February 13, 2025

By Andrew Parker

A lot of what Canadians know about the standoff between the Witsuwit’en people and the RCMP and government backed might of Coastal GasLink dates back to 2020, when raids on peaceful blockades were violently conducted within the unceded territory. The pushback from the public outside of British Columbia – particularly among other Indigenous communities – led to widespread shutdowns of services, perhaps most notably the Ontario to Quebec rail corridor. In the months and weeks leading up to a nationwide, government mandated shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Witsuwit’en struggle to maintain their sovereignty was the biggest story in Canada.

But as the documentary Yintah illustrates, that battle was waging for years before the public took wider notice. Currently nominated for the Toronto Film Critics Association’s Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award and recipient of the Audience Award at Hot Docs last spring, Yintah looks at a period in the struggle between the Witsuwit’en and CGL from 2015 to 2021, but the roots of the story go back even further. The Witsuwit’en occupy over 20,000 acres of land that legally belongs to them, not the Canadian government, pursuant to the 1997 Delgamuukw case, where the Supreme Court of Canada recognized their peoples’ jurisdiction and independence. In order for CGL to build their lucrative and highly controversial pipeline (which was approved by the B.C. government in 2014), the section that spans from Dawson Creek to Kitimat would have to be routed through Witsuwit’en territory.

Rightfully enforcing their own laws, which were drafted across centuries, and expressing many environmental concerns, the Witsuwit’en pushed back, only to be met with numerous court injunctions and militaristic responses from the RCMP and private security outfits working on behalf of CGL. The Witsuwit’en established checkpoints, beyond which pipeline workers, RCMP officers, and private security forces would not be allowed to cross. While the Witsuwit’en response was peaceful, the actions of CGL and those operating on their behalf were not.

Co-directed by journalist, cinematographer, and filmmaker Michael Toledano, Brenda Michell, and Witsuwit’en communications manager Jennifer Wickham, Yintah examines the frustration, paranoia, and trauma that goes hand in hand with standing up for one’s rights. While the film offers many perspectives on the encroachment by CGL and the Canadian government, it does so primarily by observing the lives and advocacy efforts of two of the Witsuwit’en’s most prominent female leaders: Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham (sisters of co-directors Michell and Wickham, respectively).

Respected community leaders and tireless organizers, family women, and passionate advocates, Huson and Wickham embody the inner strength of the Witsuwit’en with bottomless reserves of strength and resistance.

“I’ve realized that remaining peaceful and calm has been our biggest path to success over the past ten years,” Huson said during a phone call from B.C. last week. “Prior to the injunction, we successfully stopped two pipelines from coming through our territory because of our peaceful stand. I know they try to get you riled up and force you to react so they have an excuse to arrest you. We know their tactics and we try to remain calm. I speak for Unist’ot’en [a protest camp that upholds the clan’s right to protect the territory], but our leaders have said that we are peaceful and for us not to use any force, no matter what.”

This desire to remain calm, even in the face of threatened violence and forcible removal from their own land, extended to Huson’s interactions with the officers tasked with enforcing the 2018 injunction.

“The whole time I was educating RCMP officers and asking them what they would tell their children or grandchildren if they asked what they did to prevent the climate change that was happening,” Huson continues. “Did you help them create the mess your children are going to live in, or did you do something to stop it? Truthfully, some of the officers I spoke to about that had tears in their eyes, and after we talked, I never saw them again. My guess is that they stepped down and refused to come in.”

In spite of the approach, and as Yintah illustrates through Toledano’s embedded observation on the front lines of the battle, CGL and those with vested interests in seeing the pipeline go through the territory would use any and all tactics in their arsenal. These efforts include shows of physical force and psychological manipulation, not just against the Witsuwit’en, but also members of the press.

“Patience was crucial,” Toledano said in a separate phone conversation, characterizing  the filmmaking team’s struggle to ensure proper coverage in the face of censorship and media blackouts. “Every time there’s a large scale police action, they would shut down access to the entire area and block all media and journalists from access. They would create media exclusion zones and would attempt to arrest anyone who tried to preempt these zones. In order to capture all of these raids, we had to have camera operators already on the inside of these areas before they were declared. And even then in almost all of these instances, the camera operator would still be detained or held at gunpoint, arrested, and removed. It was a long game, and anticipating these areas and making sure someone was there to cover these media ‘no-go zones’ was part of that.”

“For those ten years, we had many people who stayed in our space, anytime we heard choppers or machinery,” adds Huson, who in one of Yintah’s most striking images and moments is heartbreakingly escorted away from a peaceful protest in the face of RCMP forces. “It was easy to monitor everything else because the only way in or out was the road we were on. And there was the river and a bridge. We had a locked gate there. Every time a chopper went in, though, we sent vehicles down all the roads to find out where they landed and evicted them. We told them they were trespassing. Every time they tried to do some work, we would send them out.

“They used the injunction as their strongest tool,” she continues. “We were told we had to go to their courts and waste all this money and time, but 99% of the time in those courts, the injunction is going to win because the federal government makes these rules and regulations. Plus, they bought out the CGL pipeline, so that’s why they backed it 100%.”

“We have a complex statute of laws,” fellow participant Wickham states during a separate phone call from B.C. “We have our own constitution. These are thousands of years old and that’s what we’re upholding. That’s the law we are following, and it’s super disrespectful  that the RCMP and the courts continue to ignore that these things even exist. They don’t acknowledge that we have our own laws and systems. But it has always been that way, and always disrespectful, but it continues on because the state can’t recognize that we have our own laws, or else the state would have to acknowledge that they are occupying our territory illegally.”

The role of cameras in documenting the RCMP encroachment and CGL occupation was one that cut both ways. While Toledano and his team were embedded with the Witsuwit’en and capturing things from their perspective, CGL representatives and members of the RCMP would bring their own cameras to film the reading of pre-rehearsed scripts with hopes that members of the resistance would react in a way that would result in arrests and prosecutions. Similarly, in an era where everyone has phones that can record anything at any time, any and all footage captured could be re-purposed, erased of all context, and used against someone in a court of law or the court of public opinion.

“We’re dealing with a situation that obviously the police don’t want the public to witness,” Toledano observes. “It comes down to their decision making on the ground, and it ultimately doesn’t come down much to charter rights or freedom of expression. It’s really up to the practicality of what the police choose to do when they are placed in a position of absolute power and control.”

It’s something that’s noticeable early into Yintah, where officers first approach the Gidimt’en checkpoint, an officer from the RCMP says their approach is going to be “slow and methodical.” Directly behind the officer, one can clearly see another uniform holding a camera that’s pointed directly at the Witsuwit’en. Moments later, Toledano captures footage of RCMP officers violently – not slowly or methodically – ripping through the checkpoint barricades with chainsaws, mere feet away from other people. The viewer sees things from Toledano and company’s perspective, but one will likely never see footage captured by the RCMP.

“Moments later, we see police officers in tactical gear jumping over the barricade in a very chaotic manner and there’s a very conscious thought that they police are trying to uphold their control by saying who is allowed to capture images and who gets to witness,” Toledano explains when that particular sequence is brought up. “We rarely ever see these images that the police gather, but those aren’t for accountability in the same way as what a journalist would capture. Those are for convicting people or criminalizing them. Those images are meant to support the RCMP action and only really end up in the court process, whereas what we’re gathering on the ground is to show the people of Canada what’s happening in their country.”

“They use our footage against us,” Huson adds. “For example, they would take snippets of footage without any context, snip it, and use it to their own benefit. They did that to get their injunction. They took stuff from our own social media pages, repurposed it for their own benefit, and made us out to be horrible people based on a snippet of a clip from our pages. It provided protection, but they could also twist it for their benefit.”

“They used scripts to get their points across,” she continues when asked about the disingenuous nature in which officers approached the checkpoints with prepared talking points  before dismantling the barricades. “We saw footage from other areas where the RCMP officers would use the same scripts they used on us. They all say you can be arrested if you don’t move. They have strategized and used what works for them to remove us illegally off of our own lands. One of the benefits to social media beyond seeing the strategies of the RCMP was to generate support and supplies. When other Indigenous people saw us getting arrested, it riled people up online because many of them saw something that happened to themselves. We’ve had people come to us and express how they have lost their land. The major city centres are on their territory. They know what we are going through, and they show their solidarity because they have been in the same situations.”

To make matters more complicated, no one on the side opposing the Witsuwit’en could ever fully take responsibility or blame for their culpability. The RCMP and the Canadian government would always say that they were enforcing an injunction that was brought about by the corporation, and that CGL was to blame. When pressed, CGL would always lay the blame at the feet of the RCMP. Yintah shows a clear and calculated dodging of responsibility and buck passing, but to hear it from Wickham, this isn’t anything new for the Witsuwit’en people.

“It’s very frustrating in the moment, but I also understand that this is how the colonial system is designed,” Wickham says with a hint of a sigh. “Nobody is actually held accountable, and the nature of assigning that is blurry to most people. I have a very clear understanding of who’s responsible, and that’s the government and the state. They are always trying to pass off their ability to consult off to private industry, but it’s not actually their responsibility. Corporations have a moral responsibility to understand these issues, but the legal and ethical duties always fall to the state. To me, that’s clear, but they make you have to jump through all of these hoops to find where it all begins and ends. Nobody is taking accountability.”

Toledano examines this willful blindness to accountability by including footage taken from a town hall meeting in Kamloops, B.C. where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is confronted by Indigenous protesters criticizing the government’s approach to violating Witsuwit’en law. The irony lies in the fact that this town hall meeting is happening the same day as the aforementioned “slow and methodical” sequence unfolded at the Gidimt’en checkpoint.

“Different levels of government are complicit in holding the land pretty much at gunpoint,” Toledano observes. “Often what the government says about their involvement in these sorts of actions is often vacuous and dishonest. We have Trudeau in the film [at the town hall meeting] offering these disingenuous platitudes, and the reality is that the premier of B.C. refused to meet with the hereditary chiefs and Trudeau during that conflict [and] denies ever being directly involved. Throughout, we only ever see lower level operatives from the government interacting, and the same goes for the employees of the oil company and often with the RCMP liaison officers and tactical officers. They all become the de facto representatives of the state throughout the film because they are the ones present on the land enacting a policy they didn’t shape and failing to question to whom this land is entitled.”

But Toledano looks beyond the accountability game to the bigger picture: “This isn’t just about a pipeline,” he says. “This is about their land, something larger. This is a struggle over who owns 22,000 square kilometres of land. The government by taking it can exploit that land without manufacturing the consent to do so.”

Again, this is nothing new to community leaders like Huson, who oversees a healing lodge on the territory and has deep ties to the land. The fight to keep the yintah, which means “land” in Witsuwit’en, has forced the community to always be vigilant.

“It takes lots of great supports beside me,” Huson says about how she has been able to balance her numerous duties to her people. “I trained people how to manage and watch the space when I wasn’t there. If I had to come back for a funeral, or my family, or my community, there was always someone who could fill that space.”

Huson notes that having strength in numbers also protects the community they built together, something that became more urgent as the situation escalated. “Since colonization, our cabins, our homes have been burnt if we were on our traditional territory. We would get burnt out, so we’ve lost about eight cabins through fire,” says Huson. “My grandpa had a floating cabin on our other territory, which was called Tagetochlain, which was Poplar Lake, and he lived in it most of the time and used it for trapping. Most of his time was spent on the land. The provincial government sent their workers to him, and told him to leave that spot, and he refused. When he went out for a funeral, he returned and that floating cabin was burnt. A month or two later, he saw them building a provincial park there. We even had a $30,000 common building that anyone in the community could use. It would be left unlocked, and all we asked is that people would sign the guestbook. And that was burnt, too. That’s why we never leave our healing centre vacant. There’s always someone there. Legally, if we utilize and access our land, that’s how we keep it.

Wickham also credits a tight-knit community of friends and family with fostering her ability to keep moving forward and fighting for the yintah.

“I have a solid support system of friends, family and community,” Wickham says about keeping her strength. “The times that I have to spend away and do what I do are so we can have the peace we had in the past on the yintah. I want that for them for the rest of their lives and the rest of their children’s lives. That’s why I continue to keep everything on the line. Having three children is a constant reminder of that for me. For them to be able to do the things our ancestors did and to be in the same places our ancestors were is why I do this.

But it’s also important to remember that just as events in B.C. were coming to a head – as exemplified by Yintah’s climactic scene, a violent and terrifying RCMP raid on Wolverine Camp – the world at large had bigger issues on its mind with the emergence of the 2020 global pandemic.

“At the same time COVID-19 was becoming the biggest story in Canada, the Witsuwit’en resistance was also the biggest story in the country,” Toledano says about experiencing the shifting tides of the news cycle. “It was national news, and even then it was underreported. Canadian media is really good at reporting on flashpoints of conflict. At that moment, it wasn’t hard to know what was happening in the country. But at others, the Canadian media was conspicuously absent from the Witsuwit’en story. I think members of the public had a harder time knowing what was happening, particularly the Coyote Camp blockade where hereditary chief Sleydo’ blocked drilling under the river for over two months. That garnered almost no mainstream media attention. Only a few independent news outlets like The Narwhal and The Tyee had given any space to that story.”

Wickham adds that the fight has been isolating but that the support of allies and the momentum of Shutdown Canada helped unite a shared vision of what their effort stands for. The filming of the battles unfolding on the grounds of the Witsuwit’en territory and in courts of both legal and public opinion is something Toledano could’ve continued documented beyond 2021, even though Wickham notes that things have improved since filming stopped and that newer battles have shifted her own focus.

“It’s just been in the last year that the RCMP and private security have left the territory after being there consistently and intensely there for the past several years. Things have been kind of slowly getting back to ‘normal’ in the last year,” Wickham jokes. “We have a trapping program and built a cabin for that. We continue to build infrastructure on our territory and practice our culture and laws. We’ve also been doing a lot of work around the film. There’s also been news about two new compressor stations that were supposed to be built. LNG Canada, which is the export facility meant to move the fracked gas from the pipeline, wanted to create something that would double the amount of gas that would flow through the pipes, and to do that they would need these compressor stations. Two of them are proposed for Witsuwit’en territory. We’ve been doing some work around those because that would mean three to five more years of very loud and toxic construction on the territory. We’ve been working to resist those developments as well.”

As a film, Yintah was a massive collaboration between the filmmakers, participants, and the community. Made under ‘anuc niwh’it’ën (Witsuwit’en law) and following filmmaking edicts put forward by the Indigenous Screen Office, the project always relied on community input. Toledano most wanted to honour the memories of those who are no longer with us or part of the fight, like elder Violet Gellenbeck, whose voice united the community.

“Without my great-grandma – who lived to be 113 – teaching her grandchildren the importance of the land, I wouldn’t be here,” says Huson, crediting additional elders whose spirit fuelled the resistance. “She used to say in our language, ‘Don’t let no man steal my land. Don’t sell it. Don’t give it away.’ She said it over and over again up to her death. That was instilled in me, my aunties, and my mom, and that’s why we’re so connected to the land. On all our holidays, we were brought to the territory. That’s why we have that connection to the land. If you’re not connected to the land, then you’re not going to protect the land.”

The cyclical nature of the resistance means that Toledano could easily still be filming the ongoing story, but the community knew they had to get the message out there. “We filmed a substantial amount of material after what we decided in the edit was the end,” says Toledano when asked about finding an endpoint for Yintah. “That was according to the needs of the community, particularly around community safety. The RCMP escalated their intimidation and harassment around the Witsuwit’en. There were some major events that felt like they had given some urgency to the film. But the power of the collaborative model was that there was a shared understanding of the story of the resistance that was commonly held by those who worked with us on the film. It was possible to get everyone on the same page about what story needed to be told and historically resonant. There’s obviously a challenge when you’re living in a conflict area and every single day brings with it a new potential crisis or something that requires you to react to it. We always needed to step back and think about our approach.”

Toledano adds that the community had input about the final cut. “After we showed the film to the community what we considered to be pretty close to a final version of it, everyone came together for a beautiful event where it marked the first time the traditional governance building had been opened on the yintah in probably centuries,” he says. “It was a beautiful scene, and I filmed it pretty much after the film was done. It was possible to keep filming forever, but in order for the film to serve the community, it has to be done and out in the world. It can’t just be an idea.”

The filmmakers and community leaders hope that they film can draw attention to their plight, but also help the community heal. “I kept saying, ‘Why are we standing by ourselves, just us women, and none of our people are out here with us?’ We were put into communities and reservations and oppressed and traumatized, and a lot of our people still live in that pain. If we heal our people, we heal our land,” says Huson. “We heal that connection. If you have that connection to the land, you cannot be destroyed. We built our healing centre so people could reconnect to that. Without your land and your culture, it doesn’t matter what race you are. If you don’t have that connection to the land, you become a robot. You conform to the wrong standards and the spirit within you is not alive until you reconnect culturally to your ancestors or what they did. Everybody in this world is disconnected. That’s why they are destroying the planet. It’s not just Indigenous people in this fight who have a connection to the land. Everyone once did, and we’ve all lost it.”

“I’m kind of infamous for my pep talks,” Wickham says with a chuckle about her ability to find positivity in darker moments. “I think that comes from the fact that I wholeheartedly believe we are gonna win this. There’s so much at stake. There’s never been one moment where I ever felt discouraged, even after the violent raid and all of the harassment and intimidation. All that we accomplished and all that we continue to do on the land shows that we are winning. We’re winning the long game, the big fight, not just against the pipeline, but in terms of living like our ancestors did and reclaiming our land and laws. All of that is so much bigger than this one project. I think in the darkest times where violence was looming and we knew it was coming, I was just able to harness that energy and belief that this was all bigger than us. We are a part of history, not just our own, but people around the world. That’s worth fighting for and worth any sacrifice.”

Yintah is available to stream on Netflix.

The winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award will be announced on Monday, February 25^th.

The other nominees are Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story and Your Tomorrow.