As far as I can tell, the people who inhabit the land don't want the pipeline. They contest the legitimacy of the elected band leaders who made the decision against their wishes. Going forward with the construction is basically saying, this ancestral land of yours? It's not your land. It belongs to the people we say it belongs to. If you disagree, we will remove you by force.
That's just late-onset colonialism.
Except afaik we aren't saying who it belongs to. The company in question cut a deal with what seems to basically be the local government. No one in the Canadian government decided who was the appropriate authority for them as far as I can determine.
Like, nothing I've read about this whole story says anything like what you are suggesting.
Building a massive infrastructure project and enforcing injunctions is a pretty big statement of who the land belongs to!
As far as I can tell, the people who inhabit the land don't want the pipeline. They contest the legitimacy of the elected band leaders who made the decision against their wishes. Going forward with the construction is basically saying, this ancestral land of yours? It's not your land. It belongs to the people we say it belongs to. If you disagree, we will remove you by force.
That's just late-onset colonialism.
Except afaik we aren't saying who it belongs to. The company in question cut a deal with what seems to basically be the local government. No one in the Canadian government decided who was the appropriate authority for them as far as I can determine.
Like, nothing I've read about this whole story says anything like what you are suggesting.
Building a massive infrastructure project and enforcing injunctions is a pretty big statement of who the land belongs to!
Yes, made by the people who signed the deal with the company building that project. Who, at least as far as I've read, seem to be the correct authority for the area.
No matter how much you keep implying it, as far as anything I've read says the government didn't like roll in and randomly start this. Someone talked to the local government and signed a deal. Some local groups oppose that deal. But at no point does it seem like anyone from outside came in and enforced any sort of governmental structure upon them.
As far as I can tell, the people who inhabit the land don't want the pipeline. They contest the legitimacy of the elected band leaders who made the decision against their wishes. Going forward with the construction is basically saying, this ancestral land of yours? It's not your land. It belongs to the people we say it belongs to. If you disagree, we will remove you by force.
That's just late-onset colonialism.
Except afaik we aren't saying who it belongs to. The company in question cut a deal with what seems to basically be the local government. No one in the Canadian government decided who was the appropriate authority for them as far as I can determine.
Like, nothing I've read about this whole story says anything like what you are suggesting.
The whole elected band council governance structure is an imposition of the Indian Act.
As far as I can tell, the people who inhabit the land don't want the pipeline. They contest the legitimacy of the elected band leaders who made the decision against their wishes. Going forward with the construction is basically saying, this ancestral land of yours? It's not your land. It belongs to the people we say it belongs to. If you disagree, we will remove you by force.
That's just late-onset colonialism.
Except afaik we aren't saying who it belongs to. The company in question cut a deal with what seems to basically be the local government. No one in the Canadian government decided who was the appropriate authority for them as far as I can determine.
Like, nothing I've read about this whole story says anything like what you are suggesting.
Building a massive infrastructure project and enforcing injunctions is a pretty big statement of who the land belongs to!
Yes, made by the people who signed the deal with the company building that project. Who, at least as far as I've read, seem to be the correct authority for the area.
No matter how much you keep implying it, as far as anything I've read says the government didn't like roll in and randomly start this. Someone talked to the local government and signed a deal. Some local groups oppose that deal. But at no point does it seem like anyone from outside came in and enforced any sort of governmental structure upon them.
What? As stated above the very concept of band councils is a western political structure imposed on Natives. What this means in practical terms for many reserves across the nation is that a certain group's interest end up being lumped in with others so there's no real representation. That's not even touching upon the deep levels of corruption that exist in many band councils across the country.
With all of the FPTP talk around representation I find it funny that people aren't grasping that here.
The issue seems to be that the people living there don't recognize the authority of that government to make these decisions.
I don't know how you function if you can't have a decision maker (government or popular vote or whatever) that has the power to negotiate with other entities.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
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If it is not clear who has authority to negotiate for that land, then construction has to wait for that to be determined. It takes months for squatters to be removed, even if the owner has all their ownership paperwork, because cops can't go in and evict until the court grants them the authority to do so.
But these are first Nations, and no one I know has ever given them the same respect white people get. Even people who swear up and down how not racist they are. It's all in the language they use.
Ok, this is very pertinent to the conversation still then, I found this post on reddit that may give some insight into the reasoning behind the protest that may highlight some things for others here:
So my sister and the chiefs and community made a blockade, because various chiefs did not accept the agreement. The agreements only sought the signature of one council member, which contradicts the First Nations Elections Act for what can be considered a council, thus representative of a band.
That aside, the agreement talks about timely reviews and consultations, and fostering relationships, so I don't think the RCMP is necessary, and the person who signed the agreement isn't in office or liked by the community at all.
Hopefully someone here can help me verify the claim that it only sought the signature of one council member, that's an interesting detail on the subject of authority as per the laws we've set out as a nation.
If it is not clear who has authority to negotiate for that land, then construction has to wait for that to be determined. It takes months for squatters to be removed, even if the owner has all their ownership paperwork, because cops can't go in and evict until the court grants them the authority to do so.
But these are first Nations, and no one I know has ever given them the same respect white people get. Even people who swear up and down how not racist they are. It's all in the language they use.
This has apparently been going on for nine years now, in one form or another.
Ok, this is very pertinent to the conversation still then, I found this post on reddit that may give some insight into the reasoning behind the protest that may highlight some things for others here:
So my sister and the chiefs and community made a blockade, because various chiefs did not accept the agreement. The agreements only sought the signature of one council member, which contradicts the First Nations Elections Act for what can be considered a council, thus representative of a band.
That aside, the agreement talks about timely reviews and consultations, and fostering relationships, so I don't think the RCMP is necessary, and the person who signed the agreement isn't in office or liked by the community at all.
Hopefully someone here can help me verify the claim that it only sought the signature of one council member, that's an interesting detail on the subject of authority as per the laws we've set out as a nation.
Like, I'll freely admit that I don't know much about tribal politics and I can see how (if they weren't given proper representation) the local community could be pissed about this, but it doesn't look like the corporation did anything wrong in this regard.
If it is not clear who has authority to negotiate for that land, then construction has to wait for that to be determined. It takes months for squatters to be removed, even if the owner has all their ownership paperwork, because cops can't go in and evict until the court grants them the authority to do so.
But these are first Nations, and no one I know has ever given them the same respect white people get. Even people who swear up and down how not racist they are. It's all in the language they use.
This seems less like squatters and more like people blocking a road from my read. Which generally get removed much quicker. At least, that's what the story about the incident seems to indicate.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
I think we should consider it unacceptable to deploy paramilitary police to consolidate control over Indigenous lands over their protests. The history and current state of the relationship between Canada and indigenous communities necessarily compromises any claims to legitimacy for such action.
The issue seems to be that the people living there don't recognize the authority of that government to make these decisions.
I don't know how you function if you can't have a decision maker (government or popular vote or whatever) that has the power to negotiate with other entities.
Someone has to have accountability.
Yeah, the framing of this as the Canadian government in some sort of usurption of native sovereignty does not seem to match the facts. Rather, from what I can tell anyway, the Canadian government is enforcing a contract with what is ostensibly the legitimate government of this land. And the actual argument is over who is the legitimate government, which is between various members of the tribe (or whatever) itself.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
I mean, part of the problem here is that building more pipelines is considered objectionable to a lot of people on the left. This is a natural gas pipeline IIRC, but it's still provoking concerns about e.g. fugitive methane and lifetime emissions, construction impact on the local environment, possible pipeline ruptures and leaks, etc. People don't trust these companies to be responsible or honest. They see them as prioritizing profit over safety or environmental conservation and creating terrible risks, which these companies aren't really accountable for. This compounds the objection.
If they were busting through checkpoints to do humanitarian work, for some reason, I think we'd be seeing a different reaction!
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Negotiations involving the Canadian government don't have to be colonial impositions.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
This is an odd slippery slope argument, I think. I don't think acknowledging an Indigenous people's traditional leaders means that all social structure collapses and we can no longer weigh the desires of the individual vs the community.
The community in question has an existing leadership structure, hereditary chiefs. These leaders are, in this instance, not even claiming that the elected chief/council have no authority whatsoever; they are arguing that the elected chief/council does not have jurisdiction over the traditional territory in question. This is a specific dispute over a specific issue. It is not (AFAIK) a wholesale rejection, though I'm sure plenty of these folks would like to completely dismantle and replace the current political interface with Canada. But I don't believe this specific situation is binary.
More broadly, here is my understanding: the current system of governance imposed by the Indian Act is colonial. Elected chiefs are accountable to INAC, for better or for worse. Indigenous communities have been fighting for a long time be dealt with as sovereign groups, to re-establish governance under their terms, and to make their governing officials genuinely accountable to the community. They are trying to fight against a political approach that is built on principles of colonial homogenization and assimilation, one that was designed to undermine and destroy the political and cultural institutions of Indigenous people.
So there is a fundamental, underlying rejection of the system by which Canada administers and deals with Indigenous nations. Many people despise it as racist and paternalistic, as an ongoing apparatus of assimilation. And now, when the RCMP (an institution with a long history of pressing settler land claims and displacing Indigenous people to exploit their territory) comes in to enforce an injunction, they are using that apparatus as justification. Essentially, the argument is that that entire system is flawed, any action justified by that apparatus or its officials is fundamentally compromised, and this is another familiar chapter of the ongoing Canadian refusal to recognize Indigenous self-governance.
Here's what you said earlier:
Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
I think this is pretty paternalistic. It suggests that they can't self-govern, and that their institutions of self-governance are necessarily unreliable or inferior. If an Indigenous nation has an issue with their hereditary leader, they can request aid from Canada, certainly, just as any nation could request aid to deal with political dysfunction. Interventionism is a complicated issue of foreign policy. There is also the extremely complicated question of what a colonizing nation would owe to a genuinely sovereign Indigenous nation, in terms of support and reparations after over a century of attempts at genocide and assimilation and cultural annihilation, after their institutions have been so broadly undermined and extinguished that they need to do the hard work of reconstruction.
But we already have to struggle with the question of interventionism with other sovereign nations; it is not an argument against sovereignty. Canadians may not like hereditary systems of government, but Canadians do not have some moral right to dictate how a nation runs its affairs.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
But this is exactly the point. Should Japan, in the midst of trying to cut a trade deal with Canada, go "Well, these Senators are against the idea so clearly we have to wait this out"? That's not how relations work.
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Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
But this is exactly the point. Should Japan, in the midst of trying to cut a trade deal with Canada, go "Well, these Senators are against the idea so clearly we have to wait this out"? That's not how relations work.
Japan wouldn't send in troops to enforce a trade agreement, though. They would sue.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
This is an odd slippery slope argument, I think. I don't think acknowledging an Indigenous people's traditional leaders means that all social structure collapses and we can no longer weigh the desires of the individual vs the community.
The community in question has an existing leadership structure, hereditary chiefs. These leaders are, in this instance, not even claiming that the elected chief/council have no authority whatsoever; they are arguing that the elected chief/council does not have jurisdiction over the traditional territory in question. This is a specific dispute over a specific issue. It is not (AFAIK) a wholesale rejection, though I'm sure plenty of these folks would like to completely dismantle and replace the current political interface with Canada. But I don't believe this specific situation is binary.
More broadly, here is my understanding: the current system of governance imposed by the Indian Act is colonial. Elected chiefs are accountable to INAC, for better or for worse. Indigenous communities have been fighting for a long time be dealt with as sovereign groups, to re-establish governance under their terms, and to make their governing officials genuinely accountable to the community. They are trying to fight against a political approach that is built on principles of colonial homogenization and assimilation, one that was designed to undermine and destroy the political and cultural institutions of Indigenous people.
So there is a fundamental, underlying rejection of the system by which Canada administers and deals with Indigenous nations. Many people despise it as racist and paternalistic, as an ongoing apparatus of assimilation. And now, when the RCMP (an institution with a long history of pressing settler land claims and displacing Indigenous people to exploit their territory) comes in to enforce an injunction, they are using that apparatus as justification. Essentially, the argument is that that entire system is flawed, any action justified by that apparatus or its officials is fundamentally compromised, and this is another familiar chapter of the ongoing Canadian refusal to recognize Indigenous self-governance.
And if the Band Chiefs say they do have authority over that land? And that the Clan Chiefs are illegitimate?
What if there are clans that disagree? As I understand it, in this case, there are not, but I don't even know how many clans there are, so there might be. Or what if actually, the majority of the clans disagree with their Chiefs? (Again, I've seen no indication of that, but if we just take the Clan Chiefs as the authoritative leaders, then we would never know, would we?)
What if someone wants to form a new clan? Are they just prevented from doing that now? And if it's us preventing it, because we won't recognize any new clan chiefs, then isn't that just as colonialist?
Here's what you said earlier:
Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
I think this is pretty paternalistic. It suggests that they can't self-govern, and that their institutions of self-governance are necessarily unreliable or inferior. If an Indigenous nation has an issue with their hereditary leader, they can request aid from Canada, certainly, just as any nation could request aid to deal with political dysfunction. Interventionism is a complicated issue of foreign policy. There is also the extremely complicated question of what a colonizing nation would owe to a genuinely sovereign Indigenous nation, in terms of support and reparations after over a century of attempts at genocide and assimilation and cultural annihilation, after their institutions have been so broadly undermined and extinguished that they need to do the hard work of reconstruction.
But we already have to struggle with the question of interventionism with other sovereign nations; it is not an argument against sovereignty. Canadians may not like hereditary systems of government, but Canadians do not have some moral right to dictate how a nation runs its affairs.
I don't think they can self-govern! You just said that "if an Indigenous nation has an issue with their hereditary leader, they can request aid from Canada." If that's not a clear admission that they can't self-govern, I don't know what is.* It's an admission that sometimes, we're going to have to go in there and get colonialist as fuck, and once we open that door... look, how hard do you think it'd be right now for the gas company to go canvassing and just find someone who has an issue with their hereditary leader? Probably not very hard, eh, especially if they throw them a few million dollars under the table. Now we have another group coming out of the woodworks claiming they're the "real chiefs" or whatever nonsense, yes? And then we would have to make a determination as to whether that claim was legitimate or not, based on some principles of our choice - boom, colonialist, no longer self-governing. Or are the First Nations leaderships now just locked forever in permanence? The bloodlines that are Clan Chiefs now are going to be the Clan Chiefs forevermore, this is the form of government they'll have until the year 7431, when all Canadians decamp the planet for the Andromeda Galaxy? And it'd still be us enforcing that, so that's colonialist and not self-governance either.
I am very pointedly not talking about the rest of what's going on here, because I'm just mostly stuck on this, the fact that claims of illegitimacy are flying back and forth between First Nations leaders, and we're here going, no no, these guys are the legitimate leaders, no no, these guys are the legitimate leaders, and these are being used as rhetorical arguments as to whether this pipeline can be built or not. This isn't a deadlock that seems like it can be resolved without us being colonialist and just making a decision one way or another, because we've also removed the traditional ways in which these people would have handled it, which is that they would have fought and possibly killed each other or they would have split up into new tribes/bands/clans.
This is part of my continuing struggle of trying to square exactly how we're supposed to treat First Nations people in non-colonialist ways, when it seems patently obvious to me that we've already colonized them, and it doesn't seem like anybody's really interested in fully decolonizing them. Like, are you okay with bands fighting each other and killing each other? Because that would be, as I understand it, one of the traditional ways of handling disputes over territory. Why is forcing "no murdering" on First Nations less colonialist/more acceptable than forcing democracy? And once we say, no you can't do that, isn't that already colonialist? And doesn't that lead us to where we are now, as colonial authorities, trying to determine who we should treat as the legitimate authorities in various cases in which First Nations people dispute each others' authority over each other?
Edit: To be clear, these aren't issues that are specific to First Nations. E.g. there can also be student groups that compete for legitimacy, and at some point the school or government has to acknowledge one or all groups as legitimate via some arbitrary criteria, and then that school or government may be criticized for choosing the wrong groups/criteria. But it seems to me inevitable that said outside authority must at some point be willing to do so, if said authority won't allow the competing groups to fight amongst themselves to establish legitimacy, and then, in this particular case involving First Nations people, this decision would be colonialist, no matter what the specific decision was. I don't see any actual way around that, except for people just declaring that the side they like more is the "real" authority and so acknowledging them can't be colonialist, which is just cognitive dissonance, at best.
* Double edit: Note, the difference between this and, say, Canada being self-governing is that while, yes, Canadians unhappy with the Canadian government could theoretically go ask the Americans for help overthrowing the government, there is a way for that disagreement to ultimately be resolved without American interference: either the unhappy Canadians overthrow the government, or the government crushes the rebels. In this case, we're not willing to let unhappy First Nations people violently overthrow their chiefs and we're not willing to let First Nations chiefs violently suppress their unhappy members. So, a permanent deadlock, tacitly enforced by an outside group unwilling to let the deadlock be resolved.
Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
But this is exactly the point. Should Japan, in the midst of trying to cut a trade deal with Canada, go "Well, these Senators are against the idea so clearly we have to wait this out"? That's not how relations work.
Japan wouldn't send in troops to enforce a trade agreement, though. They would sue.
What's the difference exactly? Either way the agreement is being enforced. The reason they would sue is because you don't enforce trade agreements with troops regardless. If it was some other agreement where sending in troops would be applicable, that's absolutely what would happen.
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The colonial ship has sailed. There's no going back. But perhaps we don't keep using guns to make them do what we want?
I guess my question is, legally, who has control of that territory? If that is not clearly laid out somewhere, then that is what needs to happen. The government, the tribal council, and the people living there sit down and hash out who gets to make the decision of whether or not a pipeline can be built. If it's already clearly laid out somewhere, where is it? What does it say?
Neither of those things has the phrase 'cops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles'.
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Typically when there's a leadership conflict of this sort, it's resolved through civil war. That's how we figure out whether a hereditary leadership or a republican leadership is legitimate. They fight.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
But this is exactly the point. Should Japan, in the midst of trying to cut a trade deal with Canada, go "Well, these Senators are against the idea so clearly we have to wait this out"? That's not how relations work.
Japan wouldn't send in troops to enforce a trade agreement, though. They would sue.
What's the difference exactly? Either way the agreement is being enforced. The reason they would sue is because you don't enforce trade agreements with troops regardless. If it was some other agreement where sending in troops would be applicable, that's absolutely what would happen.
What's the difference? One way ignores sovereignty. The other doesn't. I would have thought that was clear.
The colonial ship has sailed. There's no going back. But perhaps we don't keep using guns to make them do what we want?
I guess my question is, legally, who has control of that territory? If that is not clearly laid out somewhere, then that is what needs to happen. The government, the tribal council, and the people living there sit down and hash out who gets to make the decision of whether or not a pipeline can be built. If it's already clearly laid out somewhere, where is it? What does it say?
Neither of those things has the phrase 'cops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles'.
Sure it does. Because what if the answer is "the people who already signed the deal"? Then literally everything that is happening is the same.
The very fact that it got done at all strongly suggests that's the actual answer anyway.
The colonial ship has sailed. There's no going back. But perhaps we don't keep using guns to make them do what we want?
I guess my question is, legally, who has control of that territory? If that is not clearly laid out somewhere, then that is what needs to happen. The government, the tribal council, and the people living there sit down and hash out who gets to make the decision of whether or not a pipeline can be built. If it's already clearly laid out somewhere, where is it? What does it say?
Neither of those things has the phrase 'cops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles'.
Sure it does. Because what if the answer is "the people who already signed the deal"? Then literally everything that is happening is the same.
The very fact that it got done at all strongly suggests that's the actual answer anyway.
You'd be wrong there. There is a court case in progress re that, it isn't decided. The court ust decided to let the pipeline company start doing setup anyway.
My understanding is the councils have to be formed in order for the area to reviece federal funds
Their largely viewed as corrupt because they are influenced heavily by being a requirment for funds and there are quite a few people who consider this unjust and another example or treaties only working in one direction
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Did some googling. The Wet'suwet'en people don't have a formal treaty. That negotiation is ongoing. So there's no legal basis to say one way or the other.
The territory is in dispute. Until that dispute is resolved, the pipeline has to go somewhere else.
If we use force to say the territory is ours to do with as we please, then we're still committing genocide.
The colonial ship has sailed. There's no going back. But perhaps we don't keep using guns to make them do what we want?
I guess my question is, legally, who has control of that territory? If that is not clearly laid out somewhere, then that is what needs to happen. The government, the tribal council, and the people living there sit down and hash out who gets to make the decision of whether or not a pipeline can be built. If it's already clearly laid out somewhere, where is it? What does it say?
Neither of those things has the phrase 'cops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles'.
Sure it does. Because what if the answer is "the people who already signed the deal"? Then literally everything that is happening is the same.
The very fact that it got done at all strongly suggests that's the actual answer anyway.
You'd be wrong there. There is a court case in progress re that, it isn't decided. The budget just decided to let the pipeline company start doing setup anyway.
An interim injunction order from a B.C. court last Friday ordered the individuals at the Unist'ot'en camp, a self-described re-occupation of Wet'suwet'en land, to stop impeding Coastal GasLink from gaining access to the logging road and bridge it argues is on a critical path it needs to access as part of pipeline construction.
The pipeline is part of an estimated $40 billion natural gas project slated for construction in B.C. The nearly 700 km long pipeline is meant to transport natural gas from northeastern B.C. to a liquefied natural gas plant slated for construction in the north coast community of Kitimat.
In the injunction, those at the Unist'ot'en camp were given 72 hours to remove physical barriers on the bridge so contractors and employees of Coastal GasLink, a subsidiary of Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., could have access to worksites.
There was some change back in 2013 that meant the federal government didn't have to do an environmental assessment on its own, and then the BC government signed off on the project, but I don't think there was anything from the federal government on this file recently.
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Yep, a BC court decided the company could go in and begin construction.
Supreme Court of Canada said in 1997 that the BC government has to negotiate a treaty with the Wet'suwet'en people.
Interesting how the 21 year old order about First Nations land rights still isn't done, but the one about the money got done super quick.
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Considering how the BC government argued back in the 90s that they had no claim, should I be shocked that they're dragging their ass about resolving that while sending in RCMP to protect corporate interests trying to exploit that land?
In fact, there are hereditary chiefs who support the CGL natural-gas pipeline and the benefits it will bring to First Nations people. One of these is Helen Michelle, who is also an elected band councillor of the Skin Tyee band, a small First Nation that is a member of the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation.
She supports the pipeline development and rejects the notion that the hereditary chiefs are the only representatives of the Wet’suwet’en people.
In her capacity as an elected representative, she and the other band councillors negotiated an agreement with CGL after working carefully through the issues with the Skin Tyee band members and the hereditary chiefs.
In her words: “It was difficult for us, but we supported CGL. We discussed it thoroughly and we struggled with it. We agreed upon it for our future generations. No other chiefs speak for us or our territory. We speak for ourselves. We speak for our territory.”
(Bias warning, the author of this op-ed is Dan George, the "elected chief of the Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation (Burns Lake Band) and chair of the First Nations LNG Alliance.")
So now I'm even more confused about exactly what's going on. I'm not sure if the clan chiefs voted or if this is just a minority of the clan chiefs or what, nor am I sure how/if the clans divide territory.
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That's the point - there's no treaty, so there's no legal basis to definitively say who has the authority to make that kind of agreement for that land.
But while that's unclear, the BC government has no issue sending in cops that are indistinguishable from soldiers to protect a corporate project.
Imagine, imagine for just a moment, that someone claimed that your house belonged to them, and you fought them in court, but before any decision was made, government troops came in and forced you out. That is injustice in its most perfect form.
This is on top of us having a long history of ignoring any kind of legal obligations we agreed to and sending in soldiers to take away from them what we said was theirs to keep.
That's the point - there's no treaty, so there's no legal basis to definitively say who has the authority to make that kind of agreement for that land.
But while that's unclear, the BC government has no issue sending in cops that are indistinguishable from soldiers to protect a corporate project.
Imagine, imagine for just a moment, that someone claimed that your house belonged to them, and you fought them in court, but before any decision was made, government troops came in and forced you out. That is injustice in its most perfect form.
This is on top of us having a long history of ignoring any kind of legal obligations we agreed to and sending in soldiers to take away from them what we said was theirs to keep.
Would you happen to know what the hold-ups are on the treaty? (The legal ones, that is.)
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Building a massive infrastructure project and enforcing injunctions is a pretty big statement of who the land belongs to!
Yes, made by the people who signed the deal with the company building that project. Who, at least as far as I've read, seem to be the correct authority for the area.
No matter how much you keep implying it, as far as anything I've read says the government didn't like roll in and randomly start this. Someone talked to the local government and signed a deal. Some local groups oppose that deal. But at no point does it seem like anyone from outside came in and enforced any sort of governmental structure upon them.
The whole elected band council governance structure is an imposition of the Indian Act.
I don't know how you can say it isn't
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What? As stated above the very concept of band councils is a western political structure imposed on Natives. What this means in practical terms for many reserves across the nation is that a certain group's interest end up being lumped in with others so there's no real representation. That's not even touching upon the deep levels of corruption that exist in many band councils across the country.
With all of the FPTP talk around representation I find it funny that people aren't grasping that here.
The issue seems to be that the people living there don't recognize the authority of that government to make these decisions.
I don't know how you function if you can't have a decision maker (government or popular vote or whatever) that has the power to negotiate with other entities.
Someone has to have accountability.
Given the current state of the world, there is no "natural" nor "authentic" way for the governance of First Nations to evolve. Unless we're willing to let First Nations members kill each other, their form of leadership will always be effectively imposed by the government of Canada. Arguments that look, these hereditary clan leaders are the true leadership, don't appeal to me at all, since we all know one day, some First Nation is going to have an issue with their hereditary leader, and will request the government step in to deal with that too.
Like, yeah, we've imposed a Western political structure upon Native Canadians. They can't kill each other for leadership now. And they're not allowed to wage war on each other. If their leadership cannot be elected either, then, there is no available process for changes in leadership and the leadership selection process. So if a corrupt or otherwise terrible leadership emerges, the Canadian government will just have to stand by and watch, because anything else will be an imposition of Western political and judicial beliefs upon First Nations? How exactly are First Nations leadership supposed to derive their legitimacy, if we say that voting is a "Western" invention and we also say, "No fighting?" Are we just hoping on a whim and a prayer that First Nations people will always just get along and happily agree on who their leadership will be?
I am again struck by the tensions and contradictions of how Canadians envision the First Nations.
But these are first Nations, and no one I know has ever given them the same respect white people get. Even people who swear up and down how not racist they are. It's all in the language they use.
https://www.reddit.com/r/britishcolumbia/comments/adrkby/my_sister_was_arrested_today/
Hopefully someone here can help me verify the claim that it only sought the signature of one council member, that's an interesting detail on the subject of authority as per the laws we've set out as a nation.
This has apparently been going on for nine years now, in one form or another.
The agreement is very explicitly signed by the Chief and two Councillors. I have not verified the identities of the individuals. Based on this - http://www.carriersekani.ca/about-cstc/member-nations/wetsuweten-first-nation/ - I believe that would be the entire Band Council.
(Last page of https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/consulting-with-first-nations/agreements/wetsuweten_first_nation_pba_cgl_signed_bcr_-_jan_2015.pdf)
This seems less like squatters and more like people blocking a road from my read. Which generally get removed much quicker. At least, that's what the story about the incident seems to indicate.
This seems like a plain false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of alternatives beyond "civil war" and "colonial imposition." The fact that it's difficult to negotiate is not an excuse, imo.
I think we should consider it unacceptable to deploy paramilitary police to consolidate control over Indigenous lands over their protests. The history and current state of the relationship between Canada and indigenous communities necessarily compromises any claims to legitimacy for such action.
Yeah, the framing of this as the Canadian government in some sort of usurption of native sovereignty does not seem to match the facts. Rather, from what I can tell anyway, the Canadian government is enforcing a contract with what is ostensibly the legitimate government of this land. And the actual argument is over who is the legitimate government, which is between various members of the tribe (or whatever) itself.
What are these alternatives? I don't see any.
If the Canadian government were to agitate us, the Canadian population, sufficiently enough, and refused to abdicate from power, we would be forced to remove them by force. Protests -> rebellion -> revolution. This is the nature of things. But the state of the world means that we would prevent any physical force from being used to remove First Nations leaders from power. And then if you say that democratic voting is illegitimate, what else is there? Supreme Court rulings? Those are also colonial impositions. Negotiations with the federal government? Still colonial imposition. Divide the Nation? Still colonial imposition. All you have, as far as I can tell, is to hope and pray that there is never a fundamental deadlock between First Nations parties over leadership.
If it's such a plain false dichotomy, give me the counter-example. If two groups in a First Nation reach a deadlock on leadership selection, what can possibly be done to resolve it that wouldn't be unacceptably colonial?
If they were busting through checkpoints to do humanitarian work, for some reason, I think we'd be seeing a different reaction!
Negotiations involving the Canadian government don't have to be colonial impositions.
Respect their claim on the area as traditional territory, outside the jurisdiction of the elected chief, while preserving the elected chief's jurisdiction over the reserve? But that would mean they can't build the pipeline there, so they won't do it. Which is their real and only concern absent political pressure.
From what I gather, the checkpoint is also an existing Wet'suwet'en establishment to control access to their territory. A common argument I'm seeing is that dismantling it amounts to forcibly removing Indigenous people from their territory, which violates the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That doesn't address my question at all. When you have two different groups claiming to represent a First Nation, and neither recognizes the authority of the other, what do you do then, other than "Pick the authority whose decision you like better?"
So if one person at the roadblock goes, "Actually no, I'm for the pipeline, and I don't recognize the authority of the clan chiefs, I'm my own chief!" then what? I guess we have to respect their decision too? Or do we get all colonialist up in here and say, no no, the clan chief is YOUR true leader, sorry when we said respecting the decisions made by First Nations people we didn't mean you, and by the powers invested in us by colonialism we're going to choose to listen to them and not you?
If the claim is that the band chiefs are not the legitimate government/leadership of the First Nation, what exactly is the criteria for determining who is? Or is there just none, and every First Nations individual is a nation unto themselves? Do they all jointly and individually have claim to all the territory they'd care to claim? How exactly is this supposed to work? Saying that we should 'respect their claim" doesn't help at all when we don't know who "they" are and when "they" could conceivably lay claim to the entire universe.
this resistance is being backed by people of authority who do not believe the band council has a right to make this decision
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This is an odd slippery slope argument, I think. I don't think acknowledging an Indigenous people's traditional leaders means that all social structure collapses and we can no longer weigh the desires of the individual vs the community.
The community in question has an existing leadership structure, hereditary chiefs. These leaders are, in this instance, not even claiming that the elected chief/council have no authority whatsoever; they are arguing that the elected chief/council does not have jurisdiction over the traditional territory in question. This is a specific dispute over a specific issue. It is not (AFAIK) a wholesale rejection, though I'm sure plenty of these folks would like to completely dismantle and replace the current political interface with Canada. But I don't believe this specific situation is binary.
More broadly, here is my understanding: the current system of governance imposed by the Indian Act is colonial. Elected chiefs are accountable to INAC, for better or for worse. Indigenous communities have been fighting for a long time be dealt with as sovereign groups, to re-establish governance under their terms, and to make their governing officials genuinely accountable to the community. They are trying to fight against a political approach that is built on principles of colonial homogenization and assimilation, one that was designed to undermine and destroy the political and cultural institutions of Indigenous people.
So there is a fundamental, underlying rejection of the system by which Canada administers and deals with Indigenous nations. Many people despise it as racist and paternalistic, as an ongoing apparatus of assimilation. And now, when the RCMP (an institution with a long history of pressing settler land claims and displacing Indigenous people to exploit their territory) comes in to enforce an injunction, they are using that apparatus as justification. Essentially, the argument is that that entire system is flawed, any action justified by that apparatus or its officials is fundamentally compromised, and this is another familiar chapter of the ongoing Canadian refusal to recognize Indigenous self-governance.
Here's what you said earlier:
I think this is pretty paternalistic. It suggests that they can't self-govern, and that their institutions of self-governance are necessarily unreliable or inferior. If an Indigenous nation has an issue with their hereditary leader, they can request aid from Canada, certainly, just as any nation could request aid to deal with political dysfunction. Interventionism is a complicated issue of foreign policy. There is also the extremely complicated question of what a colonizing nation would owe to a genuinely sovereign Indigenous nation, in terms of support and reparations after over a century of attempts at genocide and assimilation and cultural annihilation, after their institutions have been so broadly undermined and extinguished that they need to do the hard work of reconstruction.
But we already have to struggle with the question of interventionism with other sovereign nations; it is not an argument against sovereignty. Canadians may not like hereditary systems of government, but Canadians do not have some moral right to dictate how a nation runs its affairs.
Pretend for a second someone outside Canada was talking about how weird it is that Canada has a Senate, a group of "exemplary" people appointed to a "life time" position and that is sure is odd when they disagree with Parliament...
If you don't understand the roles of Hereditary Chiefs and Elders within another nation that should give you pause before you mock them so for their frustration when their culture is not working in conjunction with the roles as set out in the Indian Act that they have tried their damnedest for generations to comply with despite everything Canada has done to their various nations. As it was explained to me, Hereditary Chiefs and Elders are supposed to act as a traditional check on the power of their elected government positions, they were supposed to take the long view on issues for their people, sound familiar? But their roles (and the traditions of those roles) are not formally recognized in nations still governed by the Indian Act and were for generations were suppressed by the Canadian Government.
But this is exactly the point. Should Japan, in the midst of trying to cut a trade deal with Canada, go "Well, these Senators are against the idea so clearly we have to wait this out"? That's not how relations work.
Japan wouldn't send in troops to enforce a trade agreement, though. They would sue.
And if the Band Chiefs say they do have authority over that land? And that the Clan Chiefs are illegitimate?
What if there are clans that disagree? As I understand it, in this case, there are not, but I don't even know how many clans there are, so there might be. Or what if actually, the majority of the clans disagree with their Chiefs? (Again, I've seen no indication of that, but if we just take the Clan Chiefs as the authoritative leaders, then we would never know, would we?)
What if someone wants to form a new clan? Are they just prevented from doing that now? And if it's us preventing it, because we won't recognize any new clan chiefs, then isn't that just as colonialist?
I don't think they can self-govern! You just said that "if an Indigenous nation has an issue with their hereditary leader, they can request aid from Canada." If that's not a clear admission that they can't self-govern, I don't know what is.* It's an admission that sometimes, we're going to have to go in there and get colonialist as fuck, and once we open that door... look, how hard do you think it'd be right now for the gas company to go canvassing and just find someone who has an issue with their hereditary leader? Probably not very hard, eh, especially if they throw them a few million dollars under the table. Now we have another group coming out of the woodworks claiming they're the "real chiefs" or whatever nonsense, yes? And then we would have to make a determination as to whether that claim was legitimate or not, based on some principles of our choice - boom, colonialist, no longer self-governing. Or are the First Nations leaderships now just locked forever in permanence? The bloodlines that are Clan Chiefs now are going to be the Clan Chiefs forevermore, this is the form of government they'll have until the year 7431, when all Canadians decamp the planet for the Andromeda Galaxy? And it'd still be us enforcing that, so that's colonialist and not self-governance either.
I am very pointedly not talking about the rest of what's going on here, because I'm just mostly stuck on this, the fact that claims of illegitimacy are flying back and forth between First Nations leaders, and we're here going, no no, these guys are the legitimate leaders, no no, these guys are the legitimate leaders, and these are being used as rhetorical arguments as to whether this pipeline can be built or not. This isn't a deadlock that seems like it can be resolved without us being colonialist and just making a decision one way or another, because we've also removed the traditional ways in which these people would have handled it, which is that they would have fought and possibly killed each other or they would have split up into new tribes/bands/clans.
This is part of my continuing struggle of trying to square exactly how we're supposed to treat First Nations people in non-colonialist ways, when it seems patently obvious to me that we've already colonized them, and it doesn't seem like anybody's really interested in fully decolonizing them. Like, are you okay with bands fighting each other and killing each other? Because that would be, as I understand it, one of the traditional ways of handling disputes over territory. Why is forcing "no murdering" on First Nations less colonialist/more acceptable than forcing democracy? And once we say, no you can't do that, isn't that already colonialist? And doesn't that lead us to where we are now, as colonial authorities, trying to determine who we should treat as the legitimate authorities in various cases in which First Nations people dispute each others' authority over each other?
Edit: To be clear, these aren't issues that are specific to First Nations. E.g. there can also be student groups that compete for legitimacy, and at some point the school or government has to acknowledge one or all groups as legitimate via some arbitrary criteria, and then that school or government may be criticized for choosing the wrong groups/criteria. But it seems to me inevitable that said outside authority must at some point be willing to do so, if said authority won't allow the competing groups to fight amongst themselves to establish legitimacy, and then, in this particular case involving First Nations people, this decision would be colonialist, no matter what the specific decision was. I don't see any actual way around that, except for people just declaring that the side they like more is the "real" authority and so acknowledging them can't be colonialist, which is just cognitive dissonance, at best.
* Double edit: Note, the difference between this and, say, Canada being self-governing is that while, yes, Canadians unhappy with the Canadian government could theoretically go ask the Americans for help overthrowing the government, there is a way for that disagreement to ultimately be resolved without American interference: either the unhappy Canadians overthrow the government, or the government crushes the rebels. In this case, we're not willing to let unhappy First Nations people violently overthrow their chiefs and we're not willing to let First Nations chiefs violently suppress their unhappy members. So, a permanent deadlock, tacitly enforced by an outside group unwilling to let the deadlock be resolved.
What's the difference exactly? Either way the agreement is being enforced. The reason they would sue is because you don't enforce trade agreements with troops regardless. If it was some other agreement where sending in troops would be applicable, that's absolutely what would happen.
I guess my question is, legally, who has control of that territory? If that is not clearly laid out somewhere, then that is what needs to happen. The government, the tribal council, and the people living there sit down and hash out who gets to make the decision of whether or not a pipeline can be built. If it's already clearly laid out somewhere, where is it? What does it say?
Neither of those things has the phrase 'cops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles'.
What's the difference? One way ignores sovereignty. The other doesn't. I would have thought that was clear.
Sure it does. Because what if the answer is "the people who already signed the deal"? Then literally everything that is happening is the same.
The very fact that it got done at all strongly suggests that's the actual answer anyway.
You'd be wrong there. There is a court case in progress re that, it isn't decided. The court ust decided to let the pipeline company start doing setup anyway.
Their largely viewed as corrupt because they are influenced heavily by being a requirment for funds and there are quite a few people who consider this unjust and another example or treaties only working in one direction
The territory is in dispute. Until that dispute is resolved, the pipeline has to go somewhere else.
If we use force to say the territory is ours to do with as we please, then we're still committing genocide.
My understanding is that there was another court case that was resolved recently that prompted this. The pipeline company petitioned for an injunction and received it. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/unist-ot-en-camp-injunction-coastal-gaslink-1.4954970)
There was some change back in 2013 that meant the federal government didn't have to do an environmental assessment on its own, and then the BC government signed off on the project, but I don't think there was anything from the federal government on this file recently.
Supreme Court of Canada said in 1997 that the BC government has to negotiate a treaty with the Wet'suwet'en people.
Interesting how the 21 year old order about First Nations land rights still isn't done, but the one about the money got done super quick.
(Bias warning, the author of this op-ed is Dan George, the "elected chief of the Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation (Burns Lake Band) and chair of the First Nations LNG Alliance.")
So now I'm even more confused about exactly what's going on. I'm not sure if the clan chiefs voted or if this is just a minority of the clan chiefs or what, nor am I sure how/if the clans divide territory.
But while that's unclear, the BC government has no issue sending in cops that are indistinguishable from soldiers to protect a corporate project.
Imagine, imagine for just a moment, that someone claimed that your house belonged to them, and you fought them in court, but before any decision was made, government troops came in and forced you out. That is injustice in its most perfect form.
This is on top of us having a long history of ignoring any kind of legal obligations we agreed to and sending in soldiers to take away from them what we said was theirs to keep.
Would you happen to know what the hold-ups are on the treaty? (The legal ones, that is.)