Canada against the controversial expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline was framed in the Canadian news discourse as a conflict involving the First Nations, the federal government and the provincial government of Alberta. The dispute over pipeline regulations, environmental risks and Indigenous land rights saw First Nations peoples arguing against the government of Canada and the government of Alberta as the new expansion would further aggravate water and air pollution on Indigenous sacred lands; while the Liberal Party’s leader and PM, Justin Trudeau, had promised to make environmental assessment credible again, the government approved plans to build pipelines on lands whose ownership is still hotly contested. Based on the assumption that the media acts as a proxy for personal contact with the legal system and that legal language plays an important role in the construction, interpretation, negotiation and implementation of legal justice, the present paper intends to investigate the mediatization of Indigenous Law, i.e. the construction and dissemination of legal knowledge on Indigenous land rights in online news discourse for global consumption.