[News] Pipeline Standoff: Wet’suwet’en Block Effort to Tunnel under Morice River

[Anti-Imperialist News]

thetyee.ca
<https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/10/04/Pipeline-Standoff-Wetsuweten-Block-Effort-Tunnel-Morice-River/>
Pipeline
Standoff: Wet’suwet’en Block Effort to Tunnel under Morice River
Amanda Follett Hosgood - October 4, 2021
------------------------------

At the turnoff, four workers with Coastal GasLink security gather in orange
and yellow vests, their voices edged with frustration as they talk above
four idling pickup trucks that release a haze of exhaust into the early
morning light.

Another pickup faces off against the group, blocking access to the rough
and muddy spur road that leads to the pipeline worksite.

It’s a scene that has played out every day for the past week and a half on
Wet’suwet’en territory, as land defenders block pipeline workers from
accessing a site where Coastal GasLink is preparing to drill under the
Morice River and install the pipeline.

On Sept. 24, protesters used Coastal GasLink’s own machinery to dig up the
rough resource road that connects this junction to a worksite two
kilometres beyond. A camp was established at the site and a school bus used
to block access. The school bus has since been removed — twice — by RCMP
and Coastal GasLink before being returned to its place in the road, which
has been roughly repaired by the pipeline company.

Known to the Wet’suwet’en as Wedzin Kwa, the Morice River becomes the
Bulkley, eventually flowing into the Skeena River at Hazelton. It’s a major
artery through the territory and source of sustenance and tradition for the
nation, as well as the territorial boundary between the Gidimt’en Clan’s
Cas Yikh house and the Unist’ot’en, a house group belonging to Gilseyhu
Clan.

According to Molly Wickham, a Cas Yikh house member whose Wet’suwet’en name
is Sleydo’, it was never a question of whether they would fight to protect
Wedzin Kwa. Only a question of when.

“It’s always been about Wedzin Kwa,” she says. “Everything that’s happened
up until now has been about Wedzin Kwa.”
[image: MollyWickhamCGLBlockageProfile.jpg] Molly Wickham, whose
Wet’suwet’en name is Sleydo’, stands next to Coastal GasLink’s pipeline
right-of-way where she and other land defenders have built a camp on
Gidimt’en Clan territory. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

The current standoff takes place 63 kilometres down the Morice West Forest
Service Road south of Houston, B.C., the site of two past police actions.
In early 2019, RCMP arrested 14 people, including Wickham, when they raided
a roadblock at Kilometre 44, where members of the Gidimt’en Clan had
erected a camp to re-occupy the land and keep pipeline workers out.

A year later, in February 2020, four camps along the Morice were raided
after Coastal GasLink was granted a permanent injunction to continue its
work on Wet’suwet’en territory. The final day of arrests took place at
the Unist’ot’en
Healing Centre
<https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/02/10/Emotions-High-Unistoten-Arrests/>, just
a few kilometres from the current roadblock, where Wet’suwet’en resistance
to pipelines began more than a decade ago. In total, 28 people were
arrested over five days, seven of them at the healing centre.

Police have already arrested two people in the latest standoff. But today,
the camp and blockade two kilometres beyond the turnoff from the forest
service road are quiet. It’s the first day that RCMP haven’t arrived to
read the injunction or threaten arrests, and the land defenders busy
themselves working on projects around the camp as a raven hops brazenly
nearby, the inquisitive tilt of its head appearing to ask what’s for
breakfast.

The camp has been established on a muddy site intended as a helipad next to
Coastal GasLink’s right-of-way. The pipeline route, which the company says
is more than 90 per cent cleared through this section, extends 670
kilometres from northeast B.C. to Kitimat, where it will connect with LNG
Canada’s processing and export facility.

It’s only by walking the right-of-way to where clearing stops about a
kilometre below camp that you hear Wedzin Kwa gurgling beyond. Here, the
30-metre-wide route expands several times over, its surface scraped bare
and mud threatening to consume a rubber boot. Deer and bear have left their
marks in its surface.

It’s here that Coastal GasLink plans to stage its drilling operation, the
vast expanse of muck a holding area for lengths of 48-inch pipe. Slash
piles and dirt mounds tower several times the height of a person. An
abandoned bulldozer sits idly nearby, a sign reading “Active Work Site”
appearing to mock the scene.
[image: 851px version of CGLClearedPipelineRoute.jpg] A cleared area
several hundred metres wide just above the Morice River, Wedzin Kwa, is
intended to store lengths of 48-inch pipe during Coastal GasLink’s drilling
process. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

Where the clearing ends, a narrow trail begins. It leads to Wedzin Kwa,
where the river’s edge is quiet, continuing as it has for millennia. A pair
of seagulls dip and dive over the river.

“That’s our main river, Wedzin Kwa. That’s where our salmon are,”
Hereditary Chief Na’Moks, John Ridsdale, says about the river’s
significance as a food source and lifeblood for the nation. “We’re the
Wet’suwet’en. This is who we are — the land, the air and the water.”

In its 135-kilometre journey through the Skeena watershed, the pipeline
route crosses 206 watercourses, according to a technical data report
submitted as part of its 2014 environmental assessment application,
tributaries that offer vital spawning habitat for salmon.

This stretch of river below Morice Lake, Wedzin Bin, “supports important
Chinook salmon spawning and holding areas,” according to the data report.
Pink, coho and sockeye salmon are also found here, and steelhead and bull
trout use the river on their way to spawning channels upstream.

“These areas and other accessible tributaries also provide critical rearing
and overwintering habitat for juvenile salmon and resident char and trout,”
the report says.

The report indicates there is no low-risk period for working within the
waterways. Salmon occupy Wedzin Kwa up to 11 months of the year, and other
species fill the mid-summer gap when fry have left their spawning ground in
spring and the return of salmon in late summer.

“There are fish of one species or another that are in that waterway at all
times of the year,” says Michael Price, a fisheries biologist and
researcher with Simon Fraser University who co-authored a sockeye-recovery
plan
<https://skeenawild.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Rebuilding-Plan-for-the-Morice-Sockeye-Recovery-Unit-Final-4.pdf>
with the Office of the Wet’suwet’en.

Price says sockeye returns in Wedzin Kwa plummeted in the mid-20th century,
from an estimated 70,000 a year to an all-time low of about 1,000 in the
mid-1950s. Work to recover salmon populations has been ongoing for more
than 50 years, with moderate success. By the early 2000s, returns appeared
to rebound, levelling off at between 10,000 and 20,000 returning sockeye
each year — still well below historic numbers.
[image: MoriceRiverFlow.jpg] Below Coastal GasLink’s drill site, Wedzin Kwa
continues as it has for millennia. ‘This is who we are,’ says Wet’suwet’en
Hereditary Chief Na’Moks, ‘the land, the air and the water.’ Photo by
Amanda Follett Hosgood.

But even as the nation, in partnership with Fisheries and Oceans Canada,
works on a strategy to rebuild salmon stocks, industry continues to impact
salmon habitat.

This spring, Wickham says the river’s silty runoff season, when people
avoid drinking its water, lasted several months instead of the usual
several weeks. She suspects it was the result of industrial logging in the
watershed. Trenching through creeks and streams in preparation to lay pipe
beneath the riverbed will likely also release silt and sand into the
waterway.

“My biggest fear is that we’re never going to be able to drink from Wedzin
Kwa again... and that it will impact spawning salmon,” Wickham says.

Price says the continued effects on the watershed — things like habitat
destruction, overfishing and climate change — act as a “death by a thousand
cuts.”

“Fish need cold, clean, contaminant-free water. Whenever you have
industrial projects that take place in or near water, there’s a high
potential for damage,” he says.

“I’m amazed that a project like this has been allowed to go ahead given
that there’s at least one endangered population of salmon up there. There’s
a rebuilding plan that Fisheries and Oceans was part of, and we can’t even
stop an industrial project like this from taking place.”
[image: 851px version of OrangeShirtMoriceServiceRoadTrucks.jpg] Workers
with Coastal GasLink security placed an orange T-shirt, symbolic of
Indigenous children who died at residential schools, at the junction of
Morice West Forest Service Road and a spur road leading to a pipeline
worksite. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

In an email to The Tyee, Coastal GasLink says it’s not required to limit
work on river crossings to least-risk windows — June and July — under its
environmental assessment application if it’s using trenchless crossings,
where a tunnel is bored below the river rather than disturbing the
riverbed.

The company says its plans to use micro-tunnelling
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtunneling>, which uses a hydraulic jack
to force pipe into the ground behind the boring machine, is “the most
precise and state-of-the-art” drilling method available. The almost
900-metre span is expected to take 10 months to complete, the company says.
It did not respond to The Tyee’s question about how deep the drilling would
go.

This is the only trenchless crossing in Wet’suwet’en territory.

“Nothing like that’s ever happened along that river system, ever,” Chief
Na’Moks says about the company’s plans to drill under Wedzin Kwa. He says
something as simple as a bridge constructed over a river can be enough to
keep salmon from migrating upstream.

A hereditary Chief recently met with the BC Oil and Gas Commission and
Ministry of Energy and Mines to request a moratorium on the drilling, he
says. When asked about the request, the Oil and Gas Commission says that
any changes in the project’s timeline are up to Coastal GasLink.

It’s unlikely that Coastal GasLink would voluntarily agree to further
delays. The project has been plagued with cost overruns and setbacks,
largely due to protests and the pandemic. The delays have led to tensions
<https://globalnews.ca/news/8072383/tc-energy-lng-canada-coastal-gaslink-update-july/>
with LNG Canada.

With drilling already a year behind schedule, Wickham speculates the
company is feeling anxious to regain access and begin the work.

“They cannot afford this conflict or any delays,” she says.

Wickham says the land defenders’ ability to delay the project is a
testament to the strength of these occupations, which have been backed by
hereditary Chiefs from all five Wet’suwet’en clans, and sends a cautionary
tale to industry attempting to work in Indigenous territories without
explicit consent.

“What happens here is going to set a precedent for all other industries
that want to trespass on our land without free, prior and informed consent
from our hereditary governance system,” Wickham says. “Industry needs free,
prior and informed consent from Indigenous people.”

Coastal GasLink did not address The Tyee’s questions about the delays,
project timelines or how significant the current setback is for the
project, saying only that progress continues with almost 50 per cent of
construction complete. It has already done five trenchless crossings of
other rivers, it says.

Back at the turnoff, the workers, who say they are with Coastal GasLink
security, have hung an orange shirt from a pylon next to the road. On the
eve of Canada’s first Reconciliation Day, the symbol recognizes Indigenous
children who were forcibly taken from their families, many of whom died at
residential schools.

When approached, the workers pull out video cameras and decline to answer
questions.

A fifth man arrives in another pickup, wearing an identical orange T-shirt.
When asked about the shirt’s message, his response is brisk.

“To show our support for the missing children,” he says, edging toward his
vehicle as he speaks. “We all have children and we all know. That’s why
we’re doing it. Just to show support.”

The man declines to give his name.
[image: 851px version of ShaylynnSampsonDrumMollyWickham.jpg] Shaylynn
Sampson, from the Gitxsan Nation, drums as she and Molly Wickham, who
carries the Wet’suwet’en name Sleydo’, sing together at a camp designed to
block access to Coastal GasLink workers. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

Back at camp, Wickham is thinking about her own children and their future
here on the territory. It’s been a week in camp and she doesn’t know when
she’ll see her family. It all seems really crazy, she acknowledges,
recalling a recent moment when she left her cabin in the dead of night.

As she stared into the darkness, her headlamp beam caught the nearby
right-of-way, its trees razed by machinery.

“And I was like, no, *that’s* crazy,” she says.

“I feel like it’s so normalized to see the destruction of the land that it
doesn’t feel absurd to people... What we’re doing should be normal and
destruction of the land should not be what seems normal.” [image: [Tyee]]
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