life
FIFTH ESTATE
There’s no reconciliation without truth MY ARREST WHILE REPORTING ON THE WET’SUWET’EN PIPELINE PROTESTS IS PART OF A LARGER PATTERN OF POLICE SUPPRESSING JOURNALISTS WHO COVER STORIES ABOUT INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE—AND IT NEEDS TO STOP Words and photography by AMBER BRACKEN
58
CHATELAINE • MARCH/APRIL 2022
SOME OF THE first advice I was given as a baby journalist was: “Don’t get arrested. You can’t make any pictures from the back of a police car.” This maxim has served me for most of my 14-year career, which has taken me into zones of conflict and protest across North America. But last winter, while documenting opposition to Coastal GasLink’s building of a pipeline at a protest site called Coyote Camp near Houston, B.C.—an issue I’d been covering for three years—the RCMP made that impossible for me. I could not both avoid arrest and continue to cover a story of national importance. Instead, I was forced to become part of it. For more than a decade, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have directed an occupation of this site, which is a fraction of their 22,000-square-kilometre traditional territory. It’s culturally important land, home to glacial headwaters for salmon and habitat for moose. It is newly crossed by roads that cut all the way through to the west coast, and tunnelling under Wedzin Kwa, their river, is imminent. Unist’ot’en spokesperson Howihkat (Freda Huson) told me the only way to make the government and industry respect her nation’s rights is to claim the land in the same way settlers did—to occupy it.
