I remember the morning the video dropped.
February 22, 2022. RCMP footage, released days after the fact, showing the aftermath of what had happened on February 17: a coordinated attack on a remote Coastal GasLink drill site in northern British Columbia. Fifteen to twenty masked figures in snow camouflage, armed with axes and flare guns, had terrorized workers and caused $20 million in damage. They’d blocked escape routes with felled trees, fires, and a school bus positioned across the forest service road.
The school bus haunted me.
Not just because it was evidence of careful planning, a deliberate attempt to terrorize workers and delay police response. But because I’d seen that same yellow bus before, in social media posts from earlier protests. In photos of people dressed in white camouflage, holding axes, standing beneath a women’s warrior flag. In images from protest camps that claimed to represent peaceful Indigenous resistance.
The attack was described by RCMP as “very aggressive and calculated.” It was investigated as potential terrorism. And it represented the violent culmination of a protest movement that had transformed from Indigenous land defence into something far more complex, and far more troubling.
Yet, exactly four years have passed since February 17, 2022, and charges have yet to be laid against the assailants, despite a mountain of evidence pointing to their identity.
Introduction: The Manufacturing of Dissent: When Violence Came to the Pipeline
A new investigative series examines how the Coastal GasLink protests became a cautionary tale about who gets to decide Indigenous economic futures.
Part 1: The Attack
The February 2022 violence, the school bus, and the forensic evidence connecting peaceful protest infrastructure to coordinated assault.
Part 2: Whose Voices Were Silenced?
The matriarchs who were removed, the 80% who were ignored, and the eco-colonialism practiced in the name of allyship.
Part 3: The Protest Industrial Complex
Following the money ($1.9M crowdfunded, $40M from U.S. foundations), the professional protesters, and the media machine.
Part 4: When Anarchists Attack
How environmental protest became infiltrated by violent extremists—and who welcomed them.
Part 5: The Model Exported: What Comes Next
The PRGT pipeline, the playbook being redeployed, and the path toward real economic reconciliation.
The voices we didn’t hear
In all my years covering resource development and Indigenous partnerships in British Columbia, the Coastal GasLink story stands out for what was missing: the voices of the Indigenous majority who supported the project.
“The world thinks the matriarchs are behind all the protests going on and that’s not true,” Rita George, a matriarch and hereditary subchief, told reporters. “None of the matriarchs were contacted.”
She wasn’t alone. Surveys showed 80% support for the pipeline in Witset and Burns Lake. Traditional matriarchal leaders who backed the project found themselves removed from their positions and replaced with male representatives. Community members who favoured the pipeline told CBC they felt “intimidated” and that “non-Indigenous people are speaking up… the blockades are causing further harm in our community.”
These were the voices drowned out by a well-funded, professionally organized opposition movement that claimed to speak for Indigenous sovereignty while systematically silencing Indigenous democratic choice.
The money trail
Over the past decade, opposition to Coastal GasLink had raised at least $1.9 million through online crowdfunding alone—and that’s only what’s still visible online. Many campaigns were deleted after achieving their goals.
Beyond crowdfunding, the protest movement received lavish financial support from American foundations contributing an estimated $40 million to anti-development campaigns in Canada.
Many of us in Canada were struck by the irony that most of the opposition to a pipeline supporting Canada’s first LNG large-scale export project was coming from the very country that over those years was rapidly scaling its own LNG industry.
And it didn’t go unnoticed that another country that benefited from keeping Canadian LNG aspirations in check had their state-run news agency send a photojournalist to lovingly document the front-line protest blockades (I’m talking about Qatar’s Al-Jazeera agency).
The resulting sympathetic coverage lingered on something that was largely illusory: the impression of broad-based resistance to the project. A self-reinforcing loop of activists, media, and money pushed that story into the mainstream. In truth, it took only a few grains of grievance to set the machine in motion. This was not a grassroots uprising. It was an industry.
When protests become profession
As I tracked the story, I began recognizing faces and names from other conflicts. One arrestee later showed up at Fairy Creek logging protests. Another chaining himself to vehicle driveshafts at both locations. Tactics perfected in one protest — cantilever logs, “hedgehogs”, tree platforms — deployed at the next.
Roughly 70% of those arrested at the height of CGL protests weren’t from the region. Some came from other provinces. Two came from the United States.
This wasn’t organic Indigenous resistance. It was coordinated, funded, and sustained by outside groups with their own agendas—groups that positioned themselves as allies while practicing a form of eco-colonialism that would make the old missionaries blush.
The question that haunts
The CGL pipeline is now operational. It cost $14.5 billion — more than double initial estimates. The RCMP spent $30 million on policing. Rail blockades organized in solidarity cost the Canadian economy hundreds of millions in halted shipments.
All of that to override the democratic choice of Indigenous communities who saw the project as economic opportunity.
And now the playbook is being replicated. The proposed Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline faces the same coordinated opposition: build on the pipeline route, secure foundation funding, coordinate media coverage, amplify minority voices, claim to speak for Indigenous rights.
But something has changed. Indigenous communities are increasingly becoming owners, not just consulted parties. The Haisla Nation is the majority owner of Cedar LNG. The Nisga’a Nation is purchasing PRGT from TC Energy. Indigenous equity in resource projects is rising despite — not because of — organized opposition.
Which raises the question at the heart of everything that happened at Coastal GasLink:
Who gets to decide Indigenous economic futures? The communities themselves — or outside groups claiming to protect them?
What this series will reveal
In a series of essays starting today, I’ll be examining how a small Indigenous-led protest evolved into a complex, multi-million-dollar opposition movement backed by international funding, professional activists, and anarchist groups investigated by the FBI.
More importantly, I’ll be centring the voices that were systematically silenced: the matriarchs, the 80%, the Indigenous leaders who chose economic partnership and found themselves accused of selling out by people who had never set foot in their communities.
This series draws on hundreds of sources: court documents, financial statements, social media archives, crowdfunding data, philanthropic grant records, and investigative journalism — including the CBC’s remarkable “When Anarchists Attack” investigation.
But it’s also informed by a simple principle I’ve learned covering Indigenous economic development for years: True reconciliation means respecting Indigenous sovereignty even when—especially when—it includes choosing resource development.
Why this matters now
The Coastal GasLink story isn’t history. It’s prologue.
The same tactics, the same funders, and in some cases the same people are mobilizing against new projects—projects with unprecedented Indigenous ownership and equity. The test of Canada’s commitment to reconciliation will be whether we support Indigenous economic sovereignty when it doesn’t align with urban environmental values.
The communities who supported Coastal GasLink—and who are now pursuing ownership of Cedar LNG, PRGT, and other projects—have already made their choice. They’re choosing economic reconciliation on their own terms: not imposed poverty dressed as environmental justice, but Indigenous prosperity based on Indigenous decisions.
The question is whether the rest of Canada will respect that choice—or whether outside groups will continue to claim veto power over Indigenous economic futures.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll be making the case that economic reconciliation isn’t a slogan. It’s Indigenous communities controlling their own prosperity, not outsiders controlling their poverty.
It’s time we heard from the 80% who were silenced.
Stewart Muir is the President and CEO of Resource Works, a Vancouver-based non-profit focused on responsible resource development and Indigenous economic partnerships. He has covered natural resource policy and Indigenous economic development in British Columbia for over two decades.
