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This talk explores the role of more-than-human agencies at prayer camps organized against “natural resource” extraction and for land and water protection. Based on interviews and participant observation with participants involved in Indigenous-led prayer camps in southern Manitoba, Westfaul argues first that the often-utilized concept of “protest” reduces participants’ actions to a colonial politics of recognition, neglecting their appeals to more-than-human agencies (e.g. ancestors, Creator, God, and animacies present within the natural world) through prayer and related sacred appeals. Additionally, the separation of “protest” narratives from other actions deemed properly “religious” or “spiritual” relies on religious-secular binaries that prayer camp participants do not necessarily identify with. Participants’ insistence on the importance of prayer in response to extraction opens new questions for thinking with the possibility of more-than-human mediation in the navigation of extractivist politics and worlds.

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