Geotags and Check-Ins as Renaming Practices of Indigenous Digital Activism The Gidmt’en Checkpoint Case

The present study seeks to advance an understanding of geotagging and check-ins
as reappropriation strategies, decolonial and counter-discursive resistance prac-
tices to the erasure of Indigenous place names in Canada and the restoration of
Indigenous sovereignty over their lands. When used for political reasons, these
practices can be seen as forms of digital social action helping to shape the reality
of the Gidimt’en checkpoint on Facebook, thus amplifying the resonance of the
Wet’suwet’en resistance in British Columbia and beyond. The chapter employs
a Corpus-based Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis approach to identify
how alternative narratives of place can circulate through social media platforms
and potentially work as decolonizing tools for reclaiming ancestral names. In
order to do so, it examines patterns of information flow focusing, in particular,
on the combined use of geotags, check-ins, and hashtags to identify attitudes
and discourses, and the way Indigenous activists reclaim their right to name
unceded land.