WITSET — Fifty-three-year-old Butch Dennis drives slowly along a frozen road in the Witset First Nation village, stopping to acknowledge two kids who are watching a lucky friend motor about on a pint-sized snowmobile.
“Look at the little guy here on the Ski-Doo, eh,” says Dennis, a Wet’suwet’en from the Gitumden clan who moved to Witset (also known as Moricetown) at age 15. “This is the future right here.”
Dennis knows everyone in every home: What clan they belong to, their clan house and whether they are working.
He is proud of the reserve, and happy to point out its many band-owned and -operated features. A new health centre, a freshly paved road, seniors’ programs, a child-care facility, a learning centre, a sawmill, a gas bar, a firehall, a museum, an RV park and, soon, a tax-free cannabis retail store.
“I think we have a pretty awesome reserve,” he says.
“We have a firehall, we have clean running water, we have programs to learn our language and we have meal programs for the youth and the elders. The elders get free cut firewood.”
On the other side of Highway 16, beyond the Wet’suwet’en cemetery, is a totem pole erected in 1956 by Dennis’s grandfather David to defy the federal government. Unlike his grandfather, who died in 1986 at age 108, Dennis has stayed away from political statements and adheres to the Wet’suwet’en way of allowing only those permitted to speak to speak.
But as the Wet’suwet’en pipeline crisis deepens, with five chiefs from a neighbouring band arrested for blocking a rail line, Dennis wants to be heard.
His decision comes as the 5,000-strong Wet’suwet’en try to make sense of the polarization of their community, between elected and hereditary leaders, and within clans and households over an issue that has been brewing for years.
On Feb. 24, the same day 23 people were arrested at three B.C. blockades and more blockades appeared in Quebec and Ontario, Dennis raised a Canadian flag on a pole beside his smokehouse. “The [hereditary] chiefs’ office need to be accountable to the people and not rule everything with an iron fist,” he says. “I love this country. Not everyone wants to tear it apart.”
Bridge at centre of storm
The physical centre of the Canada-wide pipeline fight is a 40-metre steel bridge over the Wedzinkwa (Morice) River, 66 kilometres up the Morice River Forest Service Road, about a 90-minute drive from Houston.
On one side of the bridge is the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre and on the other is a newly vacated RCMP checkpoint. Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs demanded the police leave as a condition before they began meeting with the federal and provincial ministers on Thursday. The bridge is the farthest point up the road that the RCMP have arrested Wet’suwet’en members opposed to the 670-km Coastal GasLink pipeline.
The natural gas pipeline is expected to run beneath the bridge as it snakes its way through a forbidding landscape from Dawson Creek to Kitimat to fuel the $40-billion LNG Canada export plant, which is under construction. The pipeline is supposed to be complete in the fall of 2023 and the LNG plant is expected to start exports in 2025.
It should be no surprise to the Wet’suwet’en, to Coastal GasLink, or to both levels of government that this crisis has emerged.
According to an affidavit filed by a former Indigenous relations co-ordinator for Coastal GasLink, the company has tried unsuccessfully for seven years to get the Unist’ot’en House and the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, which represents the 12 other houses, to agree to its pipeline and accept a benefits package.
Coastal GasLink learned that Unist’ot’en House was responsible for its own negotiations through a letter sent Feb. 26, 2013, from the Office of the Wet’suwet’en stating that it did not formally represent “Dark House a.k.a. Unist’ot’en from the Gilseyhu clan.”
The Office of the Wet’suwet’en is a non-profit formed in the mid-1990s as hereditary chiefs and elders from the Wet’suwet’en Nation and neighbouring Gitxsan Nation fought and won a landmark Supreme Court of Canada case that acknowledged they had never ceded their rights to 22,000 square kilometres of territory and formally recognized the Wet’suwet’en hereditary system and laws.
The Office of the Wet’suwet’en, which is a welcoming space in the heart of downtown Smithers, was then tasked with securing a treaty with the government and at one point comprised the 13 hereditary house chiefs and the elected chiefs of the six Wet’suwet’en band councils. The band chiefs play no role now and there are no treaty talks underway.
The Wet’suwet’en traditional lands are divided among five clans, and within those clans are a total of 13 houses. Each house has a chief and one or more wing chiefs. There are no head chiefs in four of those houses. The Beaver House position has been empty for at least 20 years and House Beside the Fire for 15 years.
Of the nine hereditary chiefs in place, six are strongly opposed to the pipeline and have been since Coastal GasLink first made overtures to offer a benefits agreement. Those chiefs are John Risdale (Na’moks), Alphonse Gagnon (Kloum Khun), Jeff Brown (Madeek), Frank Alec (Woos), Warner Naziel (Smogelgem) and Fred Tom (Gisday’wa).
Longtime Chief Ron Mitchell (Hagwilnegh) is neutral, while Herb Naziel (Samooh) works for Coastal GasLink and is in favour of the pipeline.
Chief Warner William, despite his Dark House/Unist’ot’en House being at the centre of the fight, remains neutral while his wing chief Freda Huson — who established the Unist’ot’en healing centre in 2009, originally as an anti-pipeline checkpoint — is now the spiritual leader of the fight against Coastal GasLink and speaks for the house.
Huson was also a two-term councillor on the Witset First Nation band council, losing her post in 2017 when a pro-pipeline slate took control. She has a good reputation among the Witset and was credited with getting Witset’s gas bar off the ground.
The 2013 letter to Coastal GasLink warned that while the Office of the Wet’suwet’en would not negotiate on behalf of the Unist’ot’en House, its “members occupy their territories to monitor and protect their lands from development that is not consistent with their values. … The Unist’ot’en are well within their rights and jurisdiction to occupy and protect their lands as they see fit.”
Of the five hereditary chiefs who signed that letter, three are still chiefs — Brown, Risdale and Naziel. Risdale is the chief who speaks on behalf of the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and is a point person for the federal and provincial governments’ continuing efforts to try to get the office to support the pipeline.
Some oppose protests
The community divide falls into three categories. There are Wet’suwet’en who are working for or benefiting from multimillion-dollar agreements Coastal GasLink has signed with five of six Wet’suwet’en bands and are in favour because of that, and, therefore, oppose the protests.
There are also those within the hereditary system who are upset with how three hereditary chiefs got elected after the three female chiefs who formed a sub group in 2015 to try to strike a deal between the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and Coastal GasLink were deposed.
There are also complaints that house chiefs are making decisions without consulting house members in the traditional manner and that people without authority are speaking on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en, including Molly Wickham, an adopted Wet’suwet’en who speaks for the Gitumden clan but is not a chief or wing chief.
Lucy Gagnon, executive director of the Witset (Moricetown) First Nation, is caught between these two worlds. While responsible for managing the band council’s agreement with Coastal GasLink, she is married to hereditary chief Alphonse Gagnon. “It’s really hard for me because my husband is anti-pipeline,” Gagnon said in her office at the Witset First Nation. “In my house, we just don’t talk about it because our marriage is more important than anything that happens out there. I don’t need war in my house.”
She said the percentage of people for or against the pipeline varies from clan to clan and house to house. “There’s people who won’t disclose if they are for or against,” Gagnon said. “It may be 50-50, but in my clan there is more anti than pro. And my husband’s is the same way. But then you will have a house group that’s more for it. It’s all over the map.”
