Adam Kovac, Special to USA TODAY

MONTREAL – Despite promises to heal an often tense relationship between the Canadian government and the country’s Indigenous people, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has found himself in the middle of a standoff over a natural gas pipeline through one tribe’s traditional territory, with parts of the country’s rail system entirely shut down at one point due to protests.

A 670-kilometer, or about 416-mile, pipeline which would run through a remote northern portion of the western province of British Columbia, was originally approved in 2012 but has met fierce resistance from the Wet’suwet’en tribe’s hereditary chiefs. The chiefs have voiced objection to the pipeline based on its possible environmental impact on their land.

While a tentative deal was recently reached between the hereditary chiefs and the Canadian government, the deal must still be approved by the Wet’suwet’en people. The exact details of the deal have not been made public and there is no set date for when it will become final.

There are roughly 1 million people in Canada who identify as First Nations or North American Indian, according to Statistics Canada, and the relationship between them and Trudeau has soured considerably since he was elected prime minister in 2015. Trudeau had made “reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples a major part of his campaign.

“It’s no doubt the current Liberal government is at least discursively more progressive on Indigenous issues but I think what we’ve seen over the past four years is a preference for symbolic gestures,” said Hayden King, a professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University specializing in Indigenous issues.

Among the incidents that have clouded the relationship was the resignation of Canadian Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould last year. Wilson-Raybould had been the first Indigenous Canadian to hold that title, but she acrimoniously left the administration in 2019 during a scandal in which she said Trudeau tried to influence her to go easy on an influential construction firm facing corruption charges.

Some Indigenous groups have also rallied against an expansion of the cross-Canada oil pipeline known as Trans Mountain. Despite the objections, the Trudeau administration purchased the pipeline for $4.5 billion in 2018.

Protests in Wet’suwet’en territory initially erupted in early 2019 but spread across the country in February of this year after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police entered the territory to enforce an injunction against the protesters, arresting several of them. The Wet’suwet’en chiefs and their allies allege the police action violated the sovereignty of their land.

At the protests’ height, Indigenous groups and their allies blocked numerous rail routes across Canada, forcing both commuter and commercial routes to a stop near major cities, like Toronto and Montreal and resulting in backlogs at the country’s three largest ports.

While Trudeau initially preached patience with the blockades, he said on Feb. 21 "the barricades need to come down now," which some took to as a signal for police to act. (Canada's public safety minister, Bill Blair, seemed to be sending the same signal around the same time when he echoed Trudeau, saying the "time has come for those barricades to come down.")

One of the last barricades was just south of Montreal in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake where protesters shut down a busy commuter rail line into the city for almost four weeks. On Thursday, members of the community chose to end the barricade, saying they were “ready to act” again should negotiations with the Wet’suwet’en break down. Some conservative political opponents have criticized Trudeau for not doing enough to end the standoff sooner.

Kanentokon Hemlock, a traditional chief in Kahnawake, criticized Trudeau for not matching his actions to his rhetoric.

“The talks of reconciliation and nation-to-nation relationships, they’re good words, but the actions that have to follow them are vast,” he said.

He added that the protests have been a watershed movement for Canada’s Indigenous people, comparing them to the anti-oil pipeline Standing Rock protests in North Dakota.

“Standing Rock was about a pipeline going through the territories of the Lakota people, this is a pipeline going through the territory of the Wet’suwet’en. The major difference I see is Standing Rock was centralized around that landbase while this issue has reached right around Canada.”

Canada’s history has been marked by mistreatment of its Indigenous people. Both Trudeau and his predecessor, Stephen Harper, have apologized for the government’s various historic misdeeds, including a residential school system that saw thousands of children removed from their homes, with many suffering physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

“I think there is still tremendous sentiment in Canada that Indigenous people are just in the way of development. There’s these savage stereotypes and primitive tropes,” said King. “We see a lot of racism towards Indigenous land defenders on the blockades.”