There’s a resistance building in Canada and at the heart of it are the Wet’suwet’en, a small Indigenous First Nation with ancestral lands in the province of British Columbia.

Indigenous people are the children of Earth. Maybe that’s why it’s so fitting that this resistance — and the recent Indigenous resistance to other pipeline projects across North America — boils down to two interrelated concerns: the need for colonial governments to respect Indigenous Tribal Sovereignty and the necessity of addressing the climate emergency by transitioning away from hazardous, nonrenewable fossil fuels before it’s too late.

My own people, the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), have been fighting the construction of pipelines (Keystone 1, Dakota Access and Keystone XL) through our ancestral lands for over a decade, by any means necessary. Since 2008, we’ve protested, pleaded with elected officials, taken fossil fuel giants to federal court, and ultimately at Standing Rock, laid our bodies in the path of bulldozers and stood unarmed in front of militarized police to stop them from destroying our ancient burial sites and exposing our main source of freshwater to toxic crude without our consent.

In Canada, Unist’ot’en Matriarchs, from the C’ihlts’ehkhyu/Big Frog Clan of Wet’suwet’en, have been defending their territory from invasion by fossil fuel corporations since 2010, when they built a cabin in the path of at least three proposed pipelines. The Wet’suwet’en believe that pipelines pose a grave threat to their right to retain control over this pristine wilderness their people have inhabited since time immemorial. Besides the cabin, the land now includes traplines, a traditional pit house, a bunkhouse, and a healing center, as The Intercept reported in February.

The Wet’suwet’en contend they have strong sovereign title. They never ceded the rights to what Hereditary Chiefs say are 22,000 square kilometers of land, water, and resources. High courts in Canada have repeatedly acknowledged the legitimacy of Indigenous title rights. In the 1997 case Delgamuukw-Gisdaywa v. British Columbia, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the Wet’suwet’en people had never ceded nor surrendered title to Wet’suwet’en territory. It also held that the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs maintain authority and jurisdiction over their unceded lands and any projects crossing their lands must receive their informed consent before proceeding.

Of the three pipelines originally opposed by the Unist’ot’en Matriarchs, one was canceled, and another is delayed. The last, a TC Energy (formerly Transcanada) pipeline called Coastal GasLink, they say is now being forced through their land.

Pipeline construction itself is damaging to the land and people, according to the Wet’suwet’en, who say Coastal GasLink has interfered with archaeological sites, hampered with their ability to hunt and trap, and put their safety at risk by bringing "camps" full of workers, who are strangers, to their territory. (After Teen Vogue reached out to Coastal GasLink for comment, the company sent a link to their website, which says that the company values "the culture, lands and traditions of Indigenous groups" and has worked "closely with First Nations communities throughout the life of the project.")

The Supreme Court of British Columbia issued an injunction against the Wet’suwet’en on December 31, 2019, preventing them from stopping construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline on their own land. Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, representing all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, responded five days later by issuing an eviction notice to the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline company.