A Drama of Power: How Indigenous leaders use dramaturgical techniques to construct and communicate power over third-party supporters to maintain and control social movement frames

Abstract

Unist’ot’en Camp is an Indigenous direct-action resistance movement founded in 2009 in response to the unwanted and unwarranted construction of major pipeline projects on traditional, unceded Indigenous territory. Indigenous leaders (protagonists) of Unist’ot’en Camp invite third-party supporters (participants) of the movement to visit the blockade, learn about the community’s struggle of resistance, and in exchange provide physical and financial support towards the social movement frames. To ensure that Unist’ot’en Indigenous leaders are the individuals within the movement that hold the power to define, they employ a variety of tactics to ensure a collective understanding of power. In order to understand this empirical phenomenon, this thesis asks: ‘How do Indigenous leader use dramaturgical techniques (scripting, staging, performing, and interpreting) to construct and communicate power over third-party supporters in order to maintain the social movement frames of Unist’ot’en Camp during Winter 2018?’ and uses dramaturgy (Benford and Hunt 1992) as the analytical framework to understand how the manifestation of power over third-party supporters allows for the control of the beliefs, values, and goals of the social movement. Based on empirical evidence gathered through participant observation, informal and formal conversations, and video analysis, this thesis argues for an additional utility for dramaturgy as an analytical framework. Namely, I propose an extension of the analytical framework, whereby it is utilized to understand the relationship of power between a category of already mobilized individuals for the purpose of maintaining a particular hegemonic frame of a movement.