Around 200 Wet’suwet’en members attended a meeting in northern B.C. on Wednesday afternoon to show their support for the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline being built through their territory.

The first speaker at the event in Houston was Russell Tiljoe, a man in his 80s with 10 children whose father was a hereditary chief in the Beaver clan.

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Tiljoe said he attended the meeting, organized by the Kitimat-based pro-LNG group The North Matters, because he believed in employment.

He said that in the past the provincial government would issue permits and commence projects in Wet’suwet’en territory without consulting chiefs.

Back then, chiefs “didn’t want very much. Just one cent in every dollar so our children don’t go to sleep hungry at night.

“Back in those days First Nations people didn’t have much of a chance of getting a good job. We had to take the jobs that nobody else wanted,” Tiljoe said, adding that the pipeline offers economic hope at a time when the lumber industry is struggling. “Sometimes you don’t see what the solution is until it comes. There’s always a solution. That’s what my father told me.”

Tiljoe’s daughter Marion Shepherd also spoke. She said she was a member of the Unist’ot’en (Dark House), one of 13 Wet’suwet’en houses that fall within five clans.

The Unist’ot’en are at the centre of the pipeline protests that are raging across the country. It is within their territory that the RCMP moved in two weeks ago to take down a barricade blocking Coastal GasLink crews from accessing a work site. The head chief of the Unist’ot’en is Warner Williams (Knedebeas) and one of the wing chiefs is Freda Huson, who has become the face of the protest movement.

Shepherd said Williams and Huson were not listening to clan members.

“It really makes me sad that our elders and our hereditaries cannot speak because only the select few are allowed and I really don’t believe in that,” she said, adding that members of the Big Frog clan had not been kept informed since 2015, when relations between the hereditary chiefs and Coastal GasLink broke down.

Coastal GasLink is building a 670 km underground natural gas pipeline between Dawson Creek and Kitimat and has signed agreements with 20 First Nations bands along the route, including five within the Wet’suwet’en territory.

“People are starting to speak the truth about what they feel,” Shephard said. “People want to work. The chiefs are supposed to talk to the clans and the clans are supposed to make the decisions. It’s not going that way.”

Robert Skin, a councillor with the Skin Tyee Band, said the benefits agreement that his band had signed with Coastal GasLink “will look after our children and our children’s children.”

“These protesters are getting one side of the story,” he said. “They want to stand up with their fists in the air, but I say come and listen to us and get the other side of the story before you go out there and stop traffic and stop the railroad. All you are doing is alienating our people who are trying to put a roof over their heads and food on the table.”

Neil Sweeney, Coastal GasLink’s vice-president of external affairs, told Postmedia News that the company was expected to spend $1 billion on Indigenous contracting as part of the overall Indigenous benefits packages. He said First Nations’ contractors were responsible for clearing the right-of-way and building 16 lodges to house workers, including one for 900 people in Chetwynd.