The Unist’ot’en Camp near Smithers in northern British Columbia offers a crucial lesson for all humanity -- that the land provides for everyone who lives on it, and we in turn have a responsibility to reciprocate and care for the land.
Anger at Canada’s support for fossil fuel expansion boiled over Tuesday, driving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to physically change venues before giving a speech to Indigenous leaders in Ottawa — where he failed to mention a blockade in British Columbia that had spurred a nationwide solidarity movement.
Trudeau was originally scheduled to give opening remarks at 2:30 p.m. at a government building at 111 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, near his official residence, where an annual forum was being held concerning treaties between First Nations and the Crown.
MORICE WEST FORESTRY SERVICE ROAD, B.C.—A checkpoint camp was abandoned behind a massive fallen tree and a barrier of flame on Monday afternoon as dozens of RCMP officers finally pushed past the barricade set up to bar entry to the traditional territories of the Wet’suwet’en people.
Fourteen people would be arrested by the end of the day.
[Editor: This is motivated by a desire to protect citizens from possible spills from a three-mile-long fracked-gas LNG pipeline. John Horgan, are you listening? ]
Climate Convergence stands in solidarity with the Unis'ot'en Camp and Wet’suwe’ten Hereditary Chiefs in defending their traditional territories against the $40 billion LNG Canada mega-project approved by B.C. premier John Horgan.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has ordered the Unist’ot’en to remove a bridge barricade because it blocks access to a Coastal GasLink pipeline site. The 670km pipeline would bring fracked gas from Dawson Creek to LNG Canada’s planned processing plant in Kitimat on the coast. More than a quarter of the pipeline route crosses Wet’suwe’ten Territory.
Ground zero in the global battle against climate chaos this week is in Wet’suwet’en territory, northern B.C. As pipeline companies try to push their way onto unceded Indigenous territories, the conflict could become the next Standing Rock-style showdown over Indigenous rights and fossil fuel infrastructure.
Since 2010, the Unist’ot’en clan, members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, have been reoccupying and re-establishing themselves on their ancestral lands in opposition to as many as six proposed pipeline projects.
