This week members of Climate Action Inuvik didn't let below -40 C windchills stop them from taking to the streets and standing up for what they believed in.
They have been doing Friday afternoon marches to raise awareness about issues related to climate change since last January. This time around, they were focused on the Wet’suwet’en nation in B.C. where Coastal GasLink (CGL) is preparing to install a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline to facilitate shipping from the port town Kitimat.
Like most things involving lots of money, the people who want to make the money have spent a lot of it to advance a narrative that promotes their view, making getting the basic facts to form an opinion on the matter very difficult.
There are several groups of hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en nation
— each has authority over a certain portion of the unceded lands. The chiefs being removed have not signed an agreement with CGL for their specific lands, and neither has the elected band office of the corresponding reserve, who said it was the hereditary chief's jurisdiction. There have been agreements signed with some other nations further up and down the line. The chiefs also offered two alternate routes for the pipeline through their lands that were rejected by CGL.
No agreement between the Wet’suwet’en nation and the monarchy has even been inked. So decisions usually require courts to navigate the murky legal framework.
A simple analogy would be if you can imagine the government making a deal with some of your neighbours to dig up all the front yards in your neighbourhood, and then telling the entire community you're preventing them from creating jobs when you object.
Given the rail blockades and demonstrations erupting from coast to coast to coast, I think it's safe to say the people who pushed this through didn't anticipate this much solidarity between Indigenous residents of Turtle Island and eco-conscious Canadians.
The responses from Canada's current crop of leaders speak volumes. Andrew Scheer demanded police shut down the blockades, offering a glimpse into an alternate timeline that branched off last October, and Alberta premier Jason Kenney suggested the suppression of protests was a 'dress rehearsal' for the building of the TransMountain pipeline expansion, surely the way to get people on the fence to your side.
Meanwhile, the adults in charge seem to have second guessed themselves with the federal and B.C. governments reaching out to talk with the protestors, apparently mindful of past incidents like Oka. It's almost as if "Reconciliation is dead" had a real effect on the prime minister.
But it's true. If, at the end of the day when the colonists don't get their way out come the guns and the 19th century rhetoric, then nothing has changed and all the reconciliation put forward so far starts sounding an awful lot like all of the other promises made over the last three centuries.
Nothing is going to change unless it has to. For Indigenous people across the planet it has to change and it has to now. They're tired of waiting and rightfully so.