Building pipelines and other infrastructure on unceded Indigenous territories without free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) is legally and morally problematic. What few realize is that it is but the natural evolution of the same forced assimilation processes Canada has engaged in since time immemorial.
The peculiarity of the idea that every other infrastructural expansion somehow needs to run through Indigenous reserve lands—which are only 0.2 per cent of Canada’s total land area—is not lost on Indigenous peoples.
When engaging in discussion surrounding the ongoing Unist’ot’en pipeline standoff on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia, the argument of elected chiefs and councils being “consulted” on such projects often emerges. This ignores the fact that government “consultation” often barely fulfills the three-step test laid out in Supreme Court’s 1973 Sparrow decision—let alone the mandated FPIC standard in article 10 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Consulting elected band councils alone—particularly those who are being so forcefully and loudly protested by the communities that elected them—is coercion manufactured to look like consent, because Canada created the band council system and forcibly imposed it via the Indian Act. Unless the sovereign circle of traditional hereditary chiefs consents to the development, it does not uphold treaty standards of bilateral consent.
“When it comes to First Nations approval, systemic anti-Indigenous racism refuses to recognize anything but imposed colonial government.” – Sheldon Parathundyil, third-year public affairs and policy management
Band councils are as colonially-inadequate a form of government as the British “legislative assemblies” that were imposed on Canadian colonies. Canadians legitimized rebellion against these imposed and disempowering assemblies nearly 200 years ago. We can accept the necessity of the Senate or the House of Lords of the U.K.’s approval as legitimate, and would not dream of circumventing the U.S. president’s will to only recognize Congress. Yet, when it comes to First Nations approval, systemic anti-Indigenous racism refuses to recognize anything but imposed colonial government.
This is no fringe opinion. Hereditary chiefs have been formally recognized as national representatives since the 1997 case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, which recognized their oral traditions as valid legal sources. Ironically, this case was brought forward by hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
Since Wet’suwet’en lands are not covered under treaty, the hereditary chiefs have never formally surrendered an iota of legitimacy. Traditional chiefs have an unbroken line of succession long predating contact. Their voices are just as valid—if not more so—than government-funded, corporate-beholden, and politically-manipulated Indian Act chiefs. Their voices must be considered as integral and prestigious a part of governance as any legislative chamber if “reconciliation” is ever to be a reality. No more proof is needed of the ongoing colonial relationship than this.
The same political camps that demonize both recent immigrants and Indigenous peoples as fundamentally undermining Canadian laws or culture are quick to trample upon the treaties and advocate their violation. These people are often loathe to recognize their hypocrisy.
Canadian sovereignty is only legally valid if grounded in and exercised through treaty—not via flouting Indigenous sovereignty to line the pockets of close corporate cronies and to arbitrarily strut the state’s power over Indigenous peoples on a whim. Canadians’ status as equal parties to the treaties is an integral legal component of what it means to be a Canadian citizen. Frankly, it is high time that the colonially-minded among us who are ranting about the “rule of law” started treating it as such.
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Image by Jamine Foong
