Crouching in the grass, armed with snipers and dressed in military fatigues, they aim their assault rifles at elders, women, and children. “Don’t point it at my mom,” says one woman. While the sniper refrains, his colleagues continue tasering people. Some have police dogs set on them, while others – including children – are shot at by rubber bullets.
Among the roughly 200 armed RCMP officers, some are from the riot squad, carrying shields, batons, and employing both tear gas and pepper spray against the people. A reporter from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, Ossie Michelin, overhears one officer say: “Crown land belongs to government, not to fucking natives.” Forming a large barricade on the highway, the RCMP physically blocked protesters, also blocking cell phone signals, live video feeds, and media access to the site. In yesterday’s final account, at least 40 of the Mi’kmaw people, including Elsipogtog Chief Arren Sock, were arrested at the site near Rexton, New Brunswick.
For over two weeks now, a coalition of people led by local Mi’kmaq activists have blockaded the road leading to an equipment compound leased to a Texas-based energy company. The company, Southwestern Energy, has recently conducted seismic testing. Depending on the results, they will use the land to engage in the damaging process of hydraulic-fracturing, or fracking, in order to extract the region’s shale gas resources. Among other things, fracking in the area will contaminate the drinking water, a mainstay of the fracking process globally.
Since the summer, however, the Mi’kmaq have stood in the way of extraction. And, although Southwestern Energy has obtained an RCMP-backed injunction to have their profit interests protected by the state, the story has yet to end. Over the next few days, forty-five solidarity demonstrations will take place, and the Six Nations in Ontario have shut down a highway in solidarity with the Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq.
Today, in Vancouver, at the south side of the Vancouver Art Gallery at 3:30pm, we will meet to stand and march in solidarity with the Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq. We do so because we recognize the ownership of Indigenous peoples to their lands – even when the Canadian state does not. We do so because we know what fracking – in a world quickly overshooting its carbon budget, or the amount of carbon we can still safely emit – would mean to the lives of future generations and our own. We do so because this display of brutality against protesters must be opposed. And we do so because, when the state unequivocally works on behalf of corporations against our common goals, the Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq are not only protesters but protectors.
See facebook for more information about today’s solidarity rally in Vancouver.
quadibloc
October 18, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Police cars, paid for by tax dollars, were destroyed. Criminal violence like that utterly discredits any cause in which it is employed, and so it will be very hard now to convince people that this development poses any issues.
Henry Rychlicki
October 18, 2013 at 1:10 pm
If the First Nations say NO it’s NO!’ Shale Gas is Wrong those who are pushing it are wrong, remember this people’ this is Native Land and YOU are renters here, if you can not respect your land Lords then you will cause an up-rise, the Shale gas can and will leak into the water supply and KILL, Smarten up Canada!
AJW
October 19, 2013 at 6:39 am
Very Noble!
Bringing knives, guns and homemade bombs to their blockade. Setting an RCMP office on fire! Threatening people! And stealing private property!
They’ve taken the American GOP’s recent strategy of holding innocent people hostage to the next level!
Matt
October 19, 2013 at 11:46 pm
This land is theirs, they have never ceded it to the Canadian Government. This is no different than if the Canadian Government tried to start fracking in Alaska. It is literally an invasion, a couple burnt police cars, and CONFISCATED, not stolen, property is hardly undue response to the actions taken by the RCMP.
The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized the Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1760, as legally binding, the actions of the RCMP and the private corporations are illegal. They are defending their soverign land as a soverign nation.
Michel Gourd
October 20, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Only the international community can help Elsipogtog
The United Nations Special Rapporteur, James Anaya, who came in Canada from 8 till 15 October to inquire about First Nations, left days before one other example of what they face. The people living in Elsipogtog reserve did not want exploratory drillings for shall gases in their region. They raised a barricade which policemen dismantled by force October 17. The Chief and the band council of this reserve are in the group of forty persons who were arrested during these events.
The Elsipogtog’s people assert that they cannot accept passively the risk to see their region groundwater being contaminated with chemicals injected in the ground to extract gas. The 2011 Gasland movie made in the United States shows the dangers of such exploitation. It shows countrymen setting fire their tap water after wells were dug near their house. Many countries and provinces have already expressed by legal way their anxiety to see this situation occurring. France voted for a law in 2011, which forbids this kind of drillings. Quebec has for its part imposed in 2013 a total moratorium on this type of exploitation. In New Brunswick, chief medical officer of health, Eilish Cleary, recommendations concerning shale gas development show a lack of knowledge about its effect on resident’s health (http://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/h-s/pdf/en/HealthyEnvironments/Recommendations_ShaleGasDevelopment.pdf).
But it is the governments of Canada and New Brunswick, which make laws on the lands of the Elsipogtog’s ancestors, not them. Having said politely not and peacefully resisted, they eventually used force to prevent the dismantling of their barricade. More than 40 persons will be judged as common law criminals because politicians did not solve this problem. Only the international community can help Canadian’s First Nations because peaceful actions and demonstrations of First Nations do not have the power to change laws in Canada.