Unist’ot’en Camp, January 2015
The Boundary of Unist’ot’en Territory
The storm enveloped us.
Snow lashed the road. The darkness was total, our headlights casting weak yellow beams into the darkness. Most people had hunkered down in homes and motels, and the roads were near empty. Still, every few minutes a passing truck threw a blinding cloud of dry snow into the air, leaving us blind for seconds at a time as we hurtled onwards at the fastest speeds we could manage.
We pressed on, for our destination was important. It was a caravan to the Unist’ot’en Camp, and we were committed.
Let me explain. The Unist’ot’en Camp is an indigenous resistance community led by the eponymous clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. Since 2009, Freda Huson and Dini Ze Toghestiy, under the advisement of their elders, have built a permanent camp directly on the GPS coordinates of a series of proposed fracked-gas and tar sands oil pipelines.
Eleven companies in all, including Apache, Enbridge, Exxon and Kinder Morgan, plan to put pipelines through Unist’ot’en territory without consultation with or approval of the traditional leadership. The pipelines would carry fracked gas from the Liard and Horn River Basins in northeastern BC and bitumen from the Alberta tar sands westward to export terminals being built in the town of Kitimat. Other pipelines would carry highly corrosive and toxic condensate — used for diluting tar sands — eastward to processing facilities in Alberta.
Critics worry that increased supertanker traffic near Kitimat could lead to a catastrophic spill that could make the Exxon Valdez disaster pale in comparison.
Read the full article at: http://deepgreenresistanceseattle.org/2015/02/01/falling-love-unistoten-camp-report-back/
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