Hey, wouldn’t it be grand if citizens of canada could arrive together at the unanimous understanding of how our government’s declarations of reconciliation are an active contradiction?
The “royal canadian mounted police” marching en masse with loaded machine guns and ravenous attack dogs into unceded traditional Indigenous territories doesn’t look like the face of reconciliation to me.
Mainstream media will broadcast headlines that mention “water protectors” and “land defenders” as those opposing industry and our beloved rcmp, but rarely do they dig into the perspective from those facing down the barrel of a gun.
Water protectors standing in the way of industry’s machines are guests of the land’s hereditary chiefs who oppose this unwanted project. These are Indigenous elders, mothers, children, and their friends who are not aiming guns toward industry but who are supporting the Wet’suwet’en people as they attempt to continue living rightfully on their territory, as they have since time immemorial.
Skimming edges of clearcuts created for the pipeline, families attempt to harvest wild plants, berries, roots, and medicines. They walk with children, our next generation, trying to pass on whatever shards of their culture have not yet been decimated by colonialism.
And as our government proclaims reconciliation they simultaneously send convoys of buses loaded with rcmp to arrest these people existing on their own lands.
The Coyote Camp resistance was established in the pipeline’s path by a group who had been invited onto the territories by the hereditary chiefs. They are not unwelcome. They are camping in wall tents and tiny homes, stoking fires and singing traditional songs, cooking foods and sharing stories whether the skies are clear or raining down sleet and snow.
They are out there peacefully, these Indigenous elders and their guests, but this peace is not paired with passivity. The titles of “water protector” and “land defender” are accurate, also evoking a warrior spirit. They will not succumb to reactionary violence, nor will they regress to using weapons against other humans, but they are resilient and tenacious. Regardless of what short-term extraction gain our government insists we need, these peoples are looking for a future far further ahead than anything a pipeline is promising.
If recent years of record forest fires and freak floods have hinted at anything, it’s that Mother Nature is not happy with us. You can guarantee that she also does not need to keep us around for this planet to continue existing.
Everything about Indigenous ways of being has roots in respecting this Earth.
If an Indigenous-led group is striving this hard to stop a resource-extraction (Earth-depleting) project, then it would be in our best interest to stop and listen to what they are saying.