ecology-of-the-inhuman:

‘They are erasing our history’: Indigenous sites buried under Coastal GasLink pipeline infrastructure | The Narwhal

As the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en fight to stop the controversial $4.7 billion natural gas pipeline, the very landscape and cultu

The Narwhal

“According to Wet’suwet’en oral history, the Kweese War Trail is lined with the buried bodies of warriors who lost their lives avenging the murder of Chief Kweese’s wife and son.

The trail — a place where Wet’suwet’en youth can literally walk in the footsteps of their ancestors — branches out to important ancestral sites spread throughout the traditional territory of the nation’s five clans. 

But now a 100-metre portion of the trail, a critical piece of history for the Wet’suwet’en and the origin of some of their clan crests, and another potential archaeological site lie buried under work camps and clearcuts for the $6.6 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline, proposed to move fracked gas from B.C.’s northeast to Kitimat to feed LNG Canada’s $18 billion liquified natural gas (LNG) export facility and the province’s promise of a LNG export boom.

On Jan. 4 the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en issued an eviction notice to Coastal GasLink owned by TC Energy (formerly TransCanada), saying the company “bulldozed through our territories, destroyed our archaeological sites and occupied our land with industrial man-camps.” The eviction notice comes one year after the RCMP enforced a court injunction, forcibly removing and arresting Wet’suwet’en blockaders at a checkpoint designed to prevent the company from accessing work sites. That injunction was extended on Dec. 31, 2019, triggering the Wet’suwet’en eviction notice and raising the spectre of renewed tensions.”

This article gives a good description of how archaeologists are often complicit in the destruction of indigenous history & important cultural sites, especially when they are hired by gas and oil companies to effectively say theres nothing of “archaeological value” in an area of interest to the industry (as if living indigenous culture is solely made of artifacts to be dug up)