Aired February 3rd 2022 on wioxradio.org; lightly edited for readability.
Scott: My name is Scott, and this is Owen. we do a radio show in the South Central New York, and then release it as a podcast. It’s all live so this is literally the first interview we have done live and all very very amateur. Not like a huge audience or anything, but we really appreciate your time. Just wondering if you could introduce yourself and a little background into, you know, what the topic we’re talking about today and how you came to know so much about it.
Kolin: Alright, so my name is Kolin Sutherland-Wilson. A am from the Gitxsan nation of the Giskaast, the Fireweed clan, and I come from a hereditary house known as Git’luuhl’um’hetxwit, which means “The ones who are standing up in front.” For the past two years, I have basically been spending most of my time supporting my Wet’suwet’en relatives who are one with the Fireweed clan of the Gitxsan nation, so they are related to us through ancient bloodlines. Even though we speak distinct languages, we have distinct territories and various aspects of our culture are quite distinct, we are still closely related. So I’ve been supporting them at the same time on our home territories here and Gitxsan Laxyip [territory], we’ve pretty much pushed british columbia right off of our entire territory. We shut down a lot of clear cut logging that was happening there, and we’re basically focusing on sustainability. so, micro-hydro, solar, agriculture, sustainable use of forestry–
Scott: That’s awesome!
Kolin: –Non-timber forest products. You know, it’s one of the things i think people don’t realize about the resistance movements with indigenous peoples: we’re not trying to go back to the stone age, which never was for us, but you know, i think [that’s in] some of the the prevailing racist thinking that exists in Canadian society. We have plans for climate labs, we have hydrologists, we have advanced scientific knowledge.
That’s just part of a lot of many of our house membership. And you know, there [are] a lot of people working hard to integrate that with our cultural values. When we oppose these large destructive projects, it’s not merely on the grounds of, just like, “these projects are bad and we say no.” [We’re] very often proposing, ourselves, numerous viable alternatives that we’ve been working on our entire lives. Because we have inherent laws, like the the Gitxsan law, the Ayookim, is very similar to the Wet’suewet’en law, the Anuc niwh’it’en, and those laws basically say we have to respect the right to live of the plants, the animals, and the land itself, and that they would have equal rights to us as human beings, and for us to infringe upon their basic right to exist is a crime in itself that is worthy of punishment. That’s what all the stories continue to tell us over and over and over again.
So for us to, yes, sit back and allow swaths of destruction that will only benefit folks for not even a single generation, when you’ve been here since the last Ice Age at least, it’s kind of like a slap in the face to our culture, our ethics, our history. that’s the big reason i’m involved, just as Gitxsan. We learn this stuff our whole lives. My father was at blockades, my grandmother was at blockades, my great grandfather was literally fighting with Hudson’s Bay scouts. In this part of the world, the Northwest, we’ve barely had one hundred and fifty years of dealing with colonization, so the prevailing attitude here is still very much: we are sovereign people.
Scott: yeah! Oh wow, that’s really awesome. I really appreciate the opportunity to hear about the the other projects that you guys have going on there, the forestry, and trying to integrate with climate and to respect nature, and I really appreciate getting the chance to hear about what you’re involved in and all those projects. But I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what’s going on with the Wet’suwet’en, and what’s happening there, and maybe a little bit of perspective from your end on that.
Kolin: Yeah, I could definitely dive into that.
Scott: That’s kinda what got my attention in all this. It’s kind of like a big thing right now, I mean, certain circles you hear a lot about it but not in others at all.
Kolin: Well, it’s definitely a big, huge topic. So the Wet’suwet’en: maybe I’ll just give a brief background on their society, like who the hereditary houses are, who are the players in this game. ‘Cause I think that’s something that gets glazed over a lot.
Scott: Yeah, it’s certainly something I wanted to focus on during this, absolutely.
Kolin: Definitely! So the Wet’suwet’en, our ancient allies, they are composed of five clans. They have the Wolf clan, which are the Gidimt’en, who you see pretty prevalently in the media. There’s the Unist’ot’en, which are a part of the Big Frog clan (Gilseyhu). You’ve got Tsayu, the Beaver clan, who–one of the named spokespeople of the Wet’suwet’en nation, Namoks, is from Tsayu. We have the Small Frog clan (Laksilyu), and we have the Fireweed clan (Laksamshu), which are are my personal relatives down there.
Basically, all five of these clans have unanimously opposed this project, the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project, which is currently being constructed across their territory after what is basically three years in a row of the Wet’suwet’en people being raided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the use of heavy paramilitary gear. we had, just the last time around, assault rifles, sniper teams, helicopters dropping people in–
Scott: Oh my goodness!! I saw some of the on-the-ground stuff, it was pretty pretty scary stuff.
Kolin: Oh, it was! And then, even the little things, they were running like, I would call them psyops. Like, you know, just playing clips from horror movies, jamming the radio frequencies–
Scott: Oh my goodness!!!
Kolin: Yeah! People just trying to–
Owen: Sorry–I’m just saying like, you hear the word “psyop” being thrown around a lot but that’s, literally, that is actually what that is! Yeah, sorry, you don’t need me to tell you!
Kolin: Yeah, yeah. You had a group of matriarchs, Wet’suwet’en people, in their cabin, basically being surrounded by green men with attack dogs, with assault rifles, with the radios being jammed, with horror movie clips of little girls singing “Ring Around the Rosie” and “I see you” and–
Scott & Owen: Oh my goodness!!!! Wow!
Kolin: Yeah, it was bad!
Scott: Snd so, these tactics…I want to be extra clear for the listeners, the tactics are being used to enforce the expansion of a pipeline, a natural gas pipeline?
Kolin: Yeah!
Scott: And this is in the far west area of [what Westerners call] Canada, right?
Kolin: Yeah, I can talk about that. The RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], they raided three years in a row based on an injunction. An injunction is a legal mechanism within canadian law to provide economic relief in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit. So it’s only meant to be a temporary tool, but it’s lasted three years long. Yeah, they continue to raid every single time the Wet’suwet’en block the roads.
The original lawsuit was filed by Coastal Gaslink against Freda Huson, Warner Naziel, those would be the folks of the Unist’ot’en who started the initial blockade going way back like in 2010. Because they’d shut down numerous pipeline projects before this point, like Enbridge tar sands pipeline. they had numerous other LNG [liquid natural gas] pipelines I think in total. TC Energy, which is the big Canadian oil company which I think is also now part of a few projects down at the states. They wanted to put eight pipelines through this corridor that they’re currently building with Coastal Gaslink, and they were all shut down until this one.
And yeah, the tactics that are being used are part of a bigger trend in BC, which is a special anti-indigenous policing unit that’s known as the CIRG, which is the Community Industry Response Group, which are basically a quick response team of RCMP volunteers who get paid one hundred dollars an hour to fly all around the province and basically disrupt and attack any indigenous-led movements. These are the folks who are beating people up in Fairy Creek, pepper spraying them in the face, who are allowing loggers to tackle and pin down people there and say “I got one!” and hand them over to the cops. which, in most cases, would just be straight-up assault, since a contractor doesn’t have authority to to do that you know. The same people who will–
Scott: Impunity for the mercenaries.
Kolin: Yup, exactly. These guys were the ones who were defending the TMX pipeline, who broke Kanahus Manuel’s wrist, who were up in Wet’suet’en year after year with the the heavy tactical gear. And a lot of them are derived from the RCMP E Division, which is a pretty big division that covers most of BC. But they’re the the specialized ERTs, the emergency response team, which are basically like a heavily-outfitted and -geared unit meant to take on dangerous threats like your counterterrorism, taking on folks who are firing guns back at them. Meanwhile–
Scott: I’ll let you go ahead, i’m sorry i didn’t mean to cut you off
Kolin: Oh. I was just going to say, meanwhile, the people that they’re mobilizing against have been entirely peaceful, never once presenting any type of threat that warrants the degree of force they [the RCMP] bring to our territories.
Scott: No, no, I mean, you’re just standing there preventing the project from continuing, from what i’ve seen. is that right?
Kolin: Yup.
Scott: I saw some pretty awesome tactic in my opinion, that was when they took the excavating machine and used it to take out a section of the road and just demolish it so that the trucks couldn’t go by. I thought that was pretty awesome.
I didn’t mean to kind of seem like I wasn’t interested in the internal politics of…the clans and the nations and all that, I didn’t mean to redirect away from that, I wanted to just get a little chance to get some background in there. So if you want to go back into that topic a little more, then I would love to hear more about that.
Kolin: Yeah, definitely. I think i’ll talk about the basis of what’s happening. Because you know, the Gitxsan and the Wet’suwet’en were, are intricately linked through our histories, through our alliance, we’ve had a mutual defense pact to protect our territories for millennia. And more recently, leading up to this this conflict with Coastal Gaslink, we took the the Crown to court in a famous series of court cases known as Delgamuukw v British Columbia or Delgamuukw versus The Queen.
In these court cases our hereditary houses represented themselves. We had the plaintiffs representing the 60+ houses at the Gitxsan alongside the the 13 houses of the Wet’suwet’en, who, over the course of the years 1987 until 1991, delivered both 365 days’ worth of testimony outlining our culture, our boundaries, our laws. And this resulted in a verdict [of] “aboriginal title” as they call it. Because within canadian law, they’ll always dodge the fact that we do retain [the] title to our land, like, legally even, under Canadian law! so they’ll come up with terms, when we beat them in the courts, of “aboriginal title” which is some kind of lesser form of title.
Scott: Oh, well, it’s the ones we made that we didn’t mean to keep!
Kolin: Yeah, exactly. And so we went through the BC court of appeals following that ’91 decision, [when] the judge basically said “oh, you guys are just savages, you’ve had neither the wheel nor the written word and lived in a state of war of all against all,” that was Allan McEachern, and hugely controversial at the time. They dismissed all the evidence of our expert witnesses, including very renowned anthropologists and different academics. So that was appealed, thankfully, and as a result of that appeal in ’93, the courts essentially ruled that our title, like, the underlying basic title that pre-dates and preexists Canada, had never been extinguished by British Columbia and BC had no authority to do so or power to do so.
and in ’97, this was further clarified
by referring to an old British law which is the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which basically outlined that without a due process or a transfer of land to the Crown itself, that land could not be obtained otherwise. And this is one of the reasons for the American Revolution, this was a pretty monumental law at the time, following a war with Chief Pontiac in the east where numerous British forts were burned down…
And basically, this led to all the treaties across eastern canada. and so within Canadian law, enshrined in the constitution, it basically says that land cannot be transferred without due process, without a treaty, without some form of agreement. and in the case of Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan land, that agreement has never been achieved. The underlying position of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en has always been: we will never surrender one inch of our territory.
Scott: So when you see the map of Canada online and Canada goes right up to Alaska, that’s probably not what it should be, is what you’re maybe suggesting there?
Kolin: Yeah. Specifically all of British Columbia, or most of British Columbia aside from a few nations that did sign treaties, is unceded land. That was one of the big things that came up in the court case. This was the issue that was being fought for over ten years in the courts during Delgamuukw. And by the end of it, yeah it was established that it’s the Gitxsan & Wet’suwet’en peoples’ through our traditional governance structures who hold the the underlying title for the territories.
Scott: That’s something I kind of want to emphasize there: the court case you’re saying, said that the hereditary houses have those deeds, correct?
Kolin: Yeah, exactly.
Scott: ‘Cause that’s one of the things that has made me very hesitant to talk about this specifically. ‘Cause like, getting into it, there’s a lot of sources that you see kind of legitimising the Coastal Gaslink project through this sort of elected–um, I don’t know the words for it–but they have like some sort of agreement with–I should have looked up the words for this–
Kolin: The band councils.
Scott: Te councils, yeah. Could you talk a little bit about what legitimizes those, and/or what legitimizes the hereditary houses, as it relates to this a little bit? ‘Cause that’s something that I really wanted to pin down and try to understand, because whenever you start, as soon as you start digging into this, it starts to get really murky at that point.
Owen: It’s really easy for people to spin doctor this.
Kolin: Oh yeah no, I’ve definitely heard it. yeah, it’s the whole reason I started jotting down my thoughts on Reddit.
So, the band councils are a part of the Indian Act. Starting in
1865, we had the Indian Act introduced in canada, and that basically led to the framework of reserves, of bringing our people off of our wider territories which we’ve traditionally occupied, and confining us to reserves. We had pass systems that didn’t allow us to leave for a long time. We had an amendment in 1880 to the Indian Act which disallowed us from gathering, from participating within our governance…
All of this heavy handed repression, that didn’t end until 1950. During this era, our hereditary governments were forced to go underground. I personally have, one of my grandfathers on my father clan side, Edward Exmuth (spelling?), he was actually pulled out of the feast hall, which is our traditional governance house, by the RCMP, and he died of pneumonia in RCMP prison as an elder and a chief of our nation, during this era. So our people call it “the Prohibition Era,” where we we were losing a lot of life to, one, the smallpox and the various diseases that were coming through, but also, our people being arrested and criminalized just for trying to follow through with our culture. And at the same time, our kids were being stolen and put into residential schools. That was, I would call it the the Dark Ages.
Scott & Owen: I’d agree, yeah I mean, I think that that makes the Dark Ages sound nice, right!
Kolin: Yeah so, around this time, the Indian Act band councils were imposed as a control mechanism. Because not once throughout the history has Canada ever recognized our traditional governance. To them we were pretty much always backwards savages who didn’t fall in line with the Western politic and democracy. At the same time–
Scott: “Democracy” as they define it.
Kolin: As they define it, exactly! Because we have so many democratic values baked into our system that may not be recognizable at a glance because of some of the English that’s used to translate an entirely different language and political system for Western consumption…like, the inherent racism within the system, I’ll just say that it was geared against our our traditional governance and that’s the case with Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en territory.
And so, the band councils were put on the reserve. They are…and just one important thing about the band councils, is that they were meant to phase out our people. They would be assimilated within generations into the Canadian mainstream so that the “Indian Problem” would no longer exist, our title claims [would] no longer exist, then we’d simply be Canadian citizens and all the land would be secured as Crown land through a sort of settlement and further development.
Scott: So their goal is an explicit cultural imperialism, where they sequester off those who don’t conform and then make the rest, whoever’s willing to, conform into their culture. Is that accurate?
Kolin: Yeah, I would think so. It’s cultural imperialism, straight-up genocide, which is the erasure of a distinct social group or a distinct identity. That came through the forms of just straight murder, burning down the homes, enabling a vigilante violence throughout the Northwest, direct RCMP state repression, the removal of children, the destruction of culture and language, and just numerous other factors: it was, like I said, the Dark Ages.
But we did persist! We, our very houses, our culture and people, our language, it all persisted underground. So the band councils–
Scott: Sorry, I was just expressing that I’m glad that you’ve managed to to hang on! Because I find a lot of things about…every time I learn about a new form of culture, it blows my mind about the diversity of the way that we can organize ourselves and how rigid and and strict the US, Canada, Western Europe, whatever, sees everyone should be some certain way…. I always appreciate it whenever a culture that isn’t that is preserved. I like to learn about this diversity and whatnot, you know…
Kolin: Definitely, I mean that’s a whole other topic–
Scott: [laughs] Of course, yeah, sorry–
Kolin: [laughs] No, that’s fairl! I’m gonna just say a couple of words about it. We are, many of the the cultures of the Northwest, we’re very ancient peoples. We come from continuous civilizations that go back millennia. Our oral histories describe
glaciation periods, they describe entire eras of climate upheavals, they describe ancient migrations and entire species that don’t even exist in this world right now.
I think that’s that’s pretty rare when it comes to most human civilizations that are still on earth.
Owen: It’s valuable knowledge, you know?
Kolin: Yeah, it’s an absolute wealth of knowledge and just the details and the description of the human experience… That’s kind of a lot of the stuff we’re really trying to protect because it’s pretty rare at this point, especially with this turbulent era of humanity that we’ve all universally gone through in the past the five hundred years or so.
Scott: Yeah. Well, wow! I want to thank you so much for how much information that you’ve managed to convey in such a short period of time, and like I said you’ve already given us so much, but I do want to give you the chance to just, you know, if there’s anything that you feel like we haven’t talked about that you wanted to talk about… you know, have a chance to do that. Also, I was hoping there [were] some resources we could point anyone who happens to listen to this to, maybe linked to on our website and whatnot.
Kolin: Yeah! I guess the one thing I really want to emphasize is that, yeah, legally, it is Wet’suwet’en land, the land of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary houses. There [are] no ifs or buts about it,. It’s Supreme Court case law, the “highest” law.
Scott: And, even setting aside what’s right and what should be: their courts say it’s yours! This is Canadian law… This is the Canadian court saying that they shouldn’t be doing this and yet they are!
Owen: Not to say that the Canadian court is more legitimate than [Wet’suwet’en law]…but like, are you gonna follow your own rules or what? We could have a whole conversation about that!
Kolin: I hear you there, that’s often something that comes up too. Though I’m not trying to legitimize the Canadian courts, the baseline within our laws is: this is one 100% our land, it’s always been, we’re not asking for anything more than what we’ve taken care of for thousands of years already. we’re not expansionists or anything like that.
We took them to their own courts, fundamentally racist courts. and basically just beat them in logic, beat them with the truth, and they did not want to acknowledge our title. They even made up numerous terms within the court case [and] following it, like “we recognize you have the title of the land so we’re going to outline what constitutes a “justifiable infringement” to that title.” They just made up rules on what allows them to completely undermine and violate our title! And that’s kind of the game within the Canadian courts. So I’ll never fully stand behind that legal system because I know they fundamentally cannot undermine the sovereignty of the nation-state which delegates them power, which is Canada [in] the case here. When you have court cases starting to deal with the sovereignty of indigenous nations that are, whose territories are being assumed by by Canada. That’s fundamentally the root of it.
When it comes to these band councils, we have private industries funneling millions of dollars into non-disclosed agreements to get the permission of a select few to directly undermine the title claims of the hereditary chief while getting payouts! It’s, I think regardless of where you come from, it’s the same old story of greed undermining the rights of the collective.
So that’s fundamentally what we’re dealing with here. We’re making big headway along those lines cause, regardless of where you stand on particular projects, like a lot of people are just appalled by the RCMP violence–
Scott: From what you’ve been saying, that sounds like it’s almost status quo.
Kolin: Oh yeah, it’s always been the case. Thankfully though, just within the mainstream Canadian public, we are noticing a lot more people who are actually getting educated on these matters, who are looking into indigenous law, like the the court precedents, Delgamuukw, the history of what’s been happening up here. It’s starting to get, the conversations, getting deeper than just “anti-pipeline protesters cause trouble for a project.” Like, no, people are starting to realize that an ancient indigenous government older than the pyramids of Egypt, older than Stonehenge, is opposing the infringement of their territorial boundaries by projects which never received consent! Despite British Columbia and Canada signing an act into effect under it which specifies that they do require free prior informed consent! And then, also there’s all of our numerous rights that we fought [for] in the “highest courts of the land” and this and that…
There’s people starting to figure out what’s going on, starting to figure out just the blatant colonization that’s taking place. Our people, we fought alone for such a long time, and we now have relationships all throughout the world! There’s solidarity actions happening in Africa and Japan, during the second
We’re never gonna give up our position, that’s tantamount to giving up on our culture! Which you know is not an option for us.
Scott: No matter how much Canadians wish they would!
Kolin: I’ll just quickly share some resources. If you want to really do the deep dive on on the history and the updates of what’s happening, look up Yintah Access on instagram, facebook, Twitter; Wet’suwet’en Checkpoint; from the Gitxsan side, Git’luuhl’um’hetxwit Media, which is a mouthful. I am sure if you just look up Wet’suwet’en Checkpoint or Yintah Access, you could just follow those branches, there’s tons of interviews with chiefs elders, and explainers.
Scott: And we’ll be sure to make links to that in the in the notes whenever we post this online as well for sure.
Okay! Well, thank you very much for your time, this has been awesome. Honestly, this exceeded my expectations. Thank you very much Kolin!
Kolin: Thank you!