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an unheard conversation during a summer gathering

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don’t forget on pride month

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In pursuing its natural gas pipeline, Coastal GasLink has reached benefit agreements with all 20 elected band councils along the route – including five elected Wet’suwet’en councils representing about 2,800 people. Those councils were created under the Indian Act and, in general, have authority over federal reserves: small land parcels set aside under the act. 

While the governing principles of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and its hereditary chiefs are anchored in their own cultural traditions and recognized in major court cases, there are disagreements over how those systems work in practice. The Wet’suwet’en Nation hereditary chiefs, and their supporters, maintain they have jurisdiction and authority over 22,000 square kilometres of traditional territory: a roughly triangular patch criss-crossed by salmon-bearing rivers that sits in the middle of the pipeline’s path. The territory has never been ceded and is not subject to a treaty. 

[…]

Yet going back to at least 2014, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en – a non-profit society governed by hereditary chiefs – warned consultation was flawed because it didn’t take hereditary laws into account. “Each house group is unique in dealing with their specific house territory, therefore must be reviewed individually,” said a 2014 report submitted to the province as part of the environmental assessment process. “This does not fall within the regulatory process, and was never addressed by the Crown nor the proponent.” 

Ron Austin, president of the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, said elected band councillors have limited powers. “They’re only in charge of the reserve area. The hereditary chiefs are in charge of the territories – all through the 22,000 square kilometres,” said Mr. Austin, who goes by the hereditary wing-chief (subchief) name Dzii Ggot. 

[…]

Gloria George, Darlene Glaim and Theresa Tait-Day all support the Coastal GasLink project. The three women, who formerly held hereditary titles, helped form the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition (WMC) in 2015, saying they wanted to bridge the gap between hereditary governance and elected band councils. 

In 2016, some hereditary chiefs, drumming and singing, entered a community hall in Houston, B.C., to denounce the fledgling coalition. Hereditary leaders refused to recognize the initiative, which was funded by $30,000 from Coastal GasLink and $30,000 from the provincial government, and in June, 2016, slammed the province for “divide and conquer” tactics. 

Another article well worth the read, and more directly relevant to the current Wet’suwet’en struggle (and from Feb 2020 so also more current). 

Notice how the provincial and federal government lean on the “approval” of the chiefs that their system put in place: the ones in charge only of the reserve and so even under current post-Delgamuukw interpretations of settler-colonial law not able to give approval, and when they saw that wasn’t working they bought off three women (you can just hear Trudeau saying “we need some peoplekind not mankind” in a backroom discussion on this lmao) with government money and OIL COMPANY MONEY in order to try and infiltrate the hereditary system. These women have been stripped of their hereditary titles over this shit but Canada and British Columbia and Coastal GasLink “stand behind them” which just means “we bought them out and now they support the pipeline”. 

So in addition to what I just posted about, bear in mind that there are some fucking disgusting naked expressions of bribery and meddling in indigenous governance on the part of settler-colonial governments and corporations behind a lot of the “support” you hear about for this pipeline that are designed to undercut traditional governance either through ignoring that governance and pretending reserve councils set up by settlers and colonizers under the Indian Act are all you should listen to or through directly trying to plant their own paid for collaborators in the traditional systems of governance. 

Also worth highlighting from this article (not a part I quoted, but you should all go read the article as it’s very relevant and very recent): hereditary here doesn’t mean the same thing as European aristocracy, as these titles are granted only to those who prove themselves and can be stripped away by people who prove themselves unworthy of title, it’s a more democratic process than what right-wing white settler trolls online give it credit for (because of course they just read the word “hereditary” and assume European things about it when it’s just the closest approximation in a colonizer language for a much more complex system described with much more nuance in the Nadotʼen-Wets'uwetʼen language. 

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metal rat year

(available in full on patreon) twitter | ig | inprnt | patreon

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⭐️

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https://www.instagram.com/p/BwHk-fnnjIL/

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healing series 31.08.2019

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Untitled, 2019 Pencil and watercolour

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Gabrielle Ray as Joan of Arc 1909