Sarah Marie Wiebe opens Life Against States of Emergency by sharing with her readers the words Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence shared with her: ‘You are treaty, too.’ This invitation into relationship foregrounds the book’s main premise: that treaties – and the politics of everyday life in a settler-colonial state – are living relationships that require love and care. Echoing Indigenous scholars and communities, Wiebe reminds us that it is in rethinking treaties as relational that we can start to build better futures.
Wiebe centers Life Against States of Emergency around the life and activism of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, whose forty-three day fast from December 2012 to January 2013, in a teepee on Victoria Island outside of Canada’s Parliament, was a resounding call to the Crown to attend to its treaty obligations with Indigenous communities. Applying a kaleidoscopic lens to her research, Wiebe weaves together insights on biopolitics, environmental justice, and critical Indigenous studies to reflect on and refract the uneven power dynamics of colonial and contemporary treaty politics in Canada today.
The book’s structure mirrors its kaleidoscopic lens, as Wiebe deftly relates stories, interviews, histories, and literature together in service of understanding the ways in which crises emerge and are experienced in Indigenous communities. The first chapter emphasizes art as a means through which we can collectively imagine decolonial futures, while the second chapter acts as a roadmap to conducting meaningful community-led research. The third chapter describes Chief Spence’s life and activism in response to compounding crisis conditions in Attawapiskat, while the fourth chapter takes us through the collaborative Reimagining Attawapiskat project, highlighting youth experiences and emphasizing storytelling’s potential for hope in the face of injustice. Chapter five attends to narratives of blame, unpacking the Canadian media’s gendered discursive violence visited on Chief Spence’s body during her fast, while amplifying her corporeal sovereignty; and the sixth chapter draws a clear line from the asymmetrical power dynamics that shaped the uptake and development of treaties to the slow violence of crises in Indigenous communities today. These arguments coalesce in the seventh chapter as new directions for environmental justice, and are read together in Wiebe’s self-reflective Afterword against the backdrop of various crises.
One of the key strengths of the book lies in its accessibility. Wiebe – a settler scholar and writer-activist – is an immensely gifted storyteller, and her emphasis on futures-oriented art as a disruptive and powerful tool for reimagining treaty relations is legitimized by her own seamless integration of research and narratives. Wiebe carefully centers the voices of the Attawapiskat community at the heart of her book, to underscore her point that creativity is emergent, rupturing colonial continuities and resisting the presumed stasis of crises. In doing so, Life Against States of Emergency not only embodies the community-engaged research principles it espouses, but also highlights how hopeful stories function as powerful means for rethinking relationships.
The book’s overarching focus on emergency climate conditions and their intersecting injustices is particularly pertinent today as climate change intensifies crises around the world. In carefully linking the slow violence of the Canadian state’s violation of its treaty obligations to emergencies not only in Attawapiskat but throughout Indigenous communities, Wiebe reminds us that crises are never a surprise but are rather a reflection of sustained patterns of violence and neglect. When read within the broader global context of the disproportionate climate burdens shouldered by Indigenous populations and communities in the global South, Life Against States of Emergency makes the important point that we need to reinterpret environmental crises as continuing injustices built on relations of domination – between human and non-human, and in-between human communities – in order to embody those relationships anew.
Importantly, however, even as she meticulously details the tight relationship between colonial violence and emergency conditions in Indigenous communities, Wiebe is still careful to eschew narratives of despair, and amplifies instead the body as a site of powerful resistance. Her use of affirmative ‘positive biopolitics’ orients Indigenous women’s bodies as material forces which can interrupt hegemonic colonial body politics, and thus rewrite the discursive relations in which they are produced to draw attention to the need for love, care, and respect, in treaty relationships, and in relationships with animate environments. In centering the corporeal sovereignty of Indigenous communities, Wiebe soundly reminds us that environmental politics are embodied processes that are lived out and felt. Not only does the book serve as a reminder of the importance of bodily resistance as a force for political change, but highlights as well the centrality of Indigenous activism to the Canadian and global climate movements.
Life Against States of Emergency is ultimately an act of relationship-making. Through careful argument and well-crafted stories, Wiebe invites the reader into a relationship with the text and its core premise. While the book is situated within the Attawapiskat community, its reminder – that the politics of crises, treaties, and environmental emergencies in everyday life are built on living relationships between human and non-human environments – extends beyond the Canadian settler-colonial framework to any context shaped by continuities of injustice. Wiebe’s book is thus a timely reminder that we need to rethink our environmental politics as grounded in relationality – with each other and with our environments – in order to challenge a hegemonic and neoliberal world order with an embodied ethics of love and care. As the global climate crisis intensifies weather disasters and deepens existing social inequalities, Life Against States of Emergency has arrived at a crucial point for the field of environmental politics, reminding us to recenter relationships as foundational to meaningful engagement with the politics of planetary justice. In doing so, we can better imagine and create alternative ways of being in the world.