Wet'suwet'en hope for easing of tensions to light a way forward
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 03:42:59 +0000
A barricade has gone up on Canadian Pacific Rail lines near Kamloops by protesters who say they support of the Wet’suwet’en opponents of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Thursday blockade of the line, crucial to trade through the Port of Vancouver, came just as the RCMP said it was prepared to remove its temporary outpost on the First Nation’s territory.
Federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said the RCMP’s offer meets conditions set by the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposed to the pipeline and their supporters to end blockades, but members of the Neskonlith Indian Band set up a blockade on CP tracks east of Kamloops in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en.
Blair had hoped the RCMP’s move could pave the way for a meeting between the Wet’suwet’en chiefs and Crown-Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennet and Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller, who offered to do so as four of five chiefs visited the Mohawk supporters blockading CN Rail’s mainline at Tyendinaga Ont.
However, Wet’suwet’en Chief Na’Moks, who also goes by John Ridsdale, said that meeting wouldn’t be possible because they need to make decisions as a group and three senior chiefs remained in B.C., and they also want the pipeline builder, TC PipeLines to also move workers out of the territory as a precondition to any meeting.
Meanwhile, divisions have emerged in communities within the region where Wet’suwet’en people hope for an easing of tensions.
“It’s kind of hard to think about it,” said Russell Tiljoe, an 84-year-old Wet’suwet’en from the Houston area. “Some people who used to be good friends of ours, when they see us coming, they go the other direction.”
Tiljoe, who spoke in support of the pipeline at a public meeting in Houston, believes “what we need is dialogue” among all the hereditary chiefs without outside pressure.
Tiljoe said if the hereditary chiefs want RCMP out of their territory, outside protesters, whom he referred to as “professional protesters,” should also leave.
“Let us work out our differences ourselves,” Tiljoe said. “We’ve done that for many generations.”
Coastal GasLink is building a $6.6 billion, 670 km underground natural gas pipeline between Dawson Creek and the LNG Canada development at Kitimat.
The company has signed agreements with 20 elected First Nations band councils along the route, including five within the Wet’suwet’en territory.
However, a group of hereditary chiefs remain opposed to the pipeline on the position that it is hereditary leaders who hold Aboriginal title to the land and the project needed their consent rather than elected band councils.
The government response to the dispute should include “a cooling-off period,” during which there is no construction to provide some room for dialogue, said Jody Wilson Raybould, the independent MP for Vancouver Granville.
Raybould, a former regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, offered the suggestion in a four-point plan she raised in the House of Commons during an emergency debate on Tuesday.
And that discussion, she said, should include an internal dialogue within the Wet’suwet’en Nation “needed to bring clarity about how they will approach the future of this project collectively.”
Candice George, who lives in Fraser Lake but has Wet’suwet’en chiefs among her grandparents and great grandparents, said the communities should rely on their traditional bahlats system, using their language’s word for potlatch, to resolve the dispute.
“The only way we can solve these Indigenous issues is with Indigenous solutions,” George said. “The way I feel we need to move forward is we need to have a bahlats so each of our clans and each house needs to gather and discuss together the issues in the house and how we’re going to move forward together.”
George, an entrepreneur and cultural educator, said there was a “different vibe” in the community during her last visit to Telkwa to visit family.
“People are really upset and don’t know what’s going to happen,” George said. “Some of my elders are concerned and don’t want to even go to the grocery store.”
With files from The Canadian Press and Bloomberg