“They're treating us like Indians!”: Political Ecologies of Property and Race in North American Pipeline Populism

While political ecologists have analysed the role of private property in creating and sustaining ecological inequalities, this approach does not often take property as a foundational element of racial capitalism. I argue that the defence of private property in contestation of North American oil pipelines demonstrates the centrality of property not only to the structural reproduction of capital, but also to its Euro‐American subject. Emphasising their affective attachments to land and resentment at dispossession, landowners and populist environmental organisations in the Great Plains frequently compared individual, white experiences of eminent domain to the historic and ongoing dispossession of Native Nations by suggesting “they're treating us like Indians”. In order to account for the reproduction of white supremacy in environmentalism, I argue that we must understand how its oppositional politics are linked to economic interests‐in‐land and affective desires‐for‐land that maintain landed private property.