The Wetʼsuwetʼen are a First Nation who live on the Bulkley River and around Burns Lake, Broman Lake, and François Lake in the northwestern Central Interior of British Columbia.
They speak Witsuwitʼen, a dialect of the Babine-Witsuwitʼen language which, like its sister language Carrier, is a member of the Athabaskan family.
Their oral history, called kungax, recounts that their ancestral village, Dizkle or Dzilke, once stood upstream from the Bulkley Canyon. This cluster of cedar houses on both sides of the river is said to have been abandoned because of an omen of impending disaster. The exact location of the village has been lost. The neighbouring Gitxsan people of the Hazelton area have a similar tale, though the village in their version is named Dimlahamid (Temlahan)
The endonym Wetʼsuwetʼen means "People of the Wa Dzun Kwuh River (Bulkley River)"
The Wet’suwet’en First Nation was formerly part of the Omineca Band. However, in 1984 the Omineca Band split into the Broman Lake and Nee-Tahi-Buhn bands. The Skin Tayi band later split off from Nee-Tahi-Buhn. Today, the Skin Tyee Band, Nee Tahi Buhn Band, Wet’suwet’en First Nation, Moricetown Band and Hagwilget Band make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.
In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area.
Another conflict with the settler state has been the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which seeks to transport liquefied natural gas from northeast BC to a terminal on the coast near the town of Kitimat.
The 670-kilometre (417-mile) pipeline will cut across traditional Wet’suwet’en lands that cover 22,000sq km across northern BC.
The hereditary chiefs, who under Wet’suwet’en law claim authority over those traditional territories, said they never gave their consent for the project to move forward. They have raised concerns about the pipeline’s potential effects on the land, water, and their community.
In late July, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step in naming Dsta’hyl Canada’s first ever designated prisoner of conscience, and now demanding his immediate and unconditional release.
“The Canadian state has unjustly criminalized and confined Chief Dsta’hyl for defending the land and rights of the Wet’suwet’en people,” Amnesty International’s Ana Piquer stated in a press release. “As a result, Canada joins the shameful list of countries where prisoners of conscience remain under house arrest or behind bars.”
In October 2021, Dsta’hyl was arrested and charged with criminal contempt after confiscating and decommissioning heavy equipment utilized by Coastal GasLink to construct its LNG pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. Dsta’hyl said he was enforcing Wet’suwet’en laws as the company did not have the free, prior and informed consent of hereditary chiefs to build the pipeline.
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I know misanthropy is generally looked down upon in leftist circles because I guess it's adjacent to doomerism... but how do you stave it off in times like these? It's so hard not to hate the world lately and the hate is only getting stronger.
I know exactly what you mean, and I stave it off by trying to remind myself that I don't have to always emphatically love my fellow man collectively. And after taking a little time to reacquaint myself with what I like about people I do emphatically love, I start to notice little hints of it in strangers, even if it's nearly buried under the desperation and bitterness of our ungenerous status quo
I think of the humanity of Palestinians,of the bravery of the people of Yemen,and the steady progress of China
The old worlds dying throes are merely the last screams of a starving beast,the last shouts of an unholy choir of slaughter and destruction and the coming of a silence that will give birth to a new and better song,one of brotherhood,peace and understanding between the peoples of the world
I try to do the whole "kind to people, ruthless to systems" thing, idk it works sometimes doesn't work others. a lot of the really grotesque behaviors we see are conditioned into people by perverse incentives built into the very roots of the systems around us, i try to remind myself that they could have been better if the world around them was better. again, sometimes it works other times it doesn't. best i've got though sadly...
I try to remember that there were places and times where things were better, and if we've done it before we can do it again. We've got about thirty trillion years until the stars burn out. Things suck right now but that doesn't mean they'll suck forever. As tankies we're part of a very big project that started more or less when property was invented 10-15 thousand years ago, and will most likely continue until there are no longer people. Even if we lose here on earth there are almost certainly other people in the universe fighting very similar struggles because the principles underlying Marxism have a certain amount of universality