#alleyesonwetsuweten: An Analysis of the Wet’suwet’en protest on Twitter

The present study aims at analyzing Indigenous online activism in Canada by focusing on how the Wet’suwet’en people have recently remediated on Twitter their protest against the 2019 Coastal GasLink pipeline project. The project implied the construction of a 670-kilometre-long natural gas pipeline crossing their ancestral and unceded territories. An investigation of the discursive strategies underpinning the usage of microblogging by the Wet’suwet’en people as part of their online protest is provided through a combination of methodological and theoretical frameworks, that is Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Media Studies starting from the quantitative analysis of the GTEN Corpus. The research findings show that discourses of solidarity, mobilization and sovereignty intersect in the corpus and that the discourse of Indigenous protests on social media is a decolonizing social practice leading to empowerment, self-determination, and legitimation of Indigenous protests.