"One year after the RCMP’s highly publicized militarized raids on land defender camps, a continuous police presence is affecting the lives of Wet’suwet’en people who say intimidation and nuisance tactics are being used to suppress opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline"
"On Valentine’s Day, a small group of Wet’suwet’en people gathered outside a Coastal GasLink pipeline work camp in northwest B.C. to hold a ceremony to remember Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. They chose the site because of the connection between work camps and violence against Indigenous women.
It was a Sunday and no work was happening, which they confirmed with a Coastal GasLink employee before starting the ceremony. But just moments after starting, Coastal GasLink security officers approached the group, asked them to leave and said they were going to call the police, according to Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a supporting chief in the Cassyex House of the Gidimt’en Clan. A security officer recorded the entire ceremony, she said, and when they left, security and police were waiting on the road, watching as the group left the site.
The police and security presence on Wet’suwet’en territory has been constant since last February, when heavily armed RCMP descended on the Morice River forest road to enforce a Coastal GasLink injunction against land defenders who were blocking work on the pipeline. Twenty-eight people were arrested, including matriarchs. Today, the territory is still monitored daily by police and private security officers, despite calls from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for police and security forces to withdraw. "
