Re-imagining Boundaries: Standing Rock Protest and Native American Woman's Spatial Marginalization

Abstract

Standing Rock Tribe protest against the North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is one of the major resistance movements of contemporary Native American (NA) history. For the spatially marginalized NA women, this resistance movement is an opportunity to redefine her spatial location within the contemporary NA normative geography. The present study aims to appraise the historico-cultural context of the NA woman’s double spatial marginalization and its implications on her contemporary spatial struggle. This study claims that the Euro-Americans through religious, educational, and legislative acts in the post-contact era institutionalized NA woman’s double spatial marginalization. The present study offers a critique of the DAPL project as the United States government’s effort to reconfigure the Normative Geographic structure of contemporary Native America and also explores contemporary NA woman’s spatial marginalization, and her struggle for spatial emancipation at the anti-DAPL protest through Tim Cresswell's theoretical scaffoldings of normative geography, out-of-place actions, and transgression.