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Thousands of tourists... 

flock to Craigellachie’s Last Spike Gift Shoppe each year. 

They pose for photos by the tracks... 

and take turns re-enacting the 1885 photograph of Donald Smith driving in the last spike. But several hundred kilometres north, the Coastal GasLink pipeline is charging [stroomt] through the Wet’suwet’en territories that brought [brachten] Canadian railways to a grinding halt [tot stilstand].

November 7th marked the 135th anniversary of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s completion. Although the railway has always been a private corporation, it was — and remains — a wrought iron [smeedijzeren] symbol of Confederation. But for First Nations peoples, Canada’s railways are vehicles for expropriation [onteigening].

“Hot metal screaming through the valleys, echoing loud enough to wake the mountains,” the voice of Wet’suwet’en poet Jennifer Wickham shakes as she recites a poem from her collection, I’m a Real Skin. “A procession of metal caskets [kisten] carrying stolen goods: clickety clack clickety clack, cha-ching.”

She wrote the poem when she lived in Burns Lake. There, the trains would echo across the water, waking her up multiple times a night. “I hate the trains,” she says. “Like, a lot.”

But in 2018...

her community stood off with a different piece of Crown-backed, privately owned corporate infrastructure. Coastal GasLink had received approval from the Wet’suwet’en band council to build a pipeline on their territory, but not from the hereditary chiefs who traditionally govern their communities. Land and water “protectors” created blockades on the construction site to prevent the project from going forward, and this continued through 2019.

“Stand up and fight back,” Molly Wickham, spokesperson for the Gidimt’en camp and Jennifer’s sister, urged in a YouTube video, “Shut down Canada.” From January 2020 until COVID-19 struck, protesters from coast to coast answered the call by blocking the country’s rails. 

On the other side of the country in Kahnawake, Quebec, Mohawk filmmaker Roxann Whitebean was moved to block the rails when she saw Wet’suwet’en people being forcibly removed from their territory. “Canada always projects itself as being the most peaceful country in the world, but that’s not the case for Indigenous Peoples,” said Whitebean. “That’s not our reality.”

But why target the railways?

[bron]