Wet'suwet'en People Continue to Say No! to a Coastal GasLink Pipeline on Their Territory
- Philip Fernandez and
Barbara Biley -
Since the beginning of the year, the Wet'suweten
have stepped up their defence of their traditional territories in the
face of increased provocations by the colonial courts and the BC
government. The hereditary chiefs of the five clans that constitute the
Wet'suwet'en people issued and enforced an eviction order against
Coastal GasLink (CGL) from their territory. CGL has received government
approval to build a 670-kilometre natural-gas pipeline from west of
Dawson Creek, BC, to a liquefied-natural-gas export facility near
Kitimat, in violation of the Wet'suwet'en's sovereign right to refuse
such activity on their unceded lands. The last CGL contractor was
escorted out by the Wet'suwet'en on January 4.
These actions were taken in rejection of a December 31, 2019 ruling by
BC Supreme Court Justice Marguerite Church granting CGL an interlocutory
injunction against the Wet'suweten blocking CGL's entry into their
territory.[1] This injunction extends an interim injunction, in effect
during 2019, for the duration of the construction project and includes
an order providing the RCMP with power to enforce it.
In a press release issued at the time of the eviction, the Wet'suwet'en
hereditary chiefs stated: "Canada's courts have acknowledged in Delgamuukw-Gisdaywa
v. The Queen that the Wet'suwet'en people, represented by our
hereditary chiefs, have never ceded nor surrendered title to the 22,000
square kilometres of Wet'suwet'en territory. The granting of the
interlocutory injunction by BC's Supreme Court has proven to us that
Canadian courts will ignore their own rulings and deny our jurisdiction
when convenient, and will not protect our territories or our rights as
Indigenous peoples."[2]
Following the eviction notice to CGL, the hereditary chiefs explained:
"Coastal Gaslink has violated the Wet'suwet'en law of trespass, and has
bulldozed through our territories, destroyed our archaeological sites,
and occupied our land with industrial man-camps. Private security firms
and RCMP have continually interfered with the constitutionally
protected rights of Wet'suwet'en people to access our lands for
hunting, trapping, and ceremony."
 The hereditary
chiefs called out the hypocrisy of the Province of British Columbia for
adopting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(UNDRIP), while the Wet'suwet'en are actively denied the protections of
UNDRIP on their own lands. "When we enforced our own laws and required
that industry seek Free, Prior, and Informed Consent for development on
our lands we faced a brutal display of militaristic police violence and
an ongoing police occupation of our territories," they said. This was
in reference to the RCMP paramilitary operation of January 7, 2019,
that brutally attacked the Gidumt'en checkpoint to the Unist'ot'en
camp, arresting 14 land defenders, to enforce the interim injunction.
The hereditary chiefs also noted: "We have learned, through the
reporting of the Guardian, that RCMP are prepared
to kill unarmed Wet'suwet'en people if we continue to uphold our laws."
The statement also emphasized: "Anuc 'nu'at'en
(Wet'suwet'en law) is not a 'belief' or a 'point of view.' It is a way
of sustainably managing our territories and relations with one another
and the world around us, and it has worked for millennia to keep our
territories intact. Our law is central to our identity. The ongoing
criminalization of our laws by Canada's courts and industrial police is
an attempt at genocide, an attempt to extinguish Wet'suwet'en identity
itself."
A year after the RCMP assault on Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders on their
traditional territory in northern BC, the institutions of colonial
injustice continue to refuse to respect the hereditary rights and title
of the Wet'suwet'en. Both the federal and provincial governments, in
spite of high-sounding phrases about reconciliation and
nation-to-nation relations, insist that this is a "law and order"
matter. The NDP Premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, arrogantly
refused to meet with hereditary leaders on a recent trip to northern BC
and has repeated that "there are agreements from the Peace Country to
Kitimat with Indigenous communities that want to see economic activity
and prosperity take place [...] All the permits are in place for this
project to proceed. This project is proceeding and the rule of law
needs to prevail in BC." The agreements that the premier referenced
with Indigenous communities are deals struck with elected band councils
on the pipeline route that were established under the racist and
colonial Indian Act
precisely to accomplish assimilation and dispossession of the original
peoples.
 Premier Hogan
claims that the current stand off, the RCMP blockade, threat
of escalating violence and use of force is about "the rule of law." In
fact it is about negating by force Wet'suwet'en sovereignty and
Wet'suwet'en law and imposing the dictate of CGL to construct its
pipeline and get on with a $40 billion liquefied natural gas
mega-project.
The Wet'suwet'en have rejected the criminalization of their hereditary
rights and their sovereignty. They are affirming their sovereign right
to say No! to entry without consent. No!
to the dictate of monopolies like CGL. No!
to the illegitimate use of force and violence by the police, the courts
and other institutions of the racist, colonial Canadian state. Their
stand is that negotiations to resolve the conflict must be held between
the hereditary chiefs and the governments of British Columbia and
Canada, not with the RCMP or CGL.
Over the past year, the level of public support, understanding and
acknowledgment of the significance of this opposition by Indigenous
nations and others to the old colonial arrangements, has grown and
grown. The eyes of people in Canada and around the world have been on
the developing situation. In December 2019, the United Nations
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, meeting in
Geneva at its 100th session, issued a decision which called upon the
"state party" to suspend construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline,
the Site C dam, and "to immediately halt the construction and suspend
all permits and approvals for the construction of the Coastal GasLink
pipeline in the traditional and unceded lands and territories of the
Wet'suwet'en people, until they grant their free, prior and informed
consent, following the full and adequate discharge of the duty to
consult," and specifically that the RCMP should be withdrawn from the
traditional territories. In their decision the UN Committee found that
there had been refusal, on the part of the state "to consider free,
prior and informed consent as a requirement for any measure, such as
large-scale development projects, that may cause irreparable harm to
Indigenous peoples rights, culture, lands, territories and way of life."
The Wet'suwet'en have continued to put their fight before the Canadian
people who have responded in their thousands in support of the
principled stand of the hereditary chiefs and the clan houses to uphold
their hereditary laws and rights. Most recently actions were organized
across Canada and Quebec during the week of January 7-12 under the
banner "All Eyes on Wet'suwet'en" to ensure that people spoke out in
their own name and the colonial state was not allowed a free hand to
criminalize and attack the Wet'suwet'en for their just stands.
 The situation
brings into sharp relief the battle lines that are being drawn across
Canada between the governments of the financial oligarchies that have
usurped political power on one side and the Indigenous peoples, working
class, women and youth, and all fighting collectives for their rights
on the other.
Canada must respect the hereditary, constitutional and treaty rights of
Indigenous peoples in order to affect real reconciliation and make
right the centuries of wrong that the racist colonial state has carried
out against the Indigenous peoples of Canada.
No to the Criminalization
of the Wet'suwet'en People's
Defence of Their Hereditary Rights!
End Colonial Injustice!
Note
1. Interlocutory is a legal term which can refer to an order,
sentence, decree, or judgment, that is provisional; temporary; not
final. Something intervening between the commencement and the end
of a suit which decides some point or matter, but is not a final
decision of the whole controversy. (Black's Law Dictionary)
2. It was the hereditary chiefs of the
Wet'suwet'en and the Gitksan who launched what became known as the Delgamuukw case,
a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the
hereditary chiefs' pursuit of a legal and political settlement of their
grievances and recognition of their rights. In 1977, the Wet'suwet'en
and Gitksan Chiefs' claim over their traditional territory was accepted
by the Federal Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs as a foundation
for negotiating a "comprehensive claim" under the federal treaty
process. The province refused to participate in negotiations and after
five years with no progress, the chiefs took their case for the
recognition they had been denied since 1860 to the courts. The attempt
by some forces to characterize the hereditary chiefs as "rogue
elements" or the dispute as narrow and short-lived, is shameful in the
extreme.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 1 - January 25, 2020
Article Link:
Wet'suwet'en People Continue to Say No! to a Coastal GasLink Pipeline on Their Territory - Philip Fernandez and
Barbara Biley
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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