Indigenous Rights in Canada: Pipeline, Hunting, and Treaty Disputes

Northern Gateway Pipeline and the Wet'suwet'en Boycott

A news item appearing in the January 20, 2010, edition of the Globe and Mail, Report on Business, titled "Native Group Calls for Pipeline Boycott," concerns Canada's plan to find an alternative route to export oil sands crude to Asia for processing — an alternative to the United States route — because U.S. legislators were making Canadians nervous with proposed climate change legislation. The article describes an effort by British Columbia's Wet'suwet'en First Nation to rally environmentalists to their cause. It should prove effective, because the potential harm to the environment — and especially to an environment vital to salmon — is something that broad coalitions of people can be expected to care about.

The project in question is the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would involve constructing a 1,400-kilometre corridor partly through Wet'suwet'en traditional territory. That corridor would require altering the natural environment, potentially damaging what the article describes as "pristine, salmon-rich" waterways. As most consumers know from the prices paid for salmon at the supermarket, salmon populations have already been impacted by overfishing and environmental damage to the waterways essential to their unique upstream spawning habits. The threat to these salmon spawning grounds is sufficient to build momentum for support not only within Canada and British Columbia, but in the United States as well, where environmentalists could be expected to rally to the Wet'suwet'en cause.

The Wet'suwet'en call for a boycott of the energy companies participating in the gateway plan is a strategically clever move. People who might otherwise be unmoved by the argument that the pipeline violates Wet'suwet'en rights may nonetheless be concerned about the rights of salmon. The Wet'suwet'en are pursuing an approach that presents them in a less confrontational light, appealing to manufacturers directly involved in what could become an environmental disaster — one that would also harm the salmon industry. This emphasis on salmon is certain to attract support from the fishing sector as well.

By calling for a boycott of petroleum manufacturers and protesting at the U.S. and Chinese Consulates, the Wet'suwet'en bring U.S. government officials — whose oil processing industry would be affected by the Asian alternative — into the broader conversation. News that thousands of jobs could be lost to Asia is likely to generate additional support for the Wet'suwet'en cause from American workers, and perhaps even from the Obama administration. At the time, the impact of climate change legislation on employment had not been a prominent part of the U.S. political conversation, and an administration emphasizing job creation might have found common cause with those opposing the pipeline's economic consequences.

The response of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to the Wet'suwet'en's call to action carries the tone of political rhetoric, conveying that the Agency intends to proceed as normal. Without the support of industries and environmentalists — and without public awareness of potential job losses in the United States — there would likely be little institutional concern for the violation of Wet'suwet'en rights or the integrity of their lands. The Wet'suwet'en's approach maximizes pressure on the system while remaining non-confrontational, which is again a strategically sound choice.

The Wet'suwet'en could also pursue their legal rights and draw the Canadian government and involved companies into protracted litigation. Should they do so — and with the support of industries and environmentalists behind them — a legal finding in their favor would not be implausible.

The Healing Power of Huskies: Inuit Cultural Devastation

Varden's (2006) Star.com article, "The Healing Power of Huskies," brings into focus the harsh and even inhumane treatment of Canada's Inuit people. For the past hundred years, the Canadian government has reflected the attitudes of its non-Indigenous population toward the aboriginal people through efforts to alter the Inuit way of life. During the 1960s and 1970s, Varden reports, these efforts manifested in the controversial killing of Inuit husky dogs — animals that are both a cultural icon and an essential means of survival in the harsh frozen conditions of reservation life. Authorities claimed the animals they destroyed were diseased, which, if true, would have posed a health hazard not only to the Inuit but to wildlife and other people in the region.

The Inuit have experienced profound cultural devastation through the Canadian government's efforts to assimilate them — though, based on the evidence presented in the article, "annihilate" might be the more accurate term. Relocating the Inuit to large reservation centers impacted their freedom and their capacity for self-sufficiency, disrupting the cultural traditions that are inseparable from their survival. The Inuit are hunter-gatherers, and once relocated to larger centers, they found themselves without the resources they had previously depended upon. This was especially true with respect to hunting: the relocation sites lacked the wildlife populations that had historically provided their food supply.

Looking further back into Canadian history, Varden recounts what occurred when white Christian settlers encountered what they perceived as pagan practices among the aboriginal peoples. As history repeatedly demonstrates — and as has been seen in other parts of the world where Europeans settled — this perceived paganism was not tolerated by the settlers. Efforts to bring the aboriginals into the fold of Christianity served only to further traumatize them and to weaken them as an ethnic culture.

Varden's account of the treatment of the aboriginals weighs on the conscience of the reader, because the historical record confirms it. North and South American aboriginal peoples have long been ignored by ruling governments and by European descendants who would prefer not to revisit this history. Grouped into reservation life, it becomes easy to forget they exist, and convenient to dismiss the social ills of those communities by suggesting that what they experience is no different from the struggles of any other community in the modern world. However, by eliminating the cultural and ceremonial practices that gave structure and meaning to aboriginal life, governments effectively completed the assimilation they sought — because now drugs and alcohol, once connected to sacred experience in some traditions, have become devastating social problems rather than spiritual ones.

Canadian aboriginal peoples, like their counterparts in the United States, struggle to sustain their communities on government budgets far smaller than those allocated to non-Indigenous communities of comparable size. Their ability to build and sustain economies is further constrained by their geographic locations and by laws governing their relationship with the outside world. They have been isolated and left to their own devices in communities that afford them little opportunity to live as their ancestors did. This is the assimilation that has been forced upon them.