Canadians can be forgiven for getting the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests so wrong.
Reading much of the media coverage of the renewed protests and blockades looking to disrupt construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia, it would be easy to conclude that this is about First Nations people trying to defend their land against a brutal colonial government. That’s what many activists, academics and left-wing politicians would have you believe.
The truth is far more complex, and unless Canadians can avoid falling into the trap of viewing Canada’s Indigenous peoples as a monolithic group and trying to portray complex issues through simplistic narratives, economic development and reconciliation will continue to elude us.
In a letter published in the National Post on Tuesday, a group of Wet’suwet’en people lamented that their “traditions and way of life are being misrepresented and dishonoured by a small group of protesters, many of whom are neither Gidimt’en nor Wet’suwet’en, but nonetheless claim to be acting in our name to protest natural gas development.”
These protesters, and their supporters, have used intimidation tactics to silence their opponents, which has served to “overshadow the voices of the Gidimt’en and Wet’suwet’en,” and left many of the actual stakeholders “afraid to speak up because of bullying and alienation by aggressive and confrontational people on social media.”
Indeed, even referring to the protesters as “land defenders,” as some media outlets have chosen to do, is biased and misleading, because they often don’t represent the majority of the communities for which they claim to speak. The fact is that the elected council of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, along with the 19 other First Nations along the route, signed an agreement in support of the pipeline, which promises to bring economic benefits to their communities.
It is the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who have been opposed to the project. As Melissa Mbarki, an Indigenous policy analyst with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), explained in these pages, “The elected chief and council and the majority of their community members agreed to this pipeline,” but somewhere “in the Wet’suwet’en band structure, a divide occurred.”
This divide has been exploited by environmental groups and protesters to frame the issue as one of land rights, rather than economic opportunity. As B.C. MLA Ellis Ross wrote, also in the Post, “by saying yes to natural gas development, my northern British Columbia community was able to lift itself out of poverty.”
Other First Nations are looking for similar opportunities, but are being subverted by a small minority of people who are trying to over-rule infrastructure projects that have obtained all the necessary approvals from governments and landowners.
Writing in the Globe and Mail this week, JP Gladu, the executive director of the Indigenous Resource Network, questioned “why our communities need 100 per cent support for any project to be deemed credible. We are not a monolith; of course as in any culture, we too have disagreements. Why are we held to an unreasonable and quite frankly unattainable standard when our current federal system can see a government make decisions on behalf of our entire country with often sub 50 per cent support?”
The only possible answer is that we have given into mob rule. And by doing so, we are doing a disservice to Indigenous people.
“We were not invited to the table in the past. We fought for over 160 years to take back that seat and now we are pushing for equity ownership in the projects that extract resources from, or run through, our territories,” wrote Chris Sankey, a former elected councillor for the Lax Kw’ Alaams Band and a senior fellow at MLI, in Thursday’s Post. “Yet the protesters threaten to take all of that away. They are hindering our ability to move our communities out of poverty.”
Rather than giving credence to the sensationalized rhetoric espoused by radical extremists, it is incumbent upon media, governments and the general public to ensure that the voices of the majority of Indigenous people don’t get drowned out by a vocal minority, and to recognize that only through civil dialogue can we come to agreements over the big issues this country faces.
An open letter signed by hundreds of academics, including familiar left-wing voices such as Naomi Klein, characterizes Canadian law as “a weapon against Indigenous jurisdiction” and “a tool for Indigenous genocide.” The signatories try to undermine the rule of law by claiming that the “provincial government’s authorization of permits for construction of Coastal GasLink arises from a racist anthropology of discovery and claims to underlying title to lands that have never been the province’s to grant,” and therefore the court’s injunction was based on “false presumptions.”
Lost in this heated rhetoric are the voices of many members of the Wet’suwet’en and other First Nations, who have been lamenting the fact that their rights to speak freely and to forge a better economic future for themselves and their children are increasingly being stymied by outside protesters and environmental interest groups.
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