Canada sends police to remove Wet'suwet'en from own land, amid climate emergency

Earlier this week, the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs issued a blockade on their territory, acting on an eviction notice originally served in January 2020. (In 1997, the Canadian Supreme Court recognized the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs as having jurisdiction over the land in question.)

This blockade is to prevent further fossil fuel development on their territory from Coastal Gas Link, a subsidiary of TransCanada Energy — the same company responsible for Keystone XL, Line 3, and anti-protester legislation in South Dakota. (Anti-protester legislation in a different country.)

With the announcement of the blockade, the Wet'suwet'en People allowed 20 hours for Coastal Gas Link workers and any others to leave the area peacefully, after which they would begin shutting down roads and access in-and-out of the area.

Coastal Gas Link did not leave the territory. After 20 hours, the Wet'suwet'en People started shutting down roads.

Now, the Canadian government is sending buses and planes of police and K-9 units to arrest Wet'suwet'en Peoples and elders on their own territory, along with media personnel and legal observers (witnesses there to document police misconduct and violations of protester rights). This use of resources is happening while Canadian roads and infrastructure are underwater, due to climate change and extreme weather events.

If you want to read more, here's a piece from Grist: https://grist.org/indigenous/wetsuweten-land-defenders/

You can also follow news and updates directly from the blockade on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gidimten

And you can learn about the *U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People*, which Canada is violating: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf

Note: Coastal Gas Link states they have received the approval of elected Wet'suwet'en councils for the project. However, the 1997 Supreme Court case ruled that authority belongs to the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs. This is a complicated issue (elected councils and hereditary chiefs are two separate forms of governance) — here's a helpful resource [1] to better understand it. In short:

Electoral systems are a result of the section 74 of the Indian Act, imposed upon First Nations by Canada. It was designed to eradicate the hereditary system and create something more recognizable for the western government.

“In many instances where those electoral systems were imposed, that was in an assimilatory process that was intended to undermine traditional leadership,” [Starblanket] says. “It also allowed for the imposition of patriarchal processes because it denied women’s jurisdiction and participation in selecting leaders.”*

[Sanderson] says it’s integral that companies like the Coastal GasLink pipeline know the communities they’re working with, and that the confrontation should have been obvious if they had met with the Wet’suwet’en.

“They obviously didn’t spend any time there,” Sanderson says. “So they shouldn’t be surprised that this is unraveling in the way that it is.”

[1] http://www.firstnationsdrum.com/2019/02/the-complicated-history-of-hereditary-chiefs-and-elected-councils/

* Indigenous nations across Turtle Island have often had matriarchal systems of governance, comprising multiple tribes (like federation structures). As an example of how the US and Canada would try to upend these political structures, they would force nations to nominate a single male representative during treaty negotiations and diplomatic affairs — as a way of excluding female leaders from the room, and sowing mistrust among the other allied tribes who weren't in the room either. (From Our History Is the Future: https://www.versobooks.com/books...