Indigenous Peoples

Last week, I held a press conference with Harold Steves, former NDP MLA and a founder of the Agricultural Land Reserve, speaking out against the B.C. Liberal Site C dam. This project is not only a human-rights violation—depriving people of the right to food and water—but breaks Treaty 8 itself and, if constructed, will also be a contravention of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Note: Several Canadian law professors issued this joint statement May 26, 2015:

We write as professors of law at several Canadian law schools to recognize and commemorate the May 26, 2015 release of Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s Assessment of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Tanker Expansion (“TMEX”) Proposal(the “Assessment”).

In an old legend from the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, a two-headed serpent brings hunger and disease to the Burrard Inlet, killing off the salmon. In order to survive, the people had to confront the serpent and slay it.

“We’re now facing another long dragon that needs to be slain,” Tsleil-Waututh Sacred Trust Initiative member Rueben George told a crowd of 100 gathered at Whey-ah-Wichen Park in North Vancouver on Tuesday.

“That’s the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”

A massive Greenpeace ship will depart the Port of Vancouver on Tuesday with a cross-Canada Aboriginal delegation. The delegation seeks to raise alarm about the potential surge in U.S. oil tankers set to ply past British Columbia’s coastlines in the future, should Shell's Arctic oil drilling plans go full steam ahead.

The prospect of a liquefied natural gas industry in B.C. would be a game-changer for aboriginal communities, Premier Christy Clark said on Wednesday. But she sidestepped the question of what happens if some of those communities continue to say no to the developments.

Instead, Ms. Clark’s announcement about a major step along the path toward securing the Pacific NorthWest LNG plant – a proposal already rejected by the Lax Kw’alaams – left the door open to pushing the project through, despite the province’s preference to avoid a confrontation over aboriginal rights and title.

From the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, what unfolded in B.C. last week must have looked strange.

While the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation was voting against a $1.1 billion offer of cash and land to support Petronas’ $11 billion Pacific NorthWest LNG (PNW) project in Prince Rupert, some members were reportedly giving a tentative thumbs-up to the Eagle Spirit Energy refined oil pipeline proposal.

A senior aboriginal leader in British Columbia says First Nations will continue to oppose oil and gas developments in the province even if it means rejecting billion-dollar payouts – as long as environmental protections are not guaranteed.

A natural gas benefit offer worth more than $1 billion has been rejected by a First Nation on B.C.'s northwest coast, but not everyone thinks it will necessarily scuttle the project.

Pacific NorthWest LNG was proposing to build a pipeline and terminal in the Lax Kw'alaams Band territory just south of Prince Rupert.

Band members were asked to vote on a $1.15 billion offer over 40 years in exchange for their consent for the project.

The vote in Vancouver on Tuesday was the third in a series conducted by the First Nation that rejected the project.

VICTORIA - West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson held up a frozen bull trout Monday and said the large fish is contaminated with mercury.

"Typically, you'd be proud of this fish," he said. "But we can't eat this."

Willson and members of the McLeod Lake Indian Band, located in northeastern British Columbia, arrived at the legislature in Victoria with more than 90 kilograms of bull trout packed in two coolers.

Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and writer known for his work among the poor and the excluded, is credited with coining a phrase that is as true as any you'll ever hear: ''The opposite of poverty is not wealth -- it is justice.''

It is a phrase that has also been attributed to Bryan Stevenson, founder of America's Equal Justice Initiative and a man Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called, without qualification, ''America's Nelson Mandela.''