When Indigenous Owners Become the Target

Last of five parts

On Monday, August 18, 2025, shortly before employees arrived for work, someone entered the Gitxsan Development Corporation parking lot in New Hazelton and placed an unknown incendiary device against the tires of four company vehicles. RCMP surveillance footage captured the act: a single figure, the object placed, and then immediate ignition. Four vehicles were destroyed. Six other Gitxsan Development Corp vehicles, as well as several personal vehicles in the same lot, were left untouched — the targeting was precise. New Hazelton RCMP confirmed the incident the following day.

Not pipeline company vehicles. Not contractor equipment. Vehicles belonging to an Indigenous-owned business.

The Gitxsan Development Corporation is not a contractor in the conventional sense. It is the economic vehicle of the Gitxsan Nation — owned by the Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs through the Lipgyet Trust and Laxyip Society, governed by a board drawn from all four Gitxsan clans, and built in direct response to the Delgamuukw Supreme Court decision of 1997. After that landmark ruling affirmed Gitxsan title to their 33,000 square kilometre traditional territory, resource extraction continued on Gitxsan land while the Gitxsan people remained largely shut out of the economic benefits. GDC was their answer to that exclusion. Its mandate: to create jobs and economic opportunity for Gitxsan people on Gitxsan territory, on Gitxsan terms. Every Gitxsan person who is a member of a wilp — a house group — has a stake in the corporation.

GDC was working with McElhaney Geomatics Engineering, contracted to build access roads for the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project. PRGT is a proposed natural gas pipeline running approximately 120 kilometres through Gitxsan territory to supply Ksi Lisims LNG — a liquefied natural gas export terminal on the Nass River in which the Nisga’a Nation holds a significant ownership stake, and is located on Nisga’a owned treaty land. It is, in other words, a pipeline being built to supply an Indigenous-owned LNG facility, in which an Indigenous nation is also pursuing ownership of the pipeline itself. McElhaney had already seen its own vehicles destroyed by arson in Smithers and Terrace in the weeks prior. RCMP are treating all three incidents as connected.

The Gitxsan Development Corporation responded on Facebook: “These acts do not align with Gitxsan values or the ayookw. An attack on one Gitxsan is an attack on all Gitxsan. Our people’s safety is paramount. Love not hate. Protect our people.”

BC Counter-Info — the same platform that documented and amplified actions against Coastal GasLink — published the New Hazelton attack promptly and without comment. BC Counter-Info is an anonymously operated anarchist news aggregator that publishes claims of responsibility for sabotage, property destruction, and direct action against resource infrastructure across Canada. It does not editorialize. It does not condemn. Its function is to circulate accounts of illegal activity in support of a defined political project: the disruption and delegitimization of resource extraction. It was tagged as part of the PRGT campaign, cross-referenced with the McElhaney fires, and linked to the network’s own research document identifying contractors involved in the pipeline. The Gitxsan identity of the vehicle owners was not mentioned. It was not relevant to the network’s purposes.

RCMP have not announced an arrest. The investigation remains open. Nobody knows, publicly, who placed the incendiary device. This series didn’t solve the mystery of what persons struck the Morice River drill site in February 2022 either — it provides a setting for understanding. The actual perpetrators may never face accountability. And today, an arsonist walks free, perhaps present in the very same community where leadership decisions back a project that is already bringing elusive economic advancement. Whether the person who placed that device considers themselves an ally of Indigenous people, or an enemy, they will have to live with that.

Nor is the New Hazelton attack an isolated incident. In the four years between February 2022 and August 2025, the Bulkley Valley corridor — Smithers, Houston, New Hazelton, and Terrace, a region of fewer than 30,000 people — experienced at least five confirmed or suspected targeted arson attacks directed specifically at energy infrastructure and its contractors: the February 2022 Morice River attack that caused $20 million in damage and left workers trapped; the October 2022 Smithers attack that destroyed four RCMP resource conflict vehicles and an ambulance outside a hotel; the September 2024 Terrace attack on McElhanney Geomatics vehicles and nearby buildings; the August 10, 2025 Smithers attack on McElhanney trucks; and the August 18, 2025 New Hazelton attack on GDC vehicles. According to Statistics Canada, the national average is roughly 27 arson incidents per 100,000 Canadians per year. Even in Canada’s rural north, where the rate rises to 89.7 per 100,000 — nearly four times the urban rate — those figures represent overwhelmingly domestic and commercial fires: accidents, disputes, insurance fraud. Against that backdrop, the pattern of repeated arson incidents targeting industrial contractors in the Bulkley Valley stands out. Whether ultimately proven to be coordinated or not, the clustering of incidents linked to a single sector in a defined corridor is atypical relative to national arson patterns.

This is where the story told in this series arrives, in the late summer of 2025, in a parking lot in a small town in northern BC. But to understand what it means, it helps to look at what else is happening at the same time, a few hundred kilometres away.

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Two futures are colliding in northern British Columbia.

In one, the Haisla Nation — a First Nation on BC’s northwest coast — holds majority ownership of Cedar LNG, a liquefied natural gas export facility being built at Kitimat. Directly to the north, the Nisga’a Nation holds an equal partnership stake in the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline. Cedar LNG and PRGT are the same story told twice: Indigenous nations moving from the consultation table to the boardroom, from impact benefit agreements to equity stakes, from being asked permission to holding title. This is what reconciliation looks like when it is taken seriously as an economic principle rather than a rhetorical one — and it is precisely what the arson in New Hazelton was designed to stop.

In the other, the same protest playbook documented across this series is being run against PRGT with the same personnel, the same funders, and the same tactical architecture that was used against Coastal GasLink. Build a presence on the pipeline route. Secure foundation money. Coordinate sympathetic media. Find the governance fault lines within Indigenous communities, wedge them open, and claim to speak for communities that have already spoken for themselves.

The question is not whether that playbook is being deployed. It is. The harder question — the one this series has been building toward — is whether it matters that this time, the communities being targeted are pursuing ownership of the very projects being opposed. The answer, as the burned vehicles in New Hazelton suggest, is no. When communities choose economic partnership anyway, the playbook simply relabels them. Indigenous economic actors become contractors. Indigenous-owned businesses become infrastructure targets. The protest industrial complex doesn’t require Indigenous opposition to function. It requires Indigenous compliance, or it produces Indigenous targets.

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The philanthropic layer

The Vancouver Foundation is one of Canada’s most respected philanthropic institutions, and its 2025 Thriving Indigenous Systems Fund distributed $9.2 million to 31 organizations — the majority doing genuine cultural, healing, and language work. That is worth saying clearly.

It is also worth noting what the foundation’s own published grant list contains: a $300,000 grant to the organization operating on the PRGT pipeline route, described in the foundation’s own documentation — not by critics, but by the foundation itself — as “a form of land-based re-occupation.” That phrase appears in the Vancouver Foundation’s 2025 TISF grantee list. The foundation’s Manager of Granting, Tamo Campos, has himself organized direct action against resource projects with majority Indigenous community support.

The model — opposition infrastructure on pipeline routes, funded through philanthropic vehicles whose broader portfolio is genuinely beyond reproach, wrapped in the language of reconciliation — was not invented here. It was imported from pipeline opposition campaigns in the United States. It works because it makes the funding invisible to well-meaning donors who believe they are supporting cultural revitalization. Whether that invisibility is a design feature or an oversight is a question the foundation’s board of directors is better placed to answer than this series.

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The playbook running in real time

For readers who have followed this series, the PRGT picture will be immediately recognizable. The documentation exercise below is not rhetorical.

In September 2025, more than 60 faith groups — the majority from outside British Columbia, coordinated in part through Peace Brigades International Canada, which had already hosted webinars on “Gitxsan and Gitanyow resistance to colonial mega-projects” — sent letters to potential PRGT financers stating that the pipeline “does not have the free, prior and informed consent of hereditary Indigenous leaders.” The letters make no mention of elected chiefs and councils. They acknowledge no complexity in Gitxsan governance — the 67 Wilps, each with its own leadership and potentially different views on major projects. They do not ask what Gitxsan communities themselves want. They instruct investors, on the basis of selective invocation of one category of Indigenous authority, to withhold financing from a project an Indigenous nation is attempting to purchase.

This is the same tactic deployed at CGL: identify a governance tension within an Indigenous nation, amplify the voices that oppose the project, treat that amplified voice as unanimity, and use it to override the democratic choices of communities who chose partnership. At CGL it was hereditary versus elected Wet’suwet’en leadership. At PRGT it is being run on Gitxsan governance complexity. The structure is identical.

What is being built on the PRGT right-of-way follows a template established at CGL. First, a physical structure appears on the actual route — something with a story attached, combining healing, compassion, and leadership by women, with a genuine community member as its face and voice. Then the outside supporters arrive. Then the media narrative consolidates. And then, at the closing stage, the dramatic choice is posed: this activity, or that infrastructure. One or the other. You cannot have both.

That choice is not posed to the Nisga’a Nation, whose members will live with the outcome. It is posed to a particular segment of urban voters — people who will choose the first option over the second without hesitation, and who have no direct stake in what the second option would have meant for the communities it serves. The political leverage is not in the number of those voters. It is in their location. Ridings where election outcomes are genuinely uncertain, where a few thousand votes cast on the strength of a compelling image can determine who governs — those are the places where the posed choice does its work. The economic sovereignty of an Indigenous nation, the jobs and revenue and self-determination that flow from ownership of infrastructure, is being converted into a variable in someone else’s electoral calculation. The corridor where these five arsons occurred falls within the federal riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley, represented by Ellis Ross — the former Haisla Nation chief councillor on whose watch LNG Canada came to fruition, and now one of the most passionate voices in Parliament for resource development as the path to Indigenous economic sovereignty. His election in 2025 ended twenty years of NDP representation in the riding. He understands, from the inside, what is at stake. He is not the politician the playbook was designed to neutralize.

This is what these networks understood that resource proponents were slow to grasp: you don’t have to stop a pipeline in court. You make it politically untouchable. And the most effective way to make it politically untouchable is to give urban voters an emotionally resonant reason to oppose it that requires no knowledge of the project, no understanding of the communities affected, and no reckoning with what Indigenous economic sovereignty actually looks like when it produces a yes.

Vancouver Foundation funding: documented. Route occupation infrastructure: in place. Faith group letters to financers: sent. Violence against Indigenous-owned businesses: already occurred.

The playbook is being executed. The question is what, if anything, is different.

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What is actually different

The honest answer is: less than the optimistic reading of this moment suggests, and more than the pessimistic reading allows.

What’s different in fact: Indigenous equity ownership of major Canadian energy infrastructure is no longer theoretical. The Haisla Nation’s majority stake in Cedar LNG is a completed structure. The Nisga’a Nation’s purchase of PRGT from TC Energy will give a nation with the institutional capacity to own and operate a major pipeline the chance to do exactly that. These are not impact benefit agreements or training programs—they are ownership positions. The communities have moved from being consulted about assets to controlling them. The revenue those assets generate flows into Nisga’a governance, healthcare, and housing — the same things affordability-stressed Canadians across the country are struggling to fund. The connection between Indigenous energy ownership and the services ordinary Canadians depend on is not abstract. It is the same economic logic, running through different communities.

What’s different institutionally: both the federal and provincial governments have, since CGL, stated clearly that these projects are national economic priorities. The RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group has been renamed and expanded as the Critical Response Unit, drawing explicitly on CGL lessons. The regulatory environment has been adjusted. The institutional apparatus, in other words, has nominally learned something.

What hasn’t changed: the funding flows, the network architecture, the tactical playbook, and—most importantly—the willingness of Canadian civil society institutions to fund and amplify opposition to Indigenous economic choices while describing that opposition as Indigenous rights advocacy.

The arson in New Hazelton is the clearest evidence of where this leads. When philanthropic institutions fund route occupation framed as cultural revitalization, they are funding a mechanism whose logical terminus, as Parts 1 through 4 documented at length, is the burning of Indigenous-owned property by people who have convinced themselves that Indigenous communities need to be protected from their own decisions.

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There are two competing definitions of what reconciliation requires, and they produce irreconcilable outcomes. The first model offers Indigenous communities protection from development. It funds opposition infrastructure, amplifies dissenting voices regardless of their democratic representativeness, and keeps Indigenous nations in the position of victims requiring outside intervention. It celebrates Indigenous rights when those rights mean saying no, and ignores or overrides Indigenous democratic processes when they produce a yes. The faith group letters to financers, the route occupation funded through philanthropic vehicles, the Wet’suwet’en matriarchs removed from their positions for supporting CGL — these are products of this model.

It is not without internal logic. It is simply incompatible with Indigenous self-determination, because it conditions its support on the outcomes it prefers.

The Coastal GasLink protests revealed that many Indigenous communities don’t want protection from development. They want partnership in it. They don’t want outside groups speaking for them. They want control of their own economic futures. Sovereignty, it turns out, includes the right to say yes — to choose development, to negotiate equity, to generate revenue, and to govern with the proceeds. The protest industrial complex chose to call that betrayal. That is the manufacturing of dissent, in its plainest form.

This was not obscure or hidden. The communities who supported CGL said so publicly. The elected councils who negotiated agreements were fulfilling their democratic mandates. The matriarchs who supported the project and were subsequently removed from their positions were exercising traditional governance—and were punished by outside activists who claimed to be defending the tradition those matriarchs represented.

All of this was knowable at the time. Some people knew it and said so. Most of the institutions that shape Canadian public discourse chose not to know it, because knowing it complicated a story they preferred.

The question of whether PRGT’s outcome differs from CGL’s is not primarily a question about the protest movement. It is a question about the institutions that watched CGL and are now watching PRGT.

Many journalists who covered Coastal GasLink developed, over time, a more skeptical eye toward the techniques being deployed — the selective invocation of authority, the suppression of dissenting Indigenous voices, the emotional imagery that foreclosed rather than opened inquiry. But experience also shows how a persistent media strategy, especially one that relies on emotional triggers and a steady supply of compelling visuals, can reassert itself. The question is not whether individual reporters learned. It is whether the institutional incentives that rewarded a particular kind of story have changed — and whether those incentives will produce different coverage when the same playbook runs again, this time against Indigenous economic actors. Philanthropic foundations whose grant-making funded the protest apparatus while claiming to support Indigenous rights — have their governance structures changed? Politicians who were photographed at solidarity events while Indigenous women who supported CGL were receiving death threats — do they have the political courage to apply the same standard when the Indigenous economic actors are on the other side?

Polling consistently shows that resource projects rarely cost politicians votes. Activist opposition is vocal but numerically marginal. The politicians who treated that noise as electorally decisive were not constrained — they chose silence because no one demonstrated to them that silence had a cost. That calculation is now available to anyone who looks.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the operational questions that determine whether the institutional learning is real or cosmetic — and whether the cost of silence has finally been internalized.

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Whose sovereignty

At the end of the Manufacturing of Dissent series, the central question can be stated simply: who gets to decide Indigenous economic futures?

The communities themselves—through their matriarchs, their elected councils, their democratic processes, their internal deliberations, their complex and sometimes contested governance systems?

Or outside groups—environmental activists, anarchists, American foundations, urban faith groups, professional organizers, and sympathetic media—who claim to speak for Indigenous sovereignty while overriding Indigenous democratic choice?

The Haisla, the Nisga’a, the 80% at Witset and Burns Lake, the Tahltan 87% at Red Chris—they have already answered that question. They answered it clearly, repeatedly, at personal cost, and in the face of organized opposition funded by people who describe themselves as allies.

The manufacturing of dissent worked, for a time, because the institutions that could have reported accurately on what was happening chose not to. The network that produced the February 2022 attack did not emerge in darkness — it operated in the light, on podcasts and at solidarity events and in foundation grant reports, and was treated as a legitimate participant in public debate while the Indigenous communities it was mobilizing against were barely visible.

That invisibility was not accidental. It was produced. And its production required the cooperation — active or passive — of institutions that calculated, wrongly, that silence was cheaper than engagement. That calculation is now on the record, with a price tag attached.

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What comes next

I started this series with the February 2022 attack—masked figures with axes and flare guns, $20 million in damage, workers trapped and terrified on a remote drill site. I end it with a different image: the Nisga’a Nation, owners of the pipeline that the attack was intended to stop.

The protest industrial complex did not achieve what it set out to achieve at CGL. The pipeline was built. LNG Canada came online. Cedar LNG is under development with Haisla majority ownership. The communities the protest claimed to speak for are, in significant numbers, building prosperity on their own terms.

The same networks are now mobilizing against PRGT. The route occupation is in place. The foundation money is flowing. The faith group letters have gone out. The arson has already occurred.

Whether the outcome is different this time depends on a narrow set of decisions by a narrow set of institutions — and most of those decisions are not about the opposition. They will do what they do. The decisions are about whether the organizations that claim to support Indigenous economic sovereignty are prepared to name what they’re looking at when they see it: an apparatus that has adapted to target Indigenous economic actors when Indigenous communities refuse to be kept poor by people claiming to protect them.

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The opposition to Coastal GasLink and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project did not emerge organically from affected communities — it was architected. The strategic logic is coherent enough to suggest a single coordinating intelligence: shift the fight from regulatory and legal terrain, where proponents hold advantages, to the terrain of legitimacy, where projects can be made uninsurable, unbankable, and politically untouchable regardless of what courts or regulators decide. Central to that logic was the discovery that Indigenous solidarity framing was the one weapon the Canadian political class could not parry — not because the underlying Indigenous opposition was manufactured, but because it could be selectively amplified, sustained, and exported in ways that suppressed the far more numerous Indigenous voices who had chosen partnership and economic participation.

The long-term vulnerability in this strategy has always been the same: if the communities directly in the project footprint ultimately speak for themselves — and many did, through elected councils, benefit agreements, and employment — the delegitimization architecture loses its load-bearing wall. Keeping that story out of mainstream circulation was not incidental to the campaign. It was the campaign.

The documentation is now public. The networks are named. The funding is traced. What the institutions that shape Canadian public discourse do with that record is the test — not of the opposition, which has been tested and found consistent — but of everyone else.

The window for a different outcome at PRGT is not indefinite. The same alignment of economic anxiety, geopolitical urgency, and Indigenous ownership ambition that makes this moment an opportunity makes delay a compounding cost. What gets decided in the next few years will shape the operating environment for a generation.

The federal government has made its position explicit. Referring Ksi Lisims to the Major Projects Office in November 2025, Prime Minister Carney declared that Prime Minister Carney declared that “Canada is moving from reliance to resilience. By developing our critical mineral deposits, our clean electricity production, and our LNG export capacity, we are unleashing Canada’s economic potential and securing long-term prosperity for all Canadians.” Ksi Lisims, he said, will be “one of the world’s cleanest LNG operations” with emissions 94 per cent below the global average once fully electrified. The demand signal from customer countries is unambiguous. India, aiming to increase natural gas from six per cent to fifteen per cent of its energy mix, is actively courting Canadian supply. The European Union has ordered a complete halt to Russian LNG imports, with all long-term contracts required to end by January 2027. Japan and South Korea are structurally dependent on LNG imports and actively seeking supply diversification. A December 2025 analysis by the Public Policy Forum found that Canadian LNG used for electricity generation in Japan, South Korea, China, or India would deliver a fifty per cent emissions reduction compared to domestic coal. These are the countries the opposition has never had to answer to. They are asking for what the Nisga’a Nation is positioned to supply, from infrastructure that an arsonist tried to stop.

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This is not journalism I could have done from a desk. It began years before the first word of Manufacturing Dissent was written — with the Homeland Journey project, a trip I made nearly a decade ago with my son Alex and colleague Margareta Dovgal, filming all the way along Highway 16. It was an adventure filled with more learning than I knew at the time how to use. I travelled with Antonia Mills’ Eagle Down Is Our Law — the authoritative account of Wet’suwet’en governance, feast system, and land tenure, and the evidentiary foundation for the Delgamuukw case, the landmark 1997 Supreme Court ruling that established Aboriginal title in Canadian law. That precedent-setting case was built on the oral histories and territorial knowledge of both the Wet’suwet’en and the Gitxsan — neighbours, relatives, joint travellers on the same long journey through this territory and through the Canadian courts. The book became critically dog-eared as my own understanding deepened.

I found myself in growing awe of the civilization that has fascinated all who have come to encounter it: the feast system, the governance of the Wilps, the relationship to territory that is simultaneously spiritual, legal, and practical in ways that defy simple summary. We accepted invitations into First Nations communities with humility and gratitude, sat in community halls and walked on the land itself, and listened to people tell me what their lives actually looked like, what they wanted for their children, what they feared losing.

Anyone who wants to understand the pride, the hurt, and the complexity of the Gitxsan experience should seek out the new film “I Am Gitxsan.” It leaves you with the recognition that there are no edges to this story — that choosing sides is not what progress looks like, and that this is a journey which can only be completed if a great deal of healing takes place. That understanding is not a detour from the economic and political questions this series has tried to answer. It is the ground on which any real answer has to be built.

We went to where the work was being done. We saw the camps, the equipment, the workers — Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike — who were building something they believed in. That foundation of direct experience is what made it possible, eventually, to recognize the gap between the story being told in national media and the story we had witnessed with our own eyes. Resource Works exists in that gap.

I have always felt the pull to match the opposition’s heat with heat of our own, but I believed the only way to make this story stick was to be the kind of voice that could not be easily dismissed — factual when others were impressionistic, firm without being cruel, fair even to people whose conduct I find troubling, and genuinely kind, because many of the people caught in these events were navigating pressures I cannot fully claim to understand. I cannot say I always got that balance right. But it was always the goal, and it shaped every choice in this work. The point was never to win an argument. It was to make the truth of what happened impossible to ignore.

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This concludes Manufacturing Dissent, a five-part series examining the Coastal GasLink protests and their aftermath.

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