Last week, I got arrested for kayaking next to a construction barge.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise. My kayak was one of dozens of small boats, bobbing on the water near Whey-ah-Wechen, a traditional village site near what the settlers named Vancouver, British Columbia. We were there for the same reason the barge was there: because a Canadian oil giant, Kinder Morgan, is trying to build a massive new oil tanker terminal to go with its massive new Tar Sands pipeline expansion, a devastating and reckless proposal that would threaten everything we hold dear in these lands and waters.
As we approached the barge, Kinder Morgan’s loudspeakers blared that kayakers would be arrested and prosecuted if we refused to leave their private property. Their private property. As Tsleil Waututh elder Amy George responded, “This is not their private property. My people have lived here for 30,000 years.”
The Tsleil Waututh Nation never ceded this territory. But the proposed site of Kinder Morgan’s new terminal is right in the heart of it, along the narrow inlet from which Tsleil Waututh, or “People of the Inlet,” get their name.
With the defeat of many of the pipelines in the north, this will be the largest fight since Elsipogtog, if they try and push it through.
“This is not your private property:” Why I’m facing charges for taking on an oil giant
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 