Why What is Happening with the Wet'suwet'en First Nation is Important

(Originally posted on thinkspot)

             I'm going to try to put some perspective on the Wet'suwet'en situation here, to the best of my knowledge, (which isn't perfect and this may need to be tweaked later - if anyone sees anything that is not exact - let me know).

             To begin with, you should understand that First Nations people (or Indigenous peoples) are separated into different cultural groups (similar language and social structure. ) For instance, you have the Iroquois, who are not a nation, but a group of nations including Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, etc. You also have the Algonquians, another group of nations which include Cree, Ojibway, Algonquin, etc.

              Within these groups or families, you sometimes have smaller families. And within these smaller groups, you have the different nations (or tribes,) and within those nations, you have bands or clans. For instance, I grew up with the Ililiw also known as Mōsonī or Moose Cree First Nation They speak the L dialect of Cree and traditionally, their land is on the south-western shores of James Bay as well as along the Moose River. The town of Moosonee comes from their name. It is "the home of the moose. Moose is a Cree word. The Ililiw are part of a larger group or council called the omashkeko okimāwiwin or Mushkegowuk Council They are the Mushkego Cree (in other words: the Cree of the muskeg. I tend to believe that muskeg is ALSO a Cree word. ) The Mushkego Cree are again part of a much larger Cree group, extending all the way from Northern Quebec to Northern Alberta, within which, dialects can be quite different. My foster daughter, on the other hand, belongs to the Akwesasne First Nation, a band on the American side of the border (although she is, for international purposes, Canadian, having been born in Cornwall, ON. ) This band is in turn part of the Mohawk family, which is in turn part of the Six Nations Confederacy, which includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.

               In Canada, there are both what used to be called "treaty Indians" and "non-treaty Indians". The former refers to First Nations people who signed a treaty with the Canadian government, granting the government access to certain lands originally belonging to that particular Indigenous people. The Moose Cree, for example, signed Treaty No 9 with the Canadian government in return for other things. "Non-treaty Indians", however, never signed a treaty with the government and NEVER CEDED THEIR LANDS. (This is important to remember. ) In the west especially, and particularly in British Colombia, many of the First Nations never signed a treaty with the Canadian government, and never ceded their lands.

               How did Canada become the country it is today? Well, to begin with, it was two colonies, a French and an English colony. These colonies were built on the premise that there was all this free, vacant land where only wolves, deer, buffalo and some “Indians” lived. It was assumed that there was no “state,” no governing body, no country or nation, and so, explorers claimed the land for their Kings across the ocean. These kings in turn sent settlers to settle the land (before other kings got there first. ) Governors, representing the king would parcel out land to the settlers who built farms and villages, that turned into towns and cities. This was done without necessarily consulting the original inhabitants. Canada was pretty much built up around First Nations communities.

               I’m not going to get into the wars and alliances with First Nations peoples.   Suffice it to say, that it is a very complicated thing and that every First Nation has a different history with Canada.   There were treaties and alliances, sometimes certain groups of Indigenous people fought WITH certain Europeans AGAINST other Europeans and other Indigenous groups. Sometimes European people were quite capable of dealing fairly with Indigenous peoples and even of integrating themselves into their society, and forming a whole new identity, case in point: the Métis of the north-western provinces. As well, in my own hometown, the Scottish Hudson Bay Company employees from the Orkney Islands intermarried with the Cree and the result is a beautiful mix of two cultures, where one can drink tea and have bannock and moose meat in one sitting, while listening to Celtic fiddling and a bit of traditional drums.

               Some peoples had a lot of contact with the European settlers from the 1400’s onward, simply because of where they were situated (along the Saint Lawrence river and Great Lakes. ) For many others, in regions that are isolated even today, contact with European settlers was much less common. Much of Northern B. C is still sparsely populated and isolated today.

               The western provinces were not always part of Canada.   Part of what brought them into Canada was the fact that the Canadian government built a railway all the way to British Colombia. This united what is now Canada from coast to coast. It was a race really; the Canadian government did not want the Americans getting there first.

               British Colombia is densely populated in the south-western mainland, around Vancouver. A large majority of the inhabitants live in a relatively small region. The city I lived in, in the late 1990s to early 2000s is the largest city in the interior, but Prince George is a relatively young city. Construction of the current city started in 1915, and today it is still a small city at about 74, 000 people. It takes 2 hours to get to the next small town, in any direction.

               Highway 16 between Prince George and Terrace runs through Wet’suwet’en territory. Highway 16, also known as the Yellowhead highway, is the Northern Canadian highway that links the northern cities, from Portage la Prairie (just after Winnipeg) to Saskatoon, Lloydminster, Edmonton, Hinton, and passing through Jasper National Park to Prince George, Terrace and Prince Rupert, so it is at once an important highway, and also, in places, a very remote highway.

               Keeping in mind how large and sparsely populated this whole area is in today’s world, and how far away from Ottawa and the Canadian government, imagine what it must have looked like in 1868, when the Canadian government was coming to an agreement with the governing bodies in Victoria and Vancouver about joining the dominion of Canada. European settlements had grown up around First Nations settlements, and the land had been claimed for the king, without ever considering the people who already lived there. If strange newcomers are planning a whole new government and creating a country that supposedly includes your land, but they’re planning it 800 kilometres away, as if you weren’t even there, how are you supposed to know about it and what are you supposed to do about it?

               The Wet’suwet’en First Nations are divided into 5 bands or clans, and each had its own territory. Ownership of the land is not an idea that First Nations (in my experience) really hold on to. You can’t “own” the land. The land belongs to itself. The land is personified. The land PROVIDES, and you, the children of the land, receive. First Nations didn’t have deeds for the land.   I’m pretty sure that they still don’t, not on reserves or in their traditional territories.   The Cree in Moose Factory who live on-reserve don’t own their houses.   However, the houses they live in are assigned to families and are passed down from generation to generation in much the same way that the traditional territories out in the bush are passed down and belong to family groups. Most First Nations had no written language to begin with, so how could they write deeds? They are peoples with an ORAL history, not a written one. However, the land WAS divided up into territories and each band had its territory, which was further divided among family groups.

               Back home, when the Cree would go out on the land in the wintertime, usually they would go 3-4 families together on one family’s land.   They would build a temporary home, one that would last for the winter, and they would hunt and trap on the land.   The next year, they would go to a different family’s land, and the year after, yet another family’s land.   In this way, the land was never used two years in a row, and it was allowed to rest and replenish itself. It’s the same principal as farmers letting a fourth of their fields lie fallow every year and rotating them.

               None of these families had deeds for the land, but it was passed on for generations within the same family.   European settlers may not have seen evidence that someone “owned” the land, but someone DID, and it had been in their family for generations.

               What is going on right now, with the Wet’suwet’en, is that currently only two out of the original 5 territories are still in their hands, and since 2009, companies have been trying to get access to that land, while the Wet’suwet’en people are trying to keep them out. There is only one way in to their territory, and it is watched by band members.   They still hunt on this land, they use the plants for food and medicine, they drink the water from the creeks and rivers. They have a land-based healing centre, designed so members of the Nation can find healing on the land, through traditional ceremonies and rediscovering their culture and traditions.

               People using the land in this way, members attending land-based healing have been harassed by outside companies ON THEIR OWN LAND. These companies have dug up burial grounds and sacred places, without consulting the people who live there. The elected chiefs, (a system set up by the Canadian government) were consulted by the oil companies wanting to build a pipe line through this land, and agreed to it, however, the hereditary chiefs who are the ones who have jurisdiction over traditional lands are against the project.

“(The band council has) done their due diligence and they want to be part of this economic initiative, create jobs for their people, be part of the economy, and they balanced the environment and the economy,” National Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations told CTV’s Power Play earlier this week.
“In the ancestral territory lands of the Wet'suwet'en peoples, it’s the hereditary chiefs and their clans and their big houses that have the jurisdiction,” Bellegarde added. “That’s the piece that’s missing, so when Coastal GasLink and governments come in, they didn’t bring the Wet'suwet'en nation and the proper people in place to deal with their ancestral lands. ” (“What’s the difference between the elected ban council and hereditary chiefs,” CTV News. February 13, 2020. )

               There are other reasons for the hereditary Chiefs to refuse access to the oil companies to build a pipeline through the last remaining territories they have left, besides the fact that the land is already in use for hunting, gathering, drinking water, dwelling and healing. One of these reasons is the “man camps” that construction inevitably creates.   Camps full of men, looking for easy entertainment, and ready to prey on any vulnerable young women they can find. In this case, it would be the young women of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, the only women nearby in such an isolated place.   The hereditary Chiefs want to protect their young women, and with reason. Canada has a huge number of missing and murdered Indigenous women Not only that, but the last thing young women still dealing with inter-generational trauma need is to be wooed by a man who’ll get them pregnant and be gone in a few months.

 THE HEREDITARY CHIEFS PROPOSED AN ALTERNATIVE ROUTE TO CGL.
There is a piece of information that seems to have been strategically left out of many mainstream media sources, and that is that the Hereditary Chiefs who have control over the lands that the pipeline is wanting to pass through actually proposed an alternate route which went around their most ecologically rich and culturally significant areas. Yes, you read that right. But instead of honouring and respecting their request to protect these important areas of their territory, Coastal Gas Link and the B. C Government decided to ignore this request and both continue to work with the RCMP and tactical forces by sending them in mass groups in helicopters with snipers, drones and dogs to harass and bully the Wet’suwet’en and their allies, all of whom are UNARMED and peacefully existing ON THEIR OWN LAND. This type of invasion is illegal both by Canadian law and International law (Leiah Luz, in a Facebook post )

               This isn’t about protesting pipelines, folks. This is about the right of a Nation to decide what goes on ON THEIR OWN LAND. If Americans were to use tactical force to build pipelines or roads into Canada without Canada’s consent it would be quite understandable for Canada to not quietly stand by and let them do it.   So why is Canada incapable of extending the same courtesy? In fact, ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION, if they had a deed to that land, and were using it, say as a camp for youth, or maybe a wilderness tourist attraction, and didn’t want a pipe line running through it for obvious reasons would probably garner more respect than the people whose territory it has been for millennia.

               When Ghandi led thousands of Indians on a salt march to protest unjust British laws through civil disobedience, I am sure that the British at the time considered him a very tiresome pest as well as a criminal. He is now celebrated as a hero of pacifist rebellion.

               What else are you going to do, when no one is LISTENING? How else do you make your voice heard?  It is, in my opinion, a positive thing, that all these other Indigenous Nations are standing behind the Wet’suwet’en in solidarity. Where the voices of a few are ignored, the voices of many will be heard. It is also a mark of good will that all this has been done in relative non-violence. Things could be worse. The First Nations in Canada could take to the bushes and start up a Guerrilla force, like in Colombia or Nigeria and many other countries across the globe.   That they have chosen NOT to, speaks in their favour.   Not that they would be likely to win that fight anyway, but things could get very long, drawn-out and unpleasant, and often when people turn to arms, they end up hurting the very people they set out to “liberate.”

               To get the story from the Wet’suwet’en themselves, I suggest watching this documentary. “We are occupying the land and acting like we own it because we DO own it!” says one of the hereditary Chiefs.

               I also suggest this other video, seemingly unrelated, from Jordan B Peterson, on Solzhenitsyn and Socialism: I would like to make a few connections with what has happened to First Nations in general. At around 41:40, Peterson is about to show a video, as an example of how you can tell if someone is ideologically possessed "because you can almost predict word for word what they are going to say next. That's quite a term to use; “ideologically possessed. ”  But he goes on to show the video of a woman who DOES act exactly like someone possessed, and he reads examples from Solzhenitsyn’s book, where, even after being falsely “informed on” and sent to the Gulag, members of the communist party would STILL insist that socialism was life itself.

               JB Peterson reads excerpts from John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and speaks of the story of the tower of Babel. He then likens Lucifer, the (fallen) archangel of light and intellect to the "personification of the tendency of the rational mind to produce totalitarian systems and then to fall in love with them. Peterson continues, "The larger you build a system, the more there is a proclivity to worship it as if it were everything.  There is a tendency to want to incorporate everyone into a system. The bigger it grows, the more people there are in it, and the more people there are, the more different they tend to be. So, they start "speaking different languages" and the whole project falls apart into chaos like the tower of Babel.

               This tendency to “worship a totalitarian system” and to want to include everyone in it, is a dangerous tendency that we humans all have.   This is why empires don’t work. They eventually fall apart. The Soviet Union fell apart, because it abused the very people it set out to liberate. China and North Korea are doing the same.   Cuba had its own tropical Gulag. Venezuela is in dire straits. Socialism only works in small groups where everyone knows each other.   Monasteries practice something similar to socialism. Families are “socialist” units, where everyone shares common things, and certain people work and support other people until they are able to work themselves, and the parents are usually the dictators and “indoctrinate” their children with good values and virtue (we hope. ) Indigenous communities worked in a similar way, because they needed to, in order to survive. Meat was often redistributed to those who either hadn’t been able to hunt or hadn’t caught anything. But it cannot work on a large scale, simply because what is pertinent to one specific group in a specific area and circumstance may be completely inappropriate for another group living somewhere else in different circumstances.

               Here’s an example: When I was living in Prince George, the B. C government, composed of people who mostly lived and came from the lower mainland and the big cities, decided to impose a luxury tax on all trucks and SUV’s in an effort to get people to buy more fuel efficient cars and thus reduce greenhouse gases. In general, people living in the city do not need trucks or SUV’s.   What the government did not take into consideration is that the VAST majority of B. C is wilderness.   An hour out of Vancouver, cities are small and far apart, the population is sparse, and people work on farms, ranches and in the forestry industry. The kinds of jobs where you need to haul and carry things, heavy things.   So, trucks and SUV’s are not so much a luxury as a necessity. The law was completely unjust and impertinent to the people who lived in most of B. C The people complained, and luckily, the government of B. C was not the Soviet Union and quickly abolished the law.

               There’s a point to this. You see, I hear a lot of comments based on the idea that “what is good for us is good for them. ” Even within the Catholic Church the dominant culture (European) tends to fiercely defend what it considers to be “Catholic tradition” but which in reality only goes back as far as the Medieval ages more or less. What is good for European Catholics may not actually be good for Catholics elsewhere, because it does not take into consideration the particular culture, region and circumstances that that people find themselves in.

               In the same way, Canadians of European descent MUST NOT impose solutions on Indigenous peoples because “it works for us. ” We need to LET GO of our ideals, which is not to say that we let go of the TRUTH. There is a universal Truth that is the same for every Nation. The right to dignity, the right to be respected, the need to be loved, the necessity of labour and the reaping of the benefits of those labours, etc. However, HOW we go about fulfilling that Truth is going to be different from one nation to the next. This is why what is currently happening in the Wet’suwet’en territory is so important.   How we deal with that is important. Do we recognize this people and their right to control their lives on THEIR land, or do we push ahead with no respect for their needs and their desires, and rape their land and their culture?