RCMP ambushes Indigenous defenders of the land

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The RCMP moved to enforce a B.C. Supreme Court injunction to allow pipeline workers to pass through two Wet’suwet’en checkpoints on Jan. 9. A heavily armed SWAT team attacked peaceful indigenous protesters and violently arrested 14 land defenders.

Over the next two days, virtually spontaneous demonstrations occurred in dozens of towns and cities in reaction to repeated state violence against Indigenous people and against the pollution that emanates from the global corporate profit machine. Mass media was excluded by the cops from the site of the attack, but photos taken by Indigenous bystanders show protesters being cruelly attacked by many police officers, pushing their faces into the snow.



The proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline would span 670 kilometres across northern British Columbia. It is intended to supply natural gas from near Dawson Creek, B.C., to the planned LNG Canada export facility near Kitimat, B.C., where it would be converted to liquefied natural gas for export. Construction is estimated to cost about $4.8 billion.



Wilson-Raybould is a woman of Kwakwaka’wakw heritage who was previously the Regional Chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations. And her words were being written the week after a heavily armed RCMP contingent used force to remove Wet’suwet’en activists from a “checkpoint” on the road to a work camp for gas-line workers. The line crosses lands where, courts have ruled, hereditary chiefs hold historic and traditional title. Those chiefs, it seems, were not part of the “consultation and accommodations” promised for the project.

The elected Band Council is a creation of the colonial settler federal government-imposed Indian Act of 1876, which treated Indigenous people as wards of the state, essentially as children. In an attempt to destroy the traditional basis of indigenous government, the Act created elected Band Councils, which, the government assumed, could be more easily swayed than traditional hereditary chiefs.

It turns out that was true in this case. The Band Council came to terms with the Trans Canada Pipeline. But the hereditary chiefs were not included and do oppose the pipeline. The clans for the most part are following the hereditary chiefs.

The big question remains: By what right is Trans Canada Pipeline able to get a court injunction to allow their workers onto un-ceded Indigenous land in the first place? By what conceivable logic can the RCMP, claiming to be “neutral” and merely “enforcing the law,” send heavily armed SWAT team members onto Indigenous land and brutally attack a peaceful road blockade, arresting 14 native land defenders in the process. The cops are far from neutral. They are imposing the will of settler capitalism on the Indigenous people. They are enforcing the laws of the white man to seize Indigenous land and using it to generate white profits.

The settler government has consistently violated indigenous sovereignty and the right to self-determination in the interests of white capitalist profit and racist social policy. The Canadian federal government, for decades, organized the forced removal of Indigenous children to brutal Residential Schools. In those schools, many were physically, sexually and psychologically abused, over-worked, under-fed and punished for speaking their own language. Many children died.

In 2010, Ottawa endorsed the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The latest Trudeau/RCMP action violates the declaration dramatically. The racist policy and practice has to cease. Trans Canada Pipeline should get off Indigenous land. Protesters should be released and RCMP excluded from Indigenous land. No to the pipeline! No to the LNG Canada fracking operation! Self-determination for Indigenous people!

Photo: Elizabeth Wang / The Ubyssey

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