On this day, 7 January 2019, a group of Indigenous land defenders was attacked by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who had been instructed to use violence and were prepared to use deadly force. The activists were defending barricades which had been erected to prevent the construction of a gas pipeline on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Senior RCMP officers had stated that “lethal" force was “req'd”, and had instructed police to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want”.
During the attack 14 people were arrested and the barricades were destroyed. For more than 20 years, First Nations peoples have been fighting the growing encroachment by fossil fuel companies in the region.
Despite the repression, resistance to the pipeline continued.
Tlingit land defender Anne Spice told the Guardian newspaper: “The police are here to support the invasion of Indigenous territories… It is what they’ve always done.”
The paramilitary RCMP was specifically created to facilitate genocide against Indigenous peoples, by violent relocation, to suppress any resistance and forcibly remove Indigenous children from their families in order to place them in residential schools and indoctrinate them into colonialist and capitalist structures. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1893675594150915/?type=3