“I brought you all some water,” I said to the ragtag crew of six holding our “All Nations Unite With Wet’suwet’en” banner across the lane of semi-truck traffic heaving out of the Port of Vancouver. We had been standing, rotating positions, for five hours now.
A hundred feet away, 200 people formed a square around the intersection of Hastings Street and Clark Drive, blocking semis, buses, and drivers headed to the glass towers of downtown. At the center of the intersection, Elders from local nations sang and drummed. With a pivot of their feet, they honored the four directions: north, south, east, and west.
I walked back to the intersection and stood with the man from yesterday’s march. He had been making his way through the crowd, offering people sage for smudging, a common cleansing ceremony. He held out his hands.
“I have to go soon. I didn’t smudge you yet. I want to give you this.” His hands held the abalone shell, the burning medicine, and feathers. Then, he looked me steadily in the eye and said, “I see you. We see you.”
Tears blurred my vision. I brought the smudge bowl to the table under the tent and cleared away bags of chips and plastic containers of muffins. I smudged. The medicine drifted through the air, and Dennis, the man from Moricetown on the Wet’suwet’en nation, walked away, toward the east. I held the feathers until, exhausted and triumphant, we marched out of the intersection as the winter dusk fell in the late afternoon.
That day, January 9, 2019, urban Native organizers led a six-hour blockade of the Port of Vancouver. We were responding to attacks by the RCMP, Canada’s paramilitary police force, on Wet’suwet’en people who have reoccupied their territory since 2010. The RCMP have been authorized by the British Columbia Supreme Court to forcibly clear a path for the construction stage of Coastal GasLink’s fracked gas pipeline. We targeted the Port because it is one of the most valuable economic sites in Vancouver, with goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through each hour. We targeted the Port to show the colonial state that Indigenous people will not sit quietly by while our cousins and comrades are under attack.
Since December 10, 2018, we have organized five other solidarity actions in Vancouver. We have occupied Coastal GasLink’s corporate offices; organized three simultaneous sit-ins of New Democrat Party (NDP) politicians’ offices (the “progressive” Party in BC under whose direction the RCMP is acting); led a march through downtown that blocked two bridges; mobilized 1,500 people into the streets of Vancouver to hear inspiring speeches; and, most recently, blockaded a rail line that leads into and out of the Port.
These actions have been strong, righteous acts of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in northern British Columbia. As urban Native organizers, we stand by our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en.
This moment of organizing is fierce, but within our own communities, we talk quietly about the absence of sustained urban Native organizing, outside of the “flashpoints” of solidarity actions that we often lead in the city for Indigenous land defenders on the remote frontlines. In settler-colonial Canada, these flashpoints inevitably come every few years, but our organizing does not sustain itself beyond our reactions to violations of Indigenous sovereignty on the land.
Many of us wonder: where is our movement?
Red Power Roots
There is an incredible history of urban Native organizing in Canada and the United States. One of the most famous was the Indigenous sovereigntist Red Power movement, which was most active and visible between the 1960s and the 1980s. Many groups organized during Red Power, but perhaps the most popularly known organization is the American Indian Movement.
Red Power was sparked when Indigenous fishing rights, secured through treaties, were threatened. In response, Indigenous activists in Washington State staged “fish-ins,” risking arrest to fish in their own waters. Then in 1969, the 19-month reoccupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay gained massive mainstream media attention and pushed issues of Native sovereignty and rights into the public discourse. Red Power was a pan-Indian movement that focused on unity between diverse Indigenous nations in the face of the colonial states of the US and Canada.
There are many ways that the stories of Red Power are told. Many who lived through the era speak about the movement’s internalization of colonized gender roles, and how this affected the leadership of women and two-spirit people. And most storytellers agree that the politics within Red Power shifted from a pan-Indian sense of unity to revitalizing cultural and spiritual practices specific to individual nations. On the ground, this often meant leaving the city as a site of organizing and going back to reservation or rural Indigenous communities.
There are lots of explanations for this shift, but from my perspective, this change was a complicated result of internal shifts in consciousness within the Red Power movement and external forces, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) targeting of the American Indian Movement; discourses of multiculturalism, most obviously instated through Canada’s 1988 Multiculturalism Act; the colonial states’ responses to broader Civil Rights-era movements by shifting money into education, which threatened social movements by offering routes to entry into the middle class; and, in the US, affirmative action policies.
With this shift away from pan-Indian identity and unity, Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US often began to return to their communities on traditional territories or reserves (in Canada) and reservations (in the US). Indigenous people also began, in earnest, relearning and revitalizing their languages, cultural and spiritual practices, and traditional or hereditary governmental structures, which, for centuries, the colonial governments had attacked and criminalized. Indigenous reoccupations of traditional territories, like at Wet’suwet’en in northern British Columbia, are the fruits of the tail end of the Red Power movement.
Yet, some urban Native organizers feel the loss of the pan-Indian politic: urban Indigenous people without a home territory to return to cannot connect to land-based activism. At issue is what sovereignty means to Indigenous people in Canada and the US, and whether we can expand our notion of sovereignty in ways that build connections and alliances between diverse experiences and expressions of Indigeneity in the early 21st century.
At issue is how urban Natives can assert our sovereignty as people who have been deeply dispossessed of our traditional territories, on the one hand, and find the city to be a rightful place of land relationships, on the other.
Who urban Natives are
Photo by Sharon Kravitz
In Canada, more than half of all Indigenous people live in urban centers, and more than 70 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live in cities in the US. Many Red Power activists in the US had been removed from reservations into major cities through the 1956 Relocation Act. Today, we find ourselves in the city for many reasons: surviving foster care or gendered violence, adoption, the search for jobs, legacies of residential schools and intergenerational trauma, fractured kinship networks. There are almost infinite reasons. In cities, we form strong urban Native communities. We make long-lasting and loving connections with diverse Indigenous people from many nations across so-called Canada. We make the city our home.
The realities of life for urban Natives often collide with settler expectations for Indigenous people; while many of us may be rooted in our cultures, many of us are not. While some of us may visit the reserve often, some of us don’t even know which reserve is ours. The gaps in our historical memories are not our individual faults; they are the effects of colonialism, which has attempted for hundreds of years to wreck our kinship systems, our non-capitalist economies, and our cultural knowledges.
Indigenous movements today emphasize returning to the land, leading many Indigenous sovereigntists to reoccupy territories, participate in ceremony, and relearn languages and cultural practices. Reoccupying land is perhaps the foremost expression of Indigenous sovereignty because Canada and the US are actively engaged in a never-ending war for land. Refusing to be confined to reserves or reservations, and refusing to be dispossessed of our territories, asserts our sovereignty in ways that defy settler laws and settler entitlement. These trajectories are enormously inspiring, and hold great potential for Indigenous nationhood.
But this era of Indigenous sovereignty expressed most radically through reoccupation of territories makes it complicated for urban Native people to participate. Many of us live in poverty and face questions of survival in our daily lives. Many of us have fled our communities due to violence; others have severed relationships with our communities due to the varied effects of colonialism. Many of us cannot “go home.”
Urban Natives in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en
In between these two tendencies, I have quietly fought to carve out space for urban Natives to make connections with our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en, and elsewhere. In Vancouver, I have been organizing with an ad hoc coalitional group that includes both settlers and Indigenous people. We come from different organizations and different politics and backgrounds. Our greatest shared point of unity is the political principle of Indigenous sovereignty, and a belief, different as it may be given our social and historical positions, in our responsibility to respond to this moment of colonial attack on Indigenous sovereignty in the streets.
Our work responds to two challenges: one is to create a place in Indigenous sovereignty movements to ensure that land defense politics also see the city as land; the second is to find a place for Indigenous struggles within class-based urban grassroots movements, which tend to elide the very real forces of colonialism that also structure the city.
In addition to my involvement with Wet’suwet’en solidarity organizing, I have been a member for the past seven years in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organization, Alliance Against Displacement. Our community organizing work has tended to focus on low-income struggles, homeless tent cities, and renter’s struggles. More recently we have started a campaign led by trans women called Bread, Roses and Hormones and a campaign against the police in the suburb of Surrey, called Anti-Police Surrey.
From the first years of being involved with Alliance Against Displacement, the urban Indigenous people within the group have wanted to start an urban Indigenous campaign. We have yearned to do this, ached over it, spent many hours dedicated to theorizing what an urban Indigenous campaign would look like in the second decade of the 21st century. We met with homeless Indigenous people in tent cities. We held talking circles for self-identified Indigenous people in Vancouver. It was hard to find the spark that could sustain a movement, and that is ultimately what we hoped to build through a campaign.
In the past two months of organizing Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions and support in Vancouver, I have felt a shift. We urban Native people are in the streets blocking ports, rail lines, speaking freely about our right to our land, our sovereignty, our nationhood. We are drumming and singing unapologetically, leading marches of thousands of people, some of us dressed in our traditional regalia happily standing beside some of us dressed in jeans and Wu-Tang sweatshirts. We are meeting each other spontaneously in the streets, building connections, and sharing politics. We are connecting with political elders, like Ray Bobb, who was involved with the Native Alliance for Red Power in the 1960s and 70s in Vancouver. We are meeting youth, like the young Stó:lô woman Sii-am, who spoke in the whipping wind and pouring rain just after we shut down a major transportation route in downtown Vancouver one evening.
While the violence against Wet’suwet’en people, and Wet’suwet’en land, is yet another mournful example of colonialism in Canada, I also see great potential in this moment. Urban Native people are being catalyzed through the Wet’suwet’en assertion of sovereignty. We are rekindling our voices, hearing new voices, developing a more explicit politics of sovereignty that takes us into the streets.
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
The future of urban Indigenous organizing
Photo by Murray Bush / flux photo
The Wet’suwet’en confrontation with colonial power has mobilized many of us Indigenous people, Wet’suwet’en and others, rural or urban. Urban Native people are rising right now, leading solidarity actions in cities across Canada, increasingly taking our rightful place in Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
We are targeting sites of economic trade and exchange, like ports and railways, because we know that colonialism and capitalism are entwined forces that must be fought simultaneously. We are taking to the streets alongside anti-capitalist organizers who are deeply committed to anti-colonial struggle, and recognize the necessity of dual movements against capitalism and colonialism in so-called Canada.
We are defying the “ally” politics that have plagued Indigenous land defense solidarity work for at least 15 years now, politics that center white activists and their relationships with Indigenous land defenders while simultaneously viewing urban Natives as “less Indian” than our rural cousins and comrades.
We are building from the strengths of the Red Power era of organizing in the 1970s and 80s, and moving past its weaknesses.
We are inheriting the consciousness-raising staged through Idle No More, an Indigenous movement that spread from Canada to the US in 2013, and are pushing this movement further, making on-the-ground connections between culture, land, and sovereignty.
We are creating a new politics that honors the particularities of individual nations’ land relationships, cultures, and knowledges while also embracing urban Natives as people with political agency as well.
We are synthesizing the varied and diverse Indigenous sovereignty efforts into a movement that has the numbers, strategic alliances, and political vision needed to fight Canadian colonialism.
We are acting in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en frontline, and we are also saying: the colonial frontlines are everywhere.
On Monday, January 7th, Canadian federal police raided the Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gidumt’en Territory on unceded indigenous land in what is commonly known as British Columbia, Canada.
The Access Point is the forward position of a pipeline occupation held primarily by the Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Unist’ot’en have been occupying this part of their territory for nine years to block numerous oil and gas pipelines from destroying their territory.
On Wednesday afternoon, the RCMP lifted the roadblock and exclusion zone that had been in place since Monday morning. Several RCMP negotiators, as well as hereditary chiefs, passed through the barrier on the bridge over the Wedzin Kwah and are currently engaged in negotiations inside the healing center.
The latest reports confirm that the Unist’ot’en will comply with the injunction and allow some Coastal Gaslink employees onto the territory. It remains to be seen what form the struggle will take.
Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs will open gate and comply with injunction. They do not want violence that happened in Gitdimt'en to repeat here. Many tears shed. Police negotiating with Clan to possibly allow gate to stay up. This is not over. #wetsuwetenstrong#unistotenhttps://t.co/liIUy8fYlW
Some scenes as the Wet’suwet’en hereditary Chiefs arriving in Unist’ot’en territory and crossing through the checkpoint on the bridge near the healing lodge pic.twitter.com/UFO8hXI4by
This is Canada in 2019. Indigenous people getting ripped from their homes by militarized police. Gidumt'en Clan spokesperson Molly Wickham arrested on her land. 12+ arrests including an elder. Wet'suwt'en hereditary chiefs with millenia old names blocked from their territories. pic.twitter.com/1CBZ6d6W8D
Fourteen land defenders were arrested on Monday including spokesperson Molly Wickham. She describes what happened in this video. All of the arrestees have been released as of 3pm Wednesday. You can donate to the legal support fund here.
Molly Wickham, Gitdimt’en spokesperson provides a detailed account of the police raid and arrests.
Media may use clips from this video ensuring context is maintained. Thank you all for your ongoing coverage.
After a lengthy, increasingly heated back-and-forth between the demonstrators and police, officers began cutting the barbed wire and started up a chainsaw. Camp members began to scream in protest; two young men had chained themselves to the fence below the view of the officers, encasing their arms in a kind of pipe that meant opening the gate risked breaking both of their arms… [the] checkpoint camp was abandoned behind a massive fallen tree and a barrier of flame on Monday afternoon as dozens of RCMP officers finally pushed past the barricade set up to bar entry to the traditional territories of the Wet’suwet’en people.
The Gidumt’en and Unist’ot’en are two of five clans that make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The traditional leadership of all five clans oppose the pipeline. However, the elected band council (a colonial leadership structure set up by the Canadian state) voted in favor of the pipeline.
More than 60 solidarity events took place across Canada and the world this week. Using the hashtag #ShutdownCanada, blockades have stopped major intersections, financial districts, bridges, and ports in Vancouver, Ottowa, Toronto, Victoria, Montreal, and elsewhere.
This situation has a long background and highly significant legal significance. Kai Nagata describes the situation:
Many Canadians have heard of the 1997 Delgamuukw decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, which recognized that Aboriginal title still exists in places where Indigenous nations have never signed a treaty with the Crown. In fact, the court was talking about the land where tonight’s raid is taking place.
Delgamuukw is a chief’s name in the neighbouring Gitxsan Nation, passed down through the generations. Delgamuukw was one of dozens of plaintiffs in the case, comprising hereditary chiefs from both the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Nations.
Together those leaders achieved an extraordinary milestone in forcing the Canadian courts to affirm the legitimacy of their oral histories, traditional laws and continuing governance of their lands. But it wasn’t until the Tsilhqot’in decision in 2014 that the Supreme Court went a step further, recognizing Aboriginal title over a specific piece of land.
If the Wet’suwet’en chiefs went back to court all these years later, many legal scholars say the strength of their claim to their territories would eventually force the Canadian government to relinquish thousands of square kilometres within the Bulkley and Skeena watersheds – and stop calling it “Crown land”.
That’s why the TransCanada pipeline company acted quickly, to secure an injunction against Wet’suwet’en members blocking construction before the legal ground could shift under their Coastal Gaslink project.
The 670-kilometre pipeline project would link the fracking fields of Northeastern B.C. with a huge liquid gas export terminal proposed for Kitimat. Called LNG Canada, this project is made up of oil and gas companies from China, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, along with Royal Dutch Shell.
The BC Liberal, BC NDP and federal governments all courted the LNG Canada project, offering tax breaks, cheap electricity, tariff exemptions and other incentives to convince the consortium to build in B.C. Both Christy Clark and Premier John Horgan celebrated LNG Canada’s final investment decision last fall, calling it a big win for the province.
However, without a four foot diameter (122cm) pipeline feeding fracked gas to the marine terminal, the LNG Canada project is a non-starter.
That brings us back to the Morice River, or Wedzin Kwa in the Wet’suwet’en language. This is where the rubber hits the road for “reconciliation”. Politicians are fond of using the word, but seemingly uncomfortable with its implications.
Politicians also talk a lot about the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, and how to enshrine it in B.C. law. Article 10 of UNDRIP states that “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories.” It is hard to see how tonight’s arrests are consistent with this basic right.
Pro-pipeline pundits are already working hard to spin this raid as the “rule of law” being asserted over the objections of “protestors”. They point to benefit agreements signed between TransCanada and many band governments along the pipeline route.
But under the Indian Act, elected councillors only have jurisdiction over reserve lands – the tiny parcels set aside for First Nations communities that are administered much like municipalities. That’s not where this pipeline would go.
What is at stake in the larger battle over Indigenous rights and title are the vast territories claimed by the Crown but never paid for, conquered or acquired by treaty. In Wet’suwet’en territory, those lands, lakes and rivers are stewarded by the hereditary chiefs under a governance system that predates the founding of Canada.
As militarized RCMP are descending onto unceded Wet’suwet’en to enforce a colonial court injunction, rallies in 30 cities expressing solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en will take place on Tuesday January 8, 2019 across Canada and internationally. The Wet’suwet’en are defending their unceded lands in Northern B.C. from unwanted fracked gas development
Rallies across Canada are being held in Calgary, Chilliwack, Cortes Island, Edmonton, Halifax, Hamilton, Lilooet, Kitchener Waterloo, Mi’kma’ki, Montreal, Nelson, North Bay, Ottawa, Prince George, Regina, Rexton, Saskatoon, Six Nations, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, and White Horse. Rallies will take place internationally in Bellingham, Flagstaff, Milan, San Francisco, and Seattle.
According to rally organizers, “We oppose the use of legal injunctions, police forces, and criminalizing state tactics against the Wet’suwet’en asserting their own laws on their own lands. This is a historic moment when the federal and provincial governments can choose to follow their stated principles of reconciliation, or respond by perpetuating colonial theft and violence in Canada.”
Coastal GasLink, a project of TransCanada Corporation, has been constructing a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline that will carry fracked gas from Dawson Creek, B.C. to the coastal town of Kitimat, where LNG Canada’s processing plant would be located. LNG Canada is the single largest private sector investment in Canadian history, with support from the Federal Liberal government and tax breaks from the NDP B.C. provincial government.
Under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink/TransCanada to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands. The 22,000 square km of Wet’suwet’en Territory is divided into 5 clans and 13 house groups. Each clan within the Wet’suwet’en Nation has full jurisdiction under their law to control access to their territory.
According to the Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gitdumden territory, who issued the call for international solidarity, “All Wet’suwet’en Clans have rejected the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline because this is our home. Our medicines, our berries, our food, the animals, our water, our culture are all here since time immemorial. We are obligated to protect our ways of life for our babies unborn.”
The Unist’ot’en Camp is a permanent Indigenous re-occupation of Wet’suwet’en land that sits on Gilsteyu Dark House Territory. The Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gitdumden territory was announced in the Wet’suwet’en feast hall in December 2018 with the support of all chiefs present to affirm that the Unist’ot’en Clan are not alone.
On December 2018, the B.C. Supreme Court issued a court injunction that authorizes the RCMP to forcibly clear a path through the Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gitdumden territory and the Unist’ot’en homestead on Unist’ot’en territory. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the landmark 1997 Delgamuukw-Gisday’wa case that the Wet’suwet’en, as represented by their hereditary leaders, had not given up rights and title to their 22,000 square kilometers of land. Members of the RCMP met with Hereditary Chiefs in January 2019 and indicated that specially trained tactical forces will soon be deployed.
“Canada knows that its own actions are illegal,” states the Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gitdumden territory. “The Wet’suwet’en chiefs have maintained their use and occupancy of their lands and hereditary governance system to this date despite generations of legislative policies that aim to remove us from this land, assimilate our people, and ban our governing system. The hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en and the land defenders holding the front lines have no intention of allowing Wet’suwet’en sovereignty to be violated.”
Support has been growing for the Wet’suwet’en with statements issued by national and international organizations such as 350 dot org, Heiltsuk Nation, Idle No More, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Civil Liberties Defense Center, Dogwood BC, Greenpeace Canada, Namgis First Nation, Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society, and Union of B.C Indian Chiefs.
The rally organizers further state, “We demand that the provincial and federal government uphold their responsibilities to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by revoking the permits for this fracked gas pipeline that does not have consent from any Wet’suwet’en Clan. The federal government, provincial government, Coastal GasLink/TransCanada, and the RCMP do not have jurisdiction on Wet’suwet’en land.”
This episode of The Green Flame focuses on colonization and has three interviews: the first with Anne Keala Kelly, a native Hawaiian organizer, journalist, and award-winning filmmaker; the second with Mari Boine, a world-reknowned Sami indigenous musician; and the third with a river.
We discuss colonization, history, tourism, the TMT telescope project on Mauna Kea, indigenous peoples of Europe, music, and how to connect with the land. Three of Mari Boine’s songs are used in this episode, with permission: Gula Gula, Goaskinvielija (Eagle Brother), and Vilges Suola.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Bios
Anne Keala Kelly is a journalist and filmmaker. Keala’s published articles and Op-Eds have appeared in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, The Nation, Indian Country Today, Honolulu Weekly, Honolulu Civil Beat, Hana Hou! Magazine, Big Island Journal, and other publications. Her broadcast journalism has aired on Free Speech Radio News, Independent Native News, Al Jazeera English, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Democracy Now!, The Environment Report, and more. She is a frequent guest commentator on First Voices Indigenous Radio, and has been interviewed on numerous nationally syndicated radio programs, from KPFK Los Angeles’ Rise-Up to Native America Calling in Anchorage to the Australia Broadcast Corporation’s Pacific Beat. Her reporting on Hawaiian poverty and homelessness garnered her Native American Journalism Awards. And her documentary, Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i, has received international film festival awards, and is widely taught in university courses focusing on Indigenous Peoples, colonization, Hawaiian sovereignty, and militarism. Keala is an outspoken Native advocate for Indigenous representation in media, and has been a guest speaker at universities in Hawai’i, the U.S., and Aotearoa-New Zealand. She has delivered conference keynotes and participated in conference and community panels and roundtables. She has an MFA in production from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. To learn more about her film, go to www.nohohewa.com.
Mari Boine: Imagine the ice and snow of the Arctic landscape, the bitter cold of the Northern wind, the hint of compelling blue under a crystallized lake. Close your eyes. Then listen. Really listen. You’ll feel a voice before you even hear it. It’s like none other. It’s a voice that brings the landscape alive with a mesmerizing purity; a voice that represents a thousand years of ancestral connection to an unyielding frozen space. This is Mari Boine. Musician. Songwriter. Singer. A genre-bending trailblazer with a taste for jazz, folk, rock, and world. An artist whose music is inspired by and infused with her Sámi roots. A woman who knows who she is, where she’s come from and what she stands for. A music icon who has inspired indigenous artists the world over.
For over 6 years now, environmental defenders representing the Unist’ot’en, an official faction of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, have been standing guard over their traditional territory from invasion by Transcanada’s Coastal Gaslink pipeline.
On December 14, 2018, a British Columbia Supreme Court Justice levied a temporary injunction, ordering an end to the blockade — bypassing the required consent of tribal leaders.
Prior to this, a gated blockade had prevented pipeline workers from trespassing onto First Nation lands through the Morice River bridge — located on a forest road.
The injunction, which demands environmental defenders vacate their stronghold of resistance to the planned 670 kilometer pipeline, is set to start on Monday, December 17th, allowing pipeline workers free passage until May 2019.
In a show of quasi-generosity, Coastal Gaslink has stated that the camp connected to the blockade may remain in place… as long as they discontinue any obstruction of pre-construction traffic through the gated area.
“Right now, our focus is on respectfully and safely moving forward with project activities, including gaining safe access across the Morice River bridge … We simply ask that their activities do not disrupt or jeopardize the safety of our employees and contractors, surrounding communities or even themselves,” Coastal GasLink said in a statement.
Representatives of Coastal Gaslink have also cited an inability of First Nation communities to provide restitution for any ‘losses’ the company could incur through delays or obstructions to construction plans as support for the injunction and enforcement order.
Yet, enforcement of the project remains dubious given that the territory has never changed hands via treaty, nor have land rights ever been conceded in any manner. In effect, the right of the Unist’ot’en People to determine the fate of their ancestral land remains intact.
This also makes the injunction a clear violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which requires ‘free, prior and informed consent’ (FPIC) when it comes to development, investment or extraction initiatives on Indigenous territories.
The area in question has been occupied by the Unist’ot’en for generations; their current leader, Chief Knedebeas, describes occupying and carrying out tribal traditions there since his childhood.
Now, the territory under threat is being used as a crucial healing center where Wet’suwet’en people are receiving treatment for addiction. Freda Hudson, Unist’ot’en clan, explained:
“The Unist’ot’en Healing Centre was constructed to fulfill their vision of a culturally-safe healing program, centred on the healing properties of the land. It is the embodiment of self-determined wellness and decolonization, with potential to build up culture-based resiliency of Indigenous people who need support, through re-establishing relationships with land, ancestors and the underlying universal teachings that connect distinct Indigenous communities across the world.”
The Unist’ot’en have until January 31, 2019 to respond to Coastal Gaslink’s application.
When it comes to the ruling elite’s corporate plunder and crimes against humanity, the U.S. national memory’s short and no one, not even its political henchmen, assume blame or suffer real consequences: take Halliburton and former chief executive and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for example. Not only did Cheney plan and justify the invasion, occupation and pilferage of Iraq’s oil, gold bars and national museum treasures under treasonous false pretenses, but its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR Inc.), overcharged the U.S. taxpayer to a tune of more than $2 billion due to collusion engendered by sole source contracting methods and shoddy accounting procedures. It’s even forgotten that Cheney received a $34 million payout from Halliburton when he joined the Vice President ticket in 2000, in advance of his unscrupulous maneuvers, according to news commentator, Chris Matthews; because on November 5th 2018, in celebration of its 100-year anniversary, its chief executives rang the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) opening bell.
Sadly, as a nation, the U.S. doesn’t recall Cheney’s lies, or his role in planning the contemptible “Shock and Awe” saturation bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation, which posed no threat to the United States, and left the world’s cradle of civilization in ruins. Conveniently, it doesn’t recall the over 500,000 deaths from war related causes, as reported by the Huffington Post in its 2017 updated article; nor does it recall that obliterating Iraq’s government created a sociopolitical vacuum that enabled the exponential growth of the CIA’s unique brand of Islamofascism and its resulting terrorism, which has culminated in war-torn Syria and Yemen.
Iraq’s only “crime” against the United States, if you want to call it that, was being hogtied by Washington’s sanctions and embargo against it – in what can only be called a Catch 22 situation. Iraq couldn’t do business with U.S. corporations not because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to, but because the U.S. government effectively barred Iraq from doing so. This Catch 22 situation is presently being repeated in Venezuela and Iran in advance of its planned invasion and occupation.
Then there is the cost of war itself: according to The Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “The wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq (the war in Pakistan refers to U.S. counterterrorism efforts there, such as drone strikes and other efforts against al Qaeda) cost $4.4 trillion. Included in the cost are: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care. By 2053, interest payments on the debt alone could reach over $7 trillion.”
Keep in mind that the U.S. taxpayer directly subsidizes the profits of the military industrial complex, and oil & gas industries. Yet, no U.S. protests against Halliburton are found in the media later than 2007. And, there are no organized disinvestment campaigns of record.
So Wall Street celebrates Halliburton’s 100-year anniversary with a clear conscience, because no one has graffitied its large four column wide sign or is disinvested from its stock. The nation only recalls, according to IBTimes, in their 2013 article on Iraq war contracts, that Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR, had the most: KBR’s war contracts totaled $39.5 billion in just a decade.
Other than the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, which found Cheney and President Bush et al guilty of war crimes in absentia for the illegal invasion of Iraq, there remains no lasting acknowledgement in the U.S. consciousness of Cheney’s evil doings. Cheney had recent book deals and continues to ramble on with speaking engagements. He was scheduled by Cornell University to issue a keynote address as recent as May 2018. In short, the ruling elite protects those engaged in their dirty work until they prove unnecessary. In this regard, consider the fact that Saddam Hussein was a former CIA asset and a good corporate customer – as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he once possessed, were sold to him by the U.S. and Britain. However, according to the former United Nations (UN) chief weapon inspector, Scott Ritter, the UN destroyed Iraq’s stockpiles after the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) – well before the 2003 invasion. This report was ignored because it contradicted the prevailing narrative that justified the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq.
Just as the ruling elite engineered Saddam Hussein rise to power when he was useful, they ensured Cheney’s political ascent, and the success of his campaign against Iraq. To illustrate the persuasive power of the oil & gas industry in politics, note that according to Open Secrets.org, oil & gas lobbyists spent over $175M in 2009 (Obama’s first year in office). Of that amount, ExxonMobil spent the most at $27.4M and Chevron Corp., in second place, spent $20.8M. For the record, ExxonMobil and Chevron are successors of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Prior to President Obama & Vice President Biden, the Oil & Gas Industry lobbyists spent approximately half that amount at $86.5M in 2007. Thus, Bush & Cheney represented a 50% savings for oil & gas lobbyists.
When seeking to “out” the elite, keep in mind that the Rockefeller clan describe themselves “as ExxonMobil’s longest continuous shareholders.” In Iraq, ExxonMobil has a 60% share of a $50 billion market contract developing the 9-billion-barrels southern West Qurna Phase I field, and ExxonMobil is expanding its oil & gas holdings into the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north.
Within this context, the enemy is not a corporate office, an oilrig, pipeline or refinery; it’s the ruling elite that own and control the means of production. If people of conscience don’t hold them accountable for their crimes, they will continue to commit them in countries such as Venezuela and Iran, which are presently locked in their sights. While henchmen change, the ruling elite remains. Why should the U.S. allow its military and secret service to be pimped out as corporate stooges and glorified security guards?
Imperialism is insatiable and fascism expedient. The time to hold the ruling elite accountable is now before another invasion and occupation is executed against a fake enemy that just so happens to coincidentally have a large desirable oil reserve. Let’s follow Iceland’s lead and seek the prosecution of white-collar criminals that hide behind a facade of corporate stock holdings now, before its too late and they strike again in Venezuela and Iran.
So for Halliburton’s 100-year anniversary wish, let’s wish its stock tanks and that its guilty are remembered, held accountable, and that justice is ultimately served.
Lauren Smith has a BA in Politics, Economics and Society from SUNY at Old Westbury and an MPA in International Development Administration from New York University. Her historical fiction novel based on Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution is due out in 2019.
