All photos courtesy of Michael Toledano.

Colonialism in Canada is alive and present. It wields enormous ongoing violence against us Indigenous people through disappearing and murdering our women, two-spirit, and trans people; through lack of clean drinking water; dire housing conditions and shortages; and the highest rates of poverty, and incarceration, of any group of people within Canada. The underlying motivation that propels all of this violence is the state’s age-old war for Indigenous land.

Unist’ot’en: reoccupying Indigenous land

Wet’suwet’en is an Indigenous nation in northern British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada. Like the majority of Indigenous nations in BC, Wet’suwet’en never signed a treaty with the government. Their land is unceded. In fact, aside from the 14 Douglas Treaties on Vancouver Island, a small portion of land in northeastern BC caught within Treaty 8, and a few “modern” treaties, all of the land in BC is unceded. This is the case because of a fairly complicated history of the province “going rogue” and defying the terms of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

Yet, throughout Canada, even nations with treaties tell stories and histories of being manipulated through treaty negotiations; every treaty was negotiated under duress, with coercion rather than consent as the rule. The spirit of the treaties as they were understood by Indigenous nations has never been followed by the Canadian state. All land in Canada is not unceded, but all land is certainly contested.

In British Columbia, it was not until the early 1990s that the province began the BC Treaty Process, a modern treaty process that has put Indigenous nations into millions of dollars of debt, and that a sizable number of nations have dropped out of. Some Indigenous sovereigntists also recognize the BC Treaty Process as a modern termination process because it is designed to shrink the territorial title of a nation within hard borders and encourages the adoption of fee simple property rights, therein negating Indigenous difference rooted in non-Western concepts of land stewardship, rather than ownership.

When the Unist’ot’en Camp began in 2010, it was quite literally a reoccupation of Indigenous land by Wet’suwet’en people, no matter whether you looked at the situation through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty, or through the colonial system of treaties. The camp includes a homestead and healing center, bunkhouse, pit house, permaculture garden, and network of trails. The Unist’ot’en Camp receives leadership from the Unist’ot’en clan, one of the five Wet’suwet’en clans. Hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have visited, learned from, and contributed to the camp.

An act of Indigenous sovereignty

It is also important to acknowledge that other Wet’suwet’en people have reoccupied their territories over the years as well; Unist’ot’en is not an exceptional reoccupation. What is exceptional about it is that it happens to lie in direct route of multiple proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines, including three projects that have failed to receive consent from the Unist’ot’en. These three pipelines are the currently halted Northern Gateway Pipeline funded by Enbridge, and the in-progress Pacific Trails Pipeline funded by Chevron as well as the Coastal GasLink Pipeline funded by TC Energy.

Until last week, TC Energy was known as TransCanada. They changed their name in the midst of widespread criticism and ongoing Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions across the world. Coastal GasLink/TC Energy has been constructing a 670 kilometer liquified natural gas (LNG) pipeline that would carry fracked gas from Dawson Creek, BC to the coastal town of Kitimat, where LNG Canada’s processing plant would be located.

The permits for Coastal GasLink’s LNG pipeline were approved by the BC government under the Liberals. More recently, the permits were enforced by the BC government under the New Democrat Party (NDP), Canada’s party of labor which, like New Labour in the UK, has adopted “third way” neoliberal policies and has led multiple attacks on Indigenous sovereignty and land defense movements when it has been in power in BC.

Whether at the hands of the Liberals or the NDP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is the paramilitary police force that has attacked Indigenous nations since the time of Canadian Confederation. The RCMP was initially founded in order to wage war against Métis, Cree, and allied non-Natives during the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Red River Resistances in the 1870s and 80s. The RCMP was born through Indian Wars, and it continues to thrive on them.

In the context of unceded land, colonial resource extraction and transportation, and a paramilitary police force founded through Indian Wars, the Wet’suwet’en struggle is a key political and symbolic battleground for a militant Indigenous movement. Wet’suwet’en is not negotiating a treaty with BC; they are actively reoccupying traditional territories without colonial “permission.”

This is a profound act of Indigenous sovereignty, and it is fitting that it would be occurring in BC. Although Canada itself has never fully solved its “Indian problem,” BC’s lack of treaties is a glaring admission of violent colonial occupation.