"I love this country. Not everyone wants to tear it apart," Butch Dennis says.

WITSET, B.C. — Fifty-three-year-old Butch Dennis drives slowly along a frozen road in the Witset First Nation village, stopping to acknowledge two kids who are watching a lucky friend motor about on a pint-sized snowmobile.

“Look at the little guy here on the Ski-Doo, eh,” says Dennis, a Wet’suwet’en from the Gitumden clan who moved to Witset (also known as Moricetown) at age 15. “This is the future right here.”

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Dennis knows everyone in every home: What clan they belong to, their clan house and whether they are working.

He is proud of the reserve, and happy to point out its many band-owned and -operated features. A new health centre, a freshly paved road, seniors’ programs, a child-care facility, a learning centre, a sawmill, a gas bar, a firehall, a museum, an RV park and, soon, a tax-free cannabis retail store.

“I think we have a pretty awesome reserve,” he says. “We have a firehall, we have clean running water, we have programs to learn our language and we have meal programs for the youth and the elders. The elders get free cut firewood.”

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On the other side of Highway 16, beyond the Wet’suwet’en cemetery, is a totem pole erected in 1956 by Dennis’s grandfather David to defy the Canadian government. Unlike his grandfather, who died in 1986 at age 108, Dennis has stayed away from political statements and adheres to the Wet’suwet’en way of allowing only those permitted to speak to speak.

But as the Wet’suwet’en pipeline crisis deepens, with five chiefs from a neighbouring band and territory arrested recently for blocking a rail line, Dennis wants to be heard.

His decision comes as the 5,000-strong Wet’suwet’en try to make sense of the polarization of their community, between elected and hereditary leaders, and within clans and households over an issue that has been brewing for years.

Photo by David Carrigg

On Feb. 24, the same day 23 people were arrested at three B.C. blockades and more blockades appeared in Quebec and Ontario, Dennis raised a Canadian flag on a pole beside his smokehouse.

“The (hereditary) chief’s office need to be accountable to the people and not rule everything with an iron fist,” he says. “I love this country. Not everyone wants to tear it apart.”

The bridge at the centre of the storm

The physical centre of the Canada-wide pipeline fight is a 40-metre steel bridge over the Wedzinkwa (Morice) River, 66 kilometres up the Morice River Forest Service Road, about a 90-minute drive from Houston.

On one side of the bridge is the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre and on the other is a newly vacated RCMP checkpoint. Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs demanded the police leave as a condition before they began meeting with the federal and provincial ministers on Thursday.

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The bridge is the farthest point up the road that the RCMP have arrested Wet’suwet’en members opposed to the 670-km Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Photo by Kyah Resources

The natural gas pipeline is expected to run beneath the bridge as it snakes its way through a forbidding landscape from Dawson Creek to Kitimat to fuel the $40-billion LNG Canada export plant, which is under construction. The pipeline is supposed to be complete in the fall of 2023 and the LNG plant is expected to start exports in 2025.

It should be no surprise to the Wet’suwet’en, to Coastal GasLink, or to both levels of government that this crisis has emerged.

According to an affidavit filed by a former Indigenous relations co-ordinator for Coastal GasLink, the company has tried unsuccessfully for seven years to get the Unist’ot’en House and the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, which represents the 12 other houses, to agree to its pipeline and accept a benefits package.

Coastal GasLink learned that Unist’ot’en House was responsible for its own negotiations through a letter sent Feb. 26, 2013, from the Office of the Wet’suwet’en stating that it did not formally represent “Dark House a.k.a. Unist’ot’en from the Gilseyhu clan.”

The Office of the Wet’suwet’en is a non-profit formed in the mid-1990s as hereditary chiefs and elders from the Wet’suwet’en Nation and neighbouring Gitxsan Nation fought and won a landmark Supreme Court of Canada case that acknowledged they had never ceded their rights to 22,000 square kilometres of territory and formally recognized the Wet’suwet’en hereditary system and laws.

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It was that ruling that led to Coastal GasLink approaching the hereditary chiefs. When that failed the company began approaching the bands.

The Office of the Wet’suwet’en, which is a welcoming space in the heart of downtown Smithers, was then tasked with securing a treaty with the government and at one point comprised the 13 hereditary house chiefs and the elected chiefs of the six Wet’suwet’en band councils. The band chiefs play no role now and there are no treaty talks underway.

The Wet’suwet’en traditional lands are divided among five clans, and within those clans are a total of 13 houses. Each house has a chief and one or more wing chiefs.

There are no head chiefs in four of those houses. The Beaver House position has been empty for at least 20 years and House Beside the Fire for 15 years.

Of the nine hereditary chiefs in place, six are strongly opposed to the pipeline and have been since Coastal GasLink first made overtures to offer a benefits agreement. Those chiefs are John Risdale (Na’moks), Alphonse Gagnon (Kloum Khun), Jeff Brown (Madeek), Frank Alec (Woos), Warner Naziel (Smogelgem) and Fred Tom (Gisday’wa).

Former Chief Woos was Roy Morris, who died in 2011 and was part of the hereditary chief group that won Aboriginal title rights after appealing two decisions in the Delgamuukw land rights case.

Longtime Chief Ron Mitchell (Hagwilnegh) is neutral, while Herb Naziel (Samooh) works for Coastal GasLink and is in favour of the pipeline.

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Chief Warner William, despite his Dark House/Unist’ot’en House being at the centre of the fight, remains neutral while his wing chief Freda Huson — who established the Unist’ot’en healing centre in 2009, originally as an anti-pipeline checkpoint — is now the spiritual leader of the fight against Coastal GasLink and speaks for the house.

Huson was also a two-term councillor on the Witset First Nation band council, losing her post in 2017 when a pro-pipeline slate took control. She has a good reputation among the Witset and was credited with getting Witset’s gas bar off the ground.

The 2013 letter to Coastal GasLink warned that while the Office of the Wet’suwet’en would not negotiate on behalf of the Unist’ot’en House, its “members occupy their territories to monitor and protect their lands from development that is not consistent with their values. … The Unist’ot’en are well within their rights and jurisdiction to occupy and protect their lands as they see fit.”

Of the five hereditary chiefs who signed that letter, three are still chiefs — Brown, Risdale and Naziel.

Risdale is the chief who speaks on behalf of the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and is a point person for the federal and provincial governments’ continuing efforts to try to get the office to support the pipeline.

The Wet’suwet’en have in the past united to resist the Enbridge bitumen pipeline and at least one coal-mining venture.

Photo by JONATHAN HAYWARD / THE CANADIAN PRESS

A community divided

The community divide falls into three categories.

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There are Wet’suwet’en who are working for or benefiting from multimillion-dollar agreements Coastal GasLink has signed with five of six Wet’suwet’en bands and are in favour because of that, and therefore oppose the protests.

There are also those within the hereditary system who are upset with how three hereditary chiefs got elected after the three female chiefs who formed a sub group in 2015 to try to strike a deal between the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and Coastal GasLink were deposed.

There are also complaints that house chiefs are making decisions without consulting house members in the traditional manner and that people without authority are speaking on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en.

Photo by David Carrigg

Lucy Gagnon, executive director of the Witset (Moricetown) First Nation, is caught between these two worlds.

While responsible for managing the band council’s agreement with Coastal GasLink, she is married to hereditary chief Alphonse Gagnon.

“It’s really hard for me because my husband is anti-pipeline,” Gagnon said in her office at the Witset First Nation. “In my house, we just don’t talk about it because our marriage is more important than anything that happens out there. I don’t need war in my house.”

She said the percentage of people for or against the pipeline varies from clan to clan and house to house.

“There’s people who won’t disclose if they are for or against,” Gagnon said. “It may be 50-50, but in my clan there is more anti than pro. And my husband’s is the same way. But then you will have a house group that’s more for it. It’s all over the map.”

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Benefits flowing

So as the battle goes on, Gagnon meets in her office with Trevor Morrison, a wing chief in a neighbouring Gitxsan Nation house and also senior general manager of Kyah Development Corporation — the Witset company that operates all band businesses.

Between them they manage the two tiers of pipeline funding laid out in a confidential agreement signed between the band and Coastal GasLink on May 10, 2018.

Photo by David Carrigg

Witset was the last and largest of five Wet’suwet’en bands (created under the federal Indian Act) that have signed agreements and is the farthest north. The others are the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, Burns Lake Band, Nee Tahi Buhn Band and Skin Tyee Nation.

Gagnon said the previous band council was opposed to the pipeline, however, an election in August 2017 elected a new band council that was in favour.

The only Wet’suwet’en-related band that did not sign on with Coastal GasLink was the Hagwilget First Nation. In August, 2019, an anti-pipeline band council was elected, forcing the former chief of 35 years to step aside.

Gagnon could not reveal how much money the Witset has received from Coastal GasLink. However, a tentative deal that was struck with the former band council, but was not signed, offered $6 million in three payments.

Gagnon said the band received its first payment when the agreement was signed and those monies were used to pave Beaver Road, between the Witset gas bar and Highway 16, a stretch of about three kilometres.

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A second payment was received after LNG Canada made a final investment decision and committed to the project, thereby ensuring it needed the Coastal GasLink pipeline built.

Gagnon said those monies have been placed in a GIC with a bank and the interest would be used to pay for skills training for band members.

While direct benefits for all 20 First Nations bands that have signed up with Coastal GasLink is expected to be around $338 million, twice that much is expected to flow into those communities through direct contracts with First Nations businesses — like that between Coastal GasLink and a joint venture between Kyah Development Corporation and the privately owned Kyah Resources Inc.

Photo by Handout

Troy Young is a Wet’suwet’en from the Tsayu clan whose great grandmother was Lucy Holland, a former hereditary chief Na’moks. The chief names go with a territory, so successive chiefs take the same name.

Young is also the owner of Kyah Resources and has about 50 First Nations workers getting on-the-job experience, which he says will be crucial to them securing jobs when the pipeline is done in three to five years.

His contract with Kyah Development is for road building and path clearing west from Houston to the Icy Pass, where Haisla Nation contractors will take over. They have to build a bridge and facilitate construction of a 1,000-person work camp.

“In Witset, you have multi-generational unemployment and we now have guys who are getting off social security. It’s life-changing,” he said.

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“If we know it’s only a three- to five-year window, we want people trained so when jobs come up elsewhere in the province they are work ready, they have a couple of thousand hours on the machines, that they can demonstrate they have worked on the job. It looks good on a resumé. This isn’t going to last forever, but the skills will translate to elsewhere.”

For Witset band member Bill van Tunen, getting work with Young came just at the right time, as he needed work that was not as hard on his body and is now building up hours of experience operating heavy machinery.

“This is going to open doors for me,” said van Tunen, who is also a farmer and hunting guide.

He said he was surprised by the culture at the Kyah Resources work site — one of respect and inclusion.

Dennis is also providing work for about a dozen Wet’suwet’en through his contracting business, which is providing flagging, labour and tree falling services.

“A lot of our people are getting training, pipeline training in Prince George, and machine operators are getting all these tickets you need,” he said. “For a young person that hasn’t done nothing like this before, now they are going to have to get all these tickets. This is new to them and we have to do this to young people, to groom and train them because they are going to be the workforce when we get older.”

Seeking a way forward

Young and Gagnon hope the pipeline impasse can be dealt with in the Feast Hall, the centre of Wet’suwet’en culture, where decisions about family and business are made according to a strict set of rules.

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“Jumping and screaming is not our way,” said Gagnon. “We are very respectful in the Feast Hall. There have been many issues that we have dealt with in the Feast Hall and maybe that is the place for this. They just have to get talking. It’s complex, but we will get through this. It just may take a while.”

Young said he was frustrated because his clan was represented by Na’moks, but he said Na’moks was not talking to his clan members. Young told Postmedia News that he had received permission from his clan elders to speak publicly. Na’moks did not return calls.

“Last week, I see my house chief proclaiming in the media that an all-clans meeting was called for the next day, and only certain people could speak,” Young wrote in a prepared statement. “This is not our law. Our house chiefs are not our dictators. Each house chief is supposed to do what the house members agree upon and tell him through our matriarchs, elders and wing chiefs, not tell us what we are going to do.

“Some chiefs have not been holding house meetings open to all, so the decisions made in these meetings do not hold weight. Our chiefs don’t get to hand pick who they invite to house meeting. Each chief holds equal power in the hall, and this has been forgotten. Being the clan spokesperson doesn’t give more power over the other chiefs, and this has been forgotten.”

Young said that unlike Metro Vancouver First Nations — the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh — the Wet’suwet’encannot rely on leasing out land to raise money.

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“That’s not an option for Wet’suwet’en people. We have natural resources such as forestry, mining and fishing, all of which are in a downturn right now. Tourism and high-tech have been suggested, but we haven’t witnessed anyone in this area make a viable business in these sectors that would create the employment levels for Witset.”

Butch Dennis does what is within his power to help his community. He cuts firewood for elders, clears dangerous trees and works at keeping bears away from the reserve.

He also clears snow so mourners can access the Wet’suwet’en cemetery.

“If you are Wet’suwet’en, you will be buried here,” said Dennis, looking over the snow-covered field of crosses and headstones.

The cemetery plays a key role in the community, and if you die off the reserve you will be brought back for burial if possible.

Dennis knows there is a split in the community, but also that the Wet’suwet’en are all connected and will always be.

He casts an eye to his grandfather’s stone.

“We all come back here together, one way or another. You can’t always get what you want.”