By Rita Wong, April 3, 2022 

Though the last two years have been hard on everyone, Tsleil Waututh community members continue to stand strong for the unceded Coast Salish lands that have sustained their ancestors since time immemorial. As the people of the inlet, the Tsleil Waututh have been healing the land and waters, bringing back clam harvests, restoring salmon habitat, re-introducing elk, and more.

During the pandemic, many of us have learned how our connection to nature is crucial for our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health. We owe an immense debt to the Tsleil Waututh and their Coast Salish kin for their efforts to restore what colonization has attempted to destroy. If we live on Coast Salish lands, we all have a responsibility to support these efforts to heal the land, which is also to heal the people at the same time.

The Tsleil Waututh Sacred Trust has compiled a comprehensive environmental assessment, doing their due diligence where the federal and provincial governments have failed us. All this is in danger, as the Trans Mountain pipeline expands, threatening to accelerate climate destabilization even more, on a scale we cannot afford. With a skyrocketing price tag of 21.4 billion dollars and counting, this is a pipeline no one can afford.

After the past year of floods, forest fires and heat waves, the land is speaking loud and clear. It is a terrible mistake to expand fossil fuel infrastructure. We need to reduce our consumption of the earth’s resources and make a fast pivot to renewable energies.

I have been standing with the Tsleil Waututh community and thousands of people in the struggle to uphold Indigenous law and protect these unceded Coast Salish lands from the TransMountain pipeline expansion for many years. I have spent time in jail, and it was a small price to pay because the scale of climate disaster we face is much more terrifying to me than the prison industrial complex. I am doing my level best to help avert mass disaster and to support Coast Salish people’s incredible efforts to heal the land.

But as Amitav Ghosh points out, “the scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon.” This Saturday, April 9, is a time to renew our collective commitment to the land and the Indigenous peoples of these lands. The Tsleil Waututh Sacred Trust is holding a rally to end this pipeline once and for all, inviting Indigenous leaders from across Turtle Island to join us in walking the talk of respect.

Whether the pipeline becomes a stranded asset through divestment efforts, ongoing civil disobedience (including a woman who recently spent her 80th birthday in jail for obstructing TMX machinery), or sheer climate destruction (more floods and fires to come, faster and faster), it is going to die. Or it will kill us all. The choice is pretty clear that we need to step up and end this pipeline expansion. Trudeau’s greenwashing is not only misleading, but irresponsible, given what we know of the climate science.

I invite everyone who has ever made a land acknowledgement in Metro Vancouver, to show up on April 9 and contribute to the collective action that is needed for us to improve our chances of having a livable planet in the decades to come.

It is time to put our money and our bodies where our words lead us—to heal the land and waters. This is not only possible but necessary, as Tsleil Waututh community members have been showing us.

In order to heal the land, the destruction needs to stop. It has been heartbreaking to witness TransMountain pipeline contractors clearcut thousands of trees in the Lower Mainland, destroying the efforts to heal the Brunette River that volunteers have contributed over many decades. The pipeline is destroying habitat for the endangered nooksack dace, the hummingbirds who no longer have a place to nest, and so much more. What if those horrific tanks on Burnaby Mountain were turned into anerobic digesters to transform food waste into energy? What other uses could those tanks and pipes be put to? Now is the time to transform the drive toward mass extinction into a renewal of life.

As Ta’ah, the daughter of Chief Dan George, reminds us, it’s time to Warrior Up. I hope to see you there on April 9; we need to continue building relationships and momentum for the long haul.