Representing across scales. How do Indigenous youth activists translate claims to international institutions

This article attends to a major Indigenous movement in the United States against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) initiated by Indigenous youth activists. The activists increasingly engage with international institutions ranging from transnational youth networks to United Nations (UN) agencies, to transnational banks. To study this process, we propose a theoretical framework that intertwines representative claims making with theories of translation. This theoretical framework allows to investigate how representative claims making creates political subjects, as well as how representative claims need to be translated, i.e. transformed and packaged to fit different contexts and audiences. The movements' local struggle becomes translated into environmental discourses and transforms them towards a recognition of colonial and racial dimensions.