07 ISSUE II
JANUARY 2025
JANUARY 2025
Kaffiyeh Nation
First Nation activists in North America have long drawn parallels between struggles against colonial violence everywhere.
By Roni Zahavi-Brunner
There is a scene in the documentary film “Yintah” (2024) about the struggle of the Wet’suwet’en, a North American first nation, against oil companies, where one of the activists, Molly Wickham, sits in a “resistance” camp defending her ancestral lands from an invasive pipeline, a chilling sound emerges from her radio: a little girl eerily singing the children’s song “Ring Around the Rosie.” This haunting broadcast, delivered by Canadian police, known as the RCMP, precedes a violent raid where police axe down her cabin and arrest her. This disturbing scene is, unfortunately, just one example of the many techniques of psychological intimidation, repression, and criminalization used against Indigenous land defenders.
Spanning over a decade, “Yintah” (meaning land) is a story of an anti-colonial struggle against the Coastal Gaslink fracked gas pipeline in so-called Canada, continuing a centuries-long global fight to protect Indigenous culture, land, and future generations from colonial violence. Using powerful resistance tactics, the Wet’suwet’en nation has fought to reoccupy and defend its ancestral lands from some of the largest fossil fuel companies on earth in the face of violent repression by the petrostate.
The Irish historian Patrick Wolfe’s famous argument that “invasion is a structure, not an event” becomes painfully visible in the story of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. When we think of colonization, we often imagine a historical event of “new world” displacement and settlement using weapons and physical force, but Canada’s settler colonialism endures through the pretext of “democratic” and “liberal” structures that continue to invade, displace, and exploit Indigenous peoples centuries after the arrival of the settlers.
The Coastal Gaslink pipeline, built to make corporate profits with the backing of Canadian authorities, exemplifies how colonization encroaches quietly through legal mechanisms: the language of ‘critical’ infrastructure legitimizes corporations to profit off Indigenous resources and environmental destruction; courts use their status as independent and impartial to provide a legal stamp for colonization and criminalize resistance. Yellowhead Institute, for example, found that 76% of injunctions filed by corporations against Indigenous communities in Canada are granted, while 81% of injunctions filed by Indigenous peoples against corporations are denied. The police repeatedly do the dirty work for corporations - violently arresting peaceful activists while ignoring harassment, trespassing, and intimidation by corporations.
The entire Canadian system is built to legitimize and normalize dispossession, working hard to establish naturalized and unquestioned control over Indigenous lands. As “Yintah” shows, attempts to achieve justice for Indigenous nations through settler systems are bound to fail - and the protagonists of the film know full well that their legal case has been decided before it ever landed on the judge’s desk. Anti-colonial resistance and disobedience are thus the only paths for the Wet’suwet’en tribes to defend their lands and ways of life.
However, the settler narrative will always delegitimize (peaceful, non-violent) Indigenous resistance as extreme, dangerous, and unruly – a discourse that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (he has since announced that he is leaving office) has repeatedly invoked in response to Coastal Gaslink pipeline protests. “Yintah” juxtaposes footage of grassroots blockades with the prime minister's public statements prioritizing corporations over human rights. Trudeau is exposed for his hypocritical colonial playbook, shouting “reconciliation!” every time the Wet’seuwt’en nation refuses to stand down and passively accept blatant violations of the FPIC (Free, Prior, and Informed Consent) principles that Trudeau claims to champion. Trudeau, Canadian authorities, and corporations construct a classic “us vs. them” narrative of national unity behind fossil fuel corporations and othering Indigenous nations in the process. The discursive merging of extractive industries and the Canadian nation serves to securitize peaceful resistance and justify repression, framing protests as unreasonable obstacles to national prosperity that hurt all (settler) Canadians.
The documentary team took big risks to capture inspiring acts and blockades, sometimes getting arrested themselves to record the protests. The film highlights the courage of Wet’suwet’en women leading blockades and underscores the global solidarity woven into their resistance. At various points in the film, we see images of land defenders protesting while wearing keffiyehs (even ten years ago, long before the current rise of Palestine movements in North America), and Wet’suwet’en activists have long drawn parallels between struggles against colonial violence from Turtle Island to Palestine.
The Coastal GasLink project cannot be isolated from other state-corporate endeavors to dispossess Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities. For example, the CEO of LNG Canada, a major beneficiary of Coastal Gaslink, is a white South African, Andy Calitz, who struggles to fathom “how there could be such a strong show of support for one Indigenous group that opposes the Coastal GasLink pipeline.”
Land defenders have meticulously collected evidence demonstrating that David Petraeus, former top US General in Iraq, is the strategist behind the repression tactics used against the Wet’suwet’en through his new role at private equity firm KKR – the majority stake owner of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. Petraeus is importing military counterinsurgency tactics, known to have terrorized many Iraqi civilians, back to North America through the private sector. The keffiyehs worn by activists getting carried away into police custody by the RCMP are not just symbols of solidarity – they call attention to the fact that Palestinians, Iraqis, Black South Africans, and Indigenous peoples around the world are all fighting the same violence of a global white supremacist system.
“Yintah” bears witness to the resilience of the Wet’suwet’en nation while illustrating how Indigenous communities worldwide confront the same forces of dispossession and violence. By exposing the systemic mechanisms of colonization and celebrating the courage of grassroots resistance, the documentary illuminates the stakes of this struggle and calls for solidarity across global movements.
Roni Zahavi-Brunner is completing an MA in international affairs at The New School.