Front Burner - Wet'suwet'en protests highlight Indigenous pipeline divide

Episode Date: January 17, 2019

The debate over a natural gas pipeline in Wet'suwet'en territory continues this week following protests over the arrest of 14 people at a blockade in the remote B.C. community. CBC reporter Chantelle Bellrichard recounts the moment the RCMP broke the barricade and explains why a pipeline project is dividing a number of B.C. Indigenous groups.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Pipelines have become a really divisive issue in Canada.

Over the last week or so, there have been almost daily protests against a natural gas pipeline on Wet'suwet'en territory in B.C. It's not what we expected from Canada. Yesterday, there was an anti-pipeline rally in Smithers, B.C., and demonstrators blocked traffic on Vancouver Island. No peace! No peace! Same thing on Tuesday, on a highway in Nova Scotia. This is all happening because last week, the RCMP broke up a barricade

that was preventing work on that pipeline I just mentioned. Young men! Go back, young men! Fourteen people were arrested. Today, we're trying to understand why that pipeline project is dividing a number of B.C. indigenous communities in particular. Because that's one of the real tensions at the heart of the story. My colleague Chantal Belrichard is here to bring us up to speed. She was at that blockade and witnessed the chaos of the arrests. There are very, very different opinions around,

you know, are these people lawbreakers or are they land defenders, land protectors? Whose laws are being broken here, really? That's today on FrontBurner. Chantel, hello and welcome. Hi. So for people who might just be coming to the story now, if you could sum up what the story is about, what would you say? I mean, depending on who you ask, it could be a story about a pipeline company that says it has all the insurances and approvals that it needs to build a pipeline through northern BC. that it needs to build a pipeline through northern BC and is being prevented from doing so by a group of people who have been blocking their access on a road. For the Wet'suwet'en people who are on the receiving end of the RCMP enforcement, it's about them being disrespected in asserting their sovereignty to their land and trying to say, you can't come into our land and do things like build pipelines unless you have our consent and you do not have our consent.

So there are really two worldviews here that are completely at odds with each other. And there is an assertion of Indigenous title to this land about sovereignty for an Indigenous nation. It's about Canada and British Columbia trying to give assurances to industry that they can get things done if they get the right approvals. And it's also competing legal views. You know, the Wet'suwet'en people have their own laws and their own governance structure, and they are very much trying to assert that in their territory. And then you have the Canadian law and the Canadian courts that are saying another thing. As you could see from videos last week of the RCMP coming over that gate, you know, these two worlds are very far apart.

So I'm hoping in this conversation, we can unpack some of these really important issues that you've just brought up. But first, I want to pick up on something you just said. some of these really important issues that you've just brought up. But first, I want to pick up on something you just said. A lot of us saw those images last week of the RCMP, heavily armed RCMP officers, arresting Indigenous people at this blockade. Let's start there, because I know you were there on the ground. Why did the RCMP move in?

It had been anticipated the RCMP would be showing up at that checkpoint for some time now, I think. But the court had given an interim injunction to Coastal Gas Link in December saying that, yes, you can move through and do this pre-construction work on your pipeline. And hello, people who are preventing access from them getting through these forest service roads in this very remote part of BC. You need to remove these barriers and allow them to come through. So that had been the lead up. And so now we get to last week when instead of people, you know, removing barriers that existed at this one settlement in this territory, a second one was set up as a show of the Wet'suwet'en coming together and saying, no, absolutely no. And so the RCMP moved in on this first camp last

Monday after I think they realized that the people were not going to move willingly and just open these gates and allow a pipeline company through. Can you take me back to those minutes and hours when the RCMP moved in? What was it like? What was happening? It was a totally different tone at the camp. I had spent a couple days there already, and so it sort of got the pulse of things that were going on around camp. On the Monday morning, people hadn't slept. People knew this was imminent. On the Monday morning, people hadn't slept. People knew this was imminent.

We've got intel and eyes on the ground of all of the tactical units leaving from Smithers. And they had started setting up additional barriers on this road that had already been blocked with a gate only. And then it had become increasingly fortified, is how people described it, with wrapping barbed wire around this gate and putting up higher obstructions on it with two by fours. They parked a school bus on the bridge and people had chained themselves beneath it. People had chained themselves beneath the school bus? Yeah. Yeah. They had chained themselves underneath as sort of a strategic maneuver. They had this odd like metal structure on the gate where these young people had attached themselves to the gate as well. So it would be really difficult for anybody to dismantle it

without seriously injuring them. And so, yeah, people really got into place. There was somebody who had suspended themselves from the bridge on this tree branch in a hammock. So, yeah, there was a lot of preparation happening and a lot of anticipation. You could just feel the energy completely changed as people really hunkered down for what was to come. What starts to happen as the RCMP move in? The first sign of the afternoon enforcement was a helicopter started flying overhead.

And then in the distance you saw a convoy of vehicles start pulling up before they collectively started walking towards the gate. And when they did that, people at the camp had been blowing, started blowing air horns. There were dozens of officers, uniformed officers, and several of them were dressed in sort of these green fatigues with assault rifles. With assault rifles? Yeah. So then what happened? A couple of the uniformed officers approached the gate and started speaking to Molly Wickham. So Molly had been the spokesperson for the Gidham Den camp. We're the people from this land, not your land. And first they wanted to know if people would move out of the way.

And there was a lot of back and forth in dialogue. There was one woman pleading with them, you know, along with others saying, you know, you don't have to do this. Don't you understand that we love you? We're peaceful people. You're trespassing. You know, it was a lot of yelling and desperation and anger that was being hurled at the RCMP. We never saw an injunction. You know, they, I think in their ideal situation, people would have moved out of the way and the gate would have been gone and then job done. But that wasn't going to happen. And so the RCMP started strategizing how they were going to remove this gate or get over this gate. And so

there was one member of the RCMP who had wire cutters, who started clipping the barbed wire off of the gate. And another another who was or a number of others who were started trying to tear these two by fours off of the gate. One of the main concerns which people in the camp were shouting at the RCMP were these people who were attached to the gate beneath them and and their safety and it was I think the RCMP were trying to figure out how to navigate that because they couldn't physically see these people. And so a chainsaw had been brought out and it was buzzing on the RCMP side and people in the campsite just started screaming, you know,

you're going to, like, you can't do this. There are people here. And, you know, depending on the way that chainsaw went, it could very well have dismembered people who were attached to it. So the RCMP stopped. I think this is when they came to the conclusion that the only way they were going to be able to enforce this is by going over the gate. We are going to have our members come over top.

At this point, I still consider, from you guys, you guys being fairly peaceful. I hope it stays that way. You are trespassing! That's when things sort of sped up again. You're going to hurt us! You're hurting us! And there were RCMP members pouring over, people being identified as, you're under arrest, you're under arrest,

people getting tackled in the snow. Go, go, go! I'm coming down! Go, go, go! Do not! Do not! Do not! You're under arrest! Get down! Members pinning them down and securing them with zap-strap-type handcuffs, and it was kind of another

pause where a group of women had stood for as creating kind of a human gate and linked arms and started singing the women's warrior song at sort of the RCMP or or to each. And then there was sort of another round of arrests where Molly Wickham, the spokesperson who I mentioned, she was taken away by RCMP quite peacefully. You know, she was walked away by the RCMP. So there was that. And then it sort of, again, sped up behind me on the bridge.

Somebody had dropped a tarp. At one point, I turned around and looked back towards the bridge. Somebody had dropped a tarp. At one point I turned around and looked back towards the camp and somebody had dropped a tarp, so you couldn't really see what was going on behind. And they had set up a fire, so there were pallets and bales of hay, which I could see later, that people had set up to sort of slow down the RCMP and had lit those on fire, so that created sort of a physical barrier.

A tree that had been notched earlier, which I didn't realize what was going on, had been notched earlier. And then while the RCMP were sort of starting to make their arrests, the tree came down over this Forest Service area. It was probably like a 30-meter tree all of a sudden. Wow. And it crashes over the road. And it was chaotic.

At one point, the cook tent back in the camp caught on fire, which caused a great deal of panic for a few moments around what is going on. I think at first people were concerned that maybe the RCMP had somehow gotten to the other side and were closing in from both sides. You know, there was just kind of a panic. Yeah. both sides you know there was just kind of a panic um yeah and so from there it was a lot of a lot of screaming a lot of arrests and well 14 people in total ended up being arrested and the people who had sort of retreated back throughout this enforcement past sort of the

lines of fire and the tree eventually got back to the camp, gathered up their belongings that they needed and took off further down the service road towards Unist'ot'en. So in this chaos, was anybody hurt? I've heard there were minor injuries. In the reports I've seen is that nobody was seriously hurt. So certainly when the people were attached to the gate and the RCMP were pouring over, the screams that I heard were certainly not something you could manufacture. But I think physical injuries are one piece of it, but the hereditary leadership has stressed time and time again that, you know, this was deeply traumatic for the people who were

there at the camp. And, you know, the emotion was clear. There was, you know, a young man who I'd been speaking to for a couple of days who I saw while the enforcement was happening and he was just sobbing, like just sobbing. And I think for, you know, there's a physical injury, and then there's a sense of people who really thought that they were in the right, you know, people who thought they were defending their nation, their nation's sovereignty, and asserting their laws, and then seeing another version of the law coming down on them. And I think that injury plays into so much history, right,

where intergenerational survivors of the residential school system, there were 60 scoop survivors there. There were family members of missing and murdered women and girls from the Highway of Tears region and elsewhere. And so I think when people see the response from, I think, even across the country and internationally of why there was so much outpouring of upset with these rallies and stuff, I mean, yes, there were people rallying on the other side of it as well as sort of

wanting this pipeline to be built or annoyed with the protests. But this reopened some deep, deep wounds in this country. The RCMP directly engaged stakeholders to make every effort to peacefully resolve the issue ahead of any enforcement action. The protesters' reaction to the police ranged from passive resistance to active resistance to actual assaultive behavior. As with any major operation, we will be conducting an after-action review that will produce recommendations to address any issues or concerns. I want to get a sense of the story of the people who were arrested.

You've been talking a lot about hereditary leaders. So the hereditary leadership, they were not physically in the camp when the arrests happened. But this is very much a product of the direction and the support of the hereditary leadership of the Wet'suwet'en. They are the leaders of the Wet'suwet'en Nation under their own governance structure, and they take their names in a way that is according to their laws, and they have responsibilities to protect the territory in the traditional territories of the Wet'suwet'en people and to protect that for future generations. the Wet'suwet'en people and to protect that for future generations. So we have this hereditary leadership, but there are also elected leaders. Yes. And can you take me through the difference between the two and how that's caused? Is tension the right word? Yeah, you know, it's tension within

the nation because elected leadership is also, they're also members of clans and house groups. And so there's this weird overlap between the two in which these are all the same people who are living their lives according to two governance structures, which is really a result of Canada and the imposition of the banned election or the Indian Act sort of banned governance that we see across Canada. But the division is sort of that the chiefs of the hereditary side will say, yeah, we get it that those banned councils have signed agreements with Coastal GasLink, but they don't have authority on anything outside of the reserve lands. And so that is where you see this division about the reserve land and the band council and the traditional territory, which is obviously much, much larger. And who has authority on that land specifically, which is where the pipeline is proposed to go through, not through the reserve lands, but through the traditional territory of the Whitsowton and others.

Okay, so we have the traditional hereditary leadership, who's generally against the pipeline. And we have a separate form of governance, elected band councils, that have mostly been in support of the pipeline. So there's this disagreement between the two forms of leadership. And I just want to pick up on something you said, that the band councils had reached agreements. The idea here is that these band councils on this territory have reached an agreement with the company making this pipeline, and they are in support of this pipeline. Yeah, so they have agreements with, and Coastal Gas Link has stressed that, and I think it is, you do have to talk about that, you know, that they do have agreements with 20 band councils

along the sort of route of this pipeline. And they do have agreements with all of them, and they do stand to benefit economically from this project. Since 2004, our people have actually supported LNG pipelines and the terminals. I mean, we tried to talk to the Wet'suwet'en elected leadership when we were out in the field. My colleague who was out was really trying to get some voices from that side. And given how loaded things were, she said people weren't willing to speak. But I mean, there are nations, other nations like the Haisla Nation, who are just very much in favor of this project and are nations, other nations like the Haisla Nation, who are just very much in favor of this project and are saying, like, let's go. And these are and some of

those nations are groups that were not okay with the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline going through and have differentiated between bitumen coming through their territory versus natural gas as this coastal gas link is a natural gas pipeline. And so there is support. There are people who will get jobs from this. And there are some type of benefit agreements that are a welcome economic boost for some of these communities. You mentioned the Haisla First Nation.

We spoke with Haisla chief, Crystal Smith, who talked about why she's a supporter of the project. So LNG Canada's facility will be in Haisla, directly in Haisla territory. I've described this opportunity as immeasurable for every First Nation that has signed in support of this project, simply because of the opportunity that lies within it through employment. But it's training, the support systems, that doesn't provide just jobs for our people. It provides a career.

So we're able to build independent members that contribute to an independent nation. We're being able to provide programming above and beyond federally funded programs. We get our mandate and then the empowerment from our members to do what we do. This has been our home for thousands of years and will continue to be our homes. So we've done all of our homework. We've done our due diligence when it comes to the support of these projects. What has this issue done to the social cohesion of the community? I would imagine that it's possible that there are members of the same family

who fall into different camps on whether or not there should be a pipeline. You know, this has been really difficult for the Wet'suwet'en. I know that one of the hereditary chiefs told me about somebody who was in his clan or his house group who was part of an elected leadership who had signed an agreement. And, you know, there's a lot of hard language being thrown around, you know, people being called traitors and sellouts. And yeah, so I can only imagine how difficult that is when people are sort of running into each other in town. I want to spend a little bit of time focusing on the company that wants to build this pipeline and has these agreements with all these band councils to build it. So what's the pipeline that we're talking about here?

There's a lot of different pipelines. Yeah, so this is the Coastal Gas Link pipeline project, which would transport natural gas from the shale gas fields in northeastern BC over to the coast in Kitimat. And so that's a subsidiary of TransCanada. And then at Kitimat, there would be a liquefied natural gas facility built there to transform the natural gas for shipment overseas. What do they have to say about this protest over the pipeline? You know, they're in a position of trying to navigate the complexity of all this, and sort of their recourse has been the courts. So they've tried for years to talk to the office

of the Wet'suwet'en, they said said around this pipeline and have tried multiple times to get out to Unist'ot'en and get through the gates there and have been turned away and saying, you know, you're not allowed here without consent from our chiefs. And so they said, you know, it was really a last resort for them to get to this point where they were putting an injunction request to the court. get to this point where they were putting an injunction request to the court. And I know that when the RCMP enforcement happened, obviously, there was a lot of attention on the company as well. And they were saying this was unfortunate that the RCMP were forced to act in this way. I did see them at the office of the Wet'suwet'en after all this enforcement happened for a meeting with the RCMP and the chiefs. And they said sort of after that wrapped that they were sort of looking forward to continuing that dialogue. But I think we'll see a lot more in the courts in terms of what their position is.

I suppose at the heart of this is the question, who owns the land? Yeah, yes, yes, definitely. You know, and I think that's particularly poignant in British Columbia, where there is a very different and not to say that there aren't issues with treaty nations as well. But, you know, the vast majority of British Columbia's nations, First Nations, don't have treaties with the government. And we're sort of seen as not needing to do the government sort of was like, well, you know, we don't need to do that. I don't know the exact language they use, but they sort of just had foregone that entire process with the exception of, you know, places in Vancouver Island and Treaty 8 territory in Northeastern BC. So, you know, one of the things people will say a lot, it's like name that people bring up a lot, is Dalgamuk,

which was a chief's name from the Gitxsan Nation. And it's also sort of the shorthand for a Supreme Court of Canada case that involved the Gitxsan and the Wet'suwet'en hereditary leadership that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada to talk about, in part, you know, this idea of whose land is this? Today, we're able to stand here and say that we beat back McEachern on his racist assumption that our rights could be extinguished prior to Confederation, and now they cannot be extinguished after Confederation as well.

And the court did see and affirm, if I'm going to be lawyerly, that the Wet'suwet'en and the Gitzen, their hereditary leadership, and so that's worth noting, this was a court action by the hereditary leadership that they had never ceded, nor surrendered, nor extinguished their title to their land, which is really, I think, in practical terms for the Wet'suwet'en, they're just like, well, we never made any deals with anybody about this. And this is still our land. And we are a sovereign nation within the nation of Canada, and whatever that interaction looks like. And so that's been their position since, you know, settlers started arriving in their territory and they've maintained that position. And so would it be fair for me to say

that for the Wet'suwet'en, it's like a hostile act? Yeah, absolutely. That's the perspective that you will hear from people, but it's really challenging that notion of law and land and it's complex. And I think there are very, very different opinions about it around, you know, are these people lawbreakers, or are they land defenders, land protectors,

or like whose laws are being broken here, really? It's something this country and the provinces are going to have to figure out. You mentioned that this is probably going to go through the courts, but what's happening now? Yeah, so what's happening now is that since Monday's enforcement last week, an agreement was made with the RCMP to allow for coastal gas link, not only through Gidham Den, where the camp has sort of been dismantled in most respects, and also to remove different obstructions at Unist'ot'en to allow their contractors through. So in terms of the enforcement side of things, we're a bit of a pause or there's a quietness there.

But the Wet'suwet'en leadership are certainly not taking any breaks. They are in meetings this week with leadership from other nations. There are going to be more rallies. And then the next steps are really going to be to watch for what happens in the courts. So January 31st is the deadline for the next filings for the courts for this interim injunction. And really, that's something we need to emphasize is that this is an interim injunction. So this hasn't gone to trial. These matters haven't really made their way through the courts.

So there's a lot of things that could happen from here. The courts could just keep going ahead and keep going with this injunction in favor of Coastal GasLink, and they will be protected with RCMP assistance to get this done. But Wet'suwet'en and others also have options in terms of filing counter injunctions, which has happened in the past. So the courts are going to be an interesting thing to watch moving forward. Chantal, thank you so much for taking us through this really complex story. Yeah, thanks for having me. At the top of the show, I talked about how pipelines are really divisive. Well, another controversial project is the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline

that would take bitumen from Alberta to the B.C. coast. It's been really strongly opposed by environmentalists and some Indigenous groups. Others, well, they're thinking about buying it. They say it would bring economic benefits and give them control over environmental monitoring. Dozens of Indigenous leaders met in Calgary yesterday to discuss that plan. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging.

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