Author: Jonathan Boone

As I write this article, all the headlines on Canada’s news websites are dominated by COVID-19, rapidly dropping oil prices and the possibility of the economy opening up again. You could be forgiven for assuming that everything to do with the dispute a few kilometres down the Morice West Forest Service Road in northern B.C. must be done and settled. After all, if media coverage has moved on, everything must be okay now, right?

ON JANUARY 7, the RCMP arrested 14 Wet’suwet’en protestors and took down a barricade blocking access to Unist’ot’en camp on the Wedzin Kwah (or, to use its more recent colonial misname, the Morice River), about 130 km south of Smithers, B.C. Images of the arrests, made after a B.C. Supreme Court injunction to allow construction of the Coastal GasLink LNG pipeline, created a sense of unease for many Canadians.