Statement in Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s Fight Against Settler Colonial State Violence

As health workers and community organizers, we stand in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide, from Wet’suwet’en to Palestine. We are writing in solidarity with Indigenous land defenders who are in a legal battle with the colonial court system for asserting their land rights as Indigenous peoples. We also know that as Canada continues to support genocide in Palestine by the Israeli state, it continues its own genocidal policy and actions against Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. 

We are writing in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation, Hereditary Chiefs, land defenders, and accomplices in their fight against the illegal construction of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline, the RCMP’s unjust and unlawful raids on the Wet’suwet’en unceded Yintah (territory), and the Canadian state’s continued criminalization of Indigenous peoples and land defenders. 

During militarized raids of the Gidimt’en Checkpoint and Coyote Camp in November 2021, 32 land defenders, including two journalists, were arrested. These include Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), a Wing Chief of Cas Yikh, a house group of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation; Shaylynn Sampson, a Gitxsan woman with Wet’suwet’en family ties, and Corey Jocko, who is Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Akwesasne, who were recently found guilty of criminal contempt. They are now proceeding with an abuse of process application alleging the RCMP violated multiple Charter rights and displayed systemic disregard for Indigenous rights and sovereignty. These charges stem from one of three large scale militarized police raids on Wet’suwet’en Yintah since 2019, which have violently displaced Wet’suwet’en peoples from their lands in order to protect and facilitate the construction of the illegal CGL pipeline. 

As Indigenous peoples, the Wet’suwet’en have a right to the protection of the environment, their lands, waters, territories, and resources. As health workers and community organizers, we further affirm the rights and autonomy of the Wet’suwet’en to their traditional medicines and health practices, as is being practiced at the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre. The Healing Centre “depends on connection to, and traditional use of, the land itself” and is “the embodiment of self-determined wellness and decolonization”. The criminalization of Wet’suwet’en land defenders and illegal construction of the CGL pipeline which ultimately seeks to remove the people from the land further jeopardizes the health and wellness of Wet’suwet’en people, land, and waterways.

We assert that the ongoing removal and criminalization of Indigenous land and water defenders is not an isolated incident, and is part of a larger project of settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples around the world, from Wet’suwet’en to Palestine. The threads of settler colonialism and military occupation that connect Canada and Israel can be seen directly in the ongoing and longstanding history of collaboration and exchange between the RCMP and Canadian military with the IOF, as occupying military forces that work to advance a settler colonial agenda.

 Despite public commitments to Truth and Reconciliation, Canada’s settler-colonial nature has its foundations on the theft of Indigenous land and life, and continues to wage genocide against Indigenous peoples. We call on the governments of Canada and British Columbia, and Coastal GasLink Pipeline Ltd. and TC Energy to immediately halt the construction and use of the CGL pipeline and respect the sovereignty of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, in accordance with the Delgamuukw ruling of 1997. 

We call on both governments to immediately drop all charges, including those of criminal contempt, against Wet’suwet’en and other land defenders. We also call on the RCMP, C-IRG, and Forsythe Security to immediately halt the harassment, intimidation, and unlawful surveillance of Wet’suwet’en land defenders and withdraw as an occupying force from the Nation’s territories.

We assert the right to self-determination for all Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and call for an end to the myriad ongoing processes of genocide by the settler colonial state of Canada.