While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practices – including watching and witnessing – serving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018–2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called ‘British Columbia, Canada’, this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialism – ecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As ‘more-than-representational’, visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders’ visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures.

虽然有争议的化石燃料管道建设计划在未经同意的情况下继续在原住民土地上进行，但视觉实践（包括观看和见证）如何作为抵抗模式？本文借鉴了 2018 年至 2021 年期间与环境捍卫者在海岸萨利什土地上的参与者观察民族志，在殖民时期称为“加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省”，本文提供了一个镜头，用于探索在不断扩大的榨取主义和警察监视中抵抗的视觉领域并在 COVID-19 大流行期间重新配置管道反对派。陆基监控中的草根摄影、法庭内外的艺术交流和其他视觉实践一直是强有力的转折点，对抗石油殖民主义的多个方面——生态破坏、健康威胁、以及公司和国家机构违反道德和法律的行为。他们还一直在激发新的集体行动，其中一些由土著土地保护者领导，延续了保护人类和非人类生命的长期传统。作为“超越代表性的”，视觉遭遇可以积极参与构建知识、挑战剥夺、种族灭绝和生态灭绝的结构，并从异质的有利位置培养对关怀、主权、气候正义和反殖民团结的理解。一些环境捍卫者的视觉创造力引发了对植根于互惠和尊重的本体论的深刻反思，而这些本体论在提取主义定居者-殖民文化中被彻底忽视。这篇文章将视觉策略置于针对土著土地保护者和其他环境捍卫者的加强警察和企业监视的紧张政治背景中，强调了对表面的光学联盟和国家行为者对土著土地上的种族主义和国家暴力作出反应的空洞姿态的严重关切。它呼吁关注国家视觉策略与反霸权视觉实践之间的辩证关系，以抵抗殖民能源政权，并努力发展替代性的、破坏性较小的能源未来。