Protest journeys: Vermont encounters in a campaign of translocal solidarity with the James Bay Crees

The Great Whale Campaign (1989–1994), in which the James Bay Crees disputed plans to build new hydroelectric facilities in their territory, is an example of new indigenous resistance efforts disputing externally imposed development projects. This study represents an effort to understand how indigenous activism is building connections through transnational networks of people-to-people and local-to-local activism with counterparts in the United States. It examines the specific responses to, and constructions of, that indigenous activism by groups seeking to support those indigenous efforts. These responses, as they occurred in Vermont, center on a series of encounters and exchanges, or what the author identifies as “protest travel,” by Crees and Vermonters.; The acts of protest travel are illustrated in a series of exchanges of narratives and physical journeys that produced and cemented translocal alliances. The result of such alliances is that indigenous activism against development is increasingly being acted out in global marketplaces. Vermonters responded to the social dramas represented by the Crees, in coming to Vermont both with the establishment of unique local actions and with a reflective process of questioning the efficacy of key local values and self-representations. The encounters and exchanges that precipitated this reflective process are viewed through a lens drawing on Turner's exploration of pilgrimage and Dirlik's presentation of the transformative action of recreating local spaces. The actions of both indigenous and nonindigenous communities in the Great Whale Campaign are held up as a counterpoint to globalizing forces.; The research suggests that it is critical to rethink the role of joint local activism between U.S. and indigenous communities as a potential transnational “local-local” parallel to globalization. It raises important questions of whether a new politics of citizen-to-citizen activism is possible and whether it offers a new space for social action that creates an equality in the relations between localities. The role of the physical and metaphorical journeys between localities emerges as an important bridge linking resistance and protest movements in joint action to dispute the development discourses now dominant in the world.