Whose voices were silenced?

“The world thinks the matriarchs are behind all the protests going on and that’s not true. None of the matriarchs were contacted. If I keep quiet, if I don’t come forward to address our point of view, it will look like we are supporters. We are not.”

— Rita George, matriarch and hereditary subchief

•  •  •

The Coastal GasLink conflict was broadcast to the world as a story of Indigenous resistance. But the most important question about those protests was never seriously asked: whose voices were chosen to represent the Wet’suwet’en people, and who did the choosing?

Economic reconciliation is the messy, democratic work of Indigenous communities weighing risks, opportunities, and their own futures. That work becomes impossible when outside voices drown out internal deliberation. Environmental groups and activists, as CBC reported, “took advantage of existing tensions and differing views on CGL within Indigenous communities,” creating further division and resentment for the protesters within the community.

This probe is not an argument that Wet’suwet’en women who opposed the pipeline were illegitimate or unworthy of respect. Some opposition was rooted in sincere duties of land protection and a coherent moral framework. One protest champion, Freda Huson, articulated those responsibilities plainly. Another, Molly Wickham, pursued her cause with determination. In small communities, many people who once clashed intensely still live side by side. Time has restored perspective, at least temporarily.

The critique here is narrower. It is about how outside organizations, the pursuit of media attention, and professional activist infrastructure distorted internal decision-making—amplifying a handful of voices over the many, while remaining blind to the lateral violence and community harm they helped set in motion. With Canada now reassessing its trade relationships, how these dynamics unfold has consequences far beyond a single pipeline route.

The riddle of the Bulkley Valley

Around the time of these events, I travelled extensively through the Bulkley Valley, where key components of an ambitious, climate-positive, nation-building project were being built—one that was completed in July 2025 and will have the impact of removing approximately 41 million cars from the road annually.

Outside of the project opponents’ blockades, built for the insta-media age, and beyond the screens where it seemed like the whole world was screaming not to build the pipeline, the project was not controversial. The Resource Works frontline roving team I led had no trouble whatsoever finding supporters of this progress from the local Wet’suwet’en community. Strong support or studied indifference was the most common thing I heard.

It was a riddle. Very white, non-Indigenous students in downtown Toronto were on the streets proclaiming they “stood with” the Wet’suwet’en, and they were all over the news. Yet in Wet’suwet’en country itself, the real picture was unrecognizable from the one being broadcast to the world. This is what I documented during the years of conflict.

A soon-to-be dog-eared copy of the legendary Eagle Down Is Our Law accompanied my travels—a book published from a court-commissioned body of research developed by an anthropologist into the extraordinarily complex Wet’suwet’en-Gitxsan traditional culture. It is the touchstone of documented knowledge of an ancient civilization from these lands, one precariously damaged by residential schools and colonialism. Reading it was a rebuke to the simplistic and misleading characterizations about “elected versus hereditary” chiefs that were quickly being circulated in the media, having been shaped by the environmentalist lobby.

Terry Glavin’s Death Feast in Dimlahamid also accompanied our travels. Written decades earlier, it offered another window into the depth of what outsiders were flattening into slogans. When my co-researcher Margareta Dovgal flagged Terry on a brilliant tweet thread of hers that sought to unravel what we were seeing, Glavin gave his seal of approval to our reading.

Even the household of Freda Huson, a valiant exponent of not building the pipeline, contained the contradiction in miniature: I would discover that Huson shared her life with a millworker husband who did not share his wife’s outlook on resource jobs. This single detail captures what no protest placard or media narrative could: the Wet’suwet’en relationship with resource development was not a simple binary of resistance and extraction. It was a living, complicated, household-level negotiation— a fact that did not fit into the polarizations settled on this remote landscape by outside voices. 

Dirtying the blanket

I began to see firsthand that the very traditions the blockaders claimed to stand up for were being inverted by their actions.

The taking of regalia outside of the feast hall—a practice the protest movement relied on heavily for its imagery—was, I soon discovered, something like an archbishop appearing at street protests in mitre and vestments. To my new Wet’suwet’en contacts, this was “dirtying the blanket” of devout members—a violation of sacred protocols, not a defence of them. This insight came from a pro-project voice who proved, herself, to have hereditary association with an ancestral name. She was not some outside critic. She was a keeper of the tradition being appropriated for cameras.

This was not a failure of mainstream journalism so much as a fait accompli. By the time the sort of reporters you should trust had even leaned in to find out what the real story was, British Columbia’s ever-inventive radical press had shaped this wet clay into an anti-truth bomb for the information age. A full-fledged culture war, climate apocalypse, incipient police state—or so you might have thought. The protest movement’s visual power—regalia, ceremony, the language of land and water—translated instantly for audiences thousands of kilometres away who had no framework for understanding that what they were watching might itself be a desecration of the culture being invoked.

‘Only warriors willing to rise are welcome here’

The disconnect between the protest movement’s claims and Indigenous reality was not limited to the Bulkley Valley. It was on display wherever the movement projected itself.

During the solidarity protests, the B.C. Legislature in Victoria was surrounded and later occupied by demonstrators claiming to stand with the Wet’suwet’en. The leader of a neighbouring First Nation happened to be in Victoria on other business. He went for an evening stroll and walked up to see the occupation for himself. What followed, as he recounted in a Facebook post, captures the absurdity with a precision no outside observer could match.

A young woman in her early twenties approached him and asked if he was there “in solidarity with us and the Wet’suwet’en.” He asked a simple question: which portion of the Wet’suwet’en was she talking about, exactly? She told him to come back during the “resistance rallies” if he wanted to be “educated on the issues.” He pressed: which Wet’suwet’en people or individuals, specifically? Her reply: “If you’re not standing with us and part of the resistance, you need to leave. Only warriors willing to rise are welcome here.”

Two young men with their faces covered in bandanas gathered around her. When the Indigenous leader suggested that anyone pretending to know the collective opinion of the Wet’suwet’en Nation was being naive, one told him to “educate yourself about the Royal Proclamation and Indigenous issues.” The other said: “You need to leave now. I suggest you read some books.”

An Indigenous leader—on the steps of his own province’s legislature—being told by non-Indigenous protesters to educate himself about Indigenous issues, and ordered to leave if he was not “part of the resistance.”

His conclusion, posted publicly, deserves to be quoted at length: “What’s happening at the Legislature right now is absolutely disgraceful and embarrassing to this Province and its citizens, including Indigenous peoples, on so many levels. There must be someone out there willing to get a helicopter full of strong female Wet’suwet’en Elders that’ll put a verbal whipping and knowledge session on these young people and set them straight. This is getting so ridiculous that it doesn’t even feel real anymore.”

A helicopter full of strong female Wet’suwet’en Elders. That was the remedy an Indigenous leader saw for a protest movement claiming to defend Indigenous governance. Not more allies, not more funding, not more media coverage—but the actual matriarchs, who had been kept out of the frame. This was one of the things that flashed through my mind later, during the time when the train tracks were blocked in Hazelton, and I had run for the car when an angry protest leader threatened to beat me up as I interviewed a young Gitxsan man who told me about his job in a mine, letting slip that he didn’t have an issue with the pipeline project.

How Wet’suwet’en governance actually works

Wet’suwet’en traditional governance is matriarchal. Women hold hereditary titles, name chiefs, and can remove them. Decisions are not handed down by a single authority. They are made collectively, in community halls, through a process designed to build consensus.

Theresa Tait Day (Wi’hali’yte), a hereditary subchief in the House Beside the Fire (Kun Beghyukh) of the Small Frog Clan (Laksilyu), described this system when she testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs on March 10, 2020. Trained by her grandparents to take on her hereditary leadership role, Tait Day’s family had been directly involved in the landmark Calder and Delgamuukw-Gisdaway rights and title cases, and in the founding of the Native Brotherhood of B.C. She had spent nearly a decade as Director of Native Programs at the Legal Services Society of B.C. She was no outsider to Wet’suwet’en tradition. She was its product.

What Tait Day told Parliament aligned precisely with what Eagle Down Is Our Law had prepared me to understand. Hereditary chiefs do not rule alone. They make decisions collectively. People are allowed to speak. An effort is made to work toward consensus. At the end, the community and band-elected chiefs inform the hereditary chiefs of the community’s message to be shared publicly.

That is what Indigenous governance looks like: consultative, collective, consensus-driven. Not a handful of voices amplified from the outside while matriarchs and majorities are sidelined.

The matriarchs who were silenced

During the Coastal GasLink protests, matriarchal leaders who supported the project were not merely overruled—they were removed from governance and replaced with male representatives. Rita George was one. Theresa Tait Day was another. The female chiefs then challenged the authority of the male chiefs at the Office of the Wet’suwet’en to sign an agreement with provincial and federal governments on behalf of the Nation.

Tait Day was co-founder and president of the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition (WMC), an organization with representation from five Wet’suwet’en clans. The WMC had been asked in 2015 by the hereditary chiefs themselves, and by the community at large, to facilitate a decision-making process for major projects including LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink.

But that mandated work was undermined. As Tait Day told Parliament, it had been “challenged by lateral violence and coercive control of our governing institutions.”

She told the committee directly: “As a female Wet’suwet’en member, hereditary chief and community leader, I want to be involved and have a voice in decision-making impacting my community. That is our way. But women’s voices are not being heard because of the male hereditary chiefs working to quiet us.”

The irony is sharp. A governance system designed to be matriarchal was captured by a small number of male hereditary chiefs, and the organizations that amplified those chiefs marketed themselves as defenders of Indigenous tradition.

Lateral violence

It was here, for the first time, that I encountered a term I’d never heard: lateral violence. I had to look it up. It means aggression directed not at the powerful, but at those closest to you—a pattern of acting out from a place of powerlessness and intergenerational trauma.

What I heard as I travelled through the Bulkley Valley would leave anyone despondent. Arson. Physical threats. Intimidation. And beneath the headlines, a silent litany of daily harm that shook me to my core as I heard the stories from the matriarchs. What they wanted was not abstract. Warm homes. Safe elders. Children not ending their own lives. The protests had not brought any of these things closer. They had made the conversations needed to address them harder.

I do not blame local First Nations members who took a position opposing the project. Their grief and alienation became a tool wielded by people who would never live with the consequences.

One little reported incident crystallized what was happening to governance and community. In February 2021, one of the high-profile male hereditary chiefs at the centre of the anti-pipeline movement, John Ridsdale (Chief Na’Moks), went to a neighbour’s home at night and shot and killed her dog, Bailey. The neighbour, Liz George, was reported to be a supporter of the pipeline project. Ridsdale faced four charges—possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose, careless use of a firearm, trespassing at night, and killing an animal.

George told the Post she was scared to leave her house afterward. “I’m having nightmares of that night,” she said, “hearing the gunshot and my poor dog yelping in pain.” When she asked the band council why they couldn’t act against Ridsdale as they would against a drug dealer, she said they were “trying to shove it all under the carpet.” She hoped there would be some closure from the guilty plea. “I’m trying to gather some supporters and people to make signs and come down to the courthouse to support me on that day,” she said.

This was one of the five hereditary chiefs held up by the protest movement and its media allies as a defender of Wet’suwet’en law and territory. Later, he pleaded guilty. What did this say about the matriarchy the movement claimed to honour? About the patriarchy that had displaced it?

The wall of portraits

It was hard to decide the most devastating knowledge I took on board in those days. But I think it was the evening spent dining at the home of one hereditary chief—a quiet, lower-ranking matriarch from a proud lineage.

In her living room after a nourishing stew, we sat and listened to an account of family—a story illustrated by the wall filled with portraits of people no longer with us.

It echoed a day I had spent decades earlier as a young journalist, sittingwith a bedridden matriarch in Shalalth, on the edge of Seton Lake, as she combed through a stack of photo albums ferried to her bedside by young relatives. Leafing through them, she gave me a knowing of each gone family member—the elders, but also the younger, the ones killed by alcohol and cars, and accidents in police cells. Modern life had cruelly extinguished so many lives, in a way that my own middle-class urban upbringing had not prepared me for—a litany of early deaths that wreaked havoc on natural succession.

In the Bulkley Valley, the wall of portraits told the same story with a political dimension that made it devastating. The gaps were not just in a family. They were in the hereditary structure itself. Slowly it dawned on me how the ancient Wet’suwet’en governance system had been completely disrupted by those same forces of modernity—the same pattern of early deaths, the same broken lines of succession. No living successor to a chiefly position, so it sits vacant, leaving the present generation’s duty to ancestors and seven future generations tragically unfilled. A cultural and family situation that the protest movement had seized upon, resulting in confusion to claim authority that could never have existed in the system as it was meant to function.

Yet for this woman—this matriarch—what was there to do but keep moving forward? What was the alternative?

I left shaken, as I had been so often in taking on the knowledge of this proud, battered, yet magnificent land, where earthly troubles have a way of vanishing when you lift your head to view the splendour of Hudson Bay Mountain, known to the Wet’suwet’en as Dzilh Yez. The mountain does not take sides. It keeps watch. So do the matriarchs, long after the cameras and the protesters have gone.

Who chose the spokespeople?

The answer, in practical terms, was that outsiders did the choosing. Environmental organizations and protest networks did not simply amplify a minority—they exploited a real, pre-existing tension between hereditary and elected leadership, and weaponized it.

They selectively elevated the hereditary chiefs who opposed the pipeline while ignoring matriarchal leaders who banked on some welcome uplift, hereditary chiefs who found a position of support, the many community members who didn’t oppose it, and elected band councils that had negotiated agreements.

This was not accidental. It was strategic. The spokespeople of the protests were Indigenous, and the protests had the support of some hereditary chiefs, but the majority of protesters were not Indigenous, not Wet’suwet’en, and not from the region. This was acknowledged as early as 2014, when protest leader Warner Naziel (Dini Ze Toghestly) publicly noted the reality on social media. During the height of opposition in 2020, when arrests were being made, roughly 70 per cent of the people taken into custody were not from the area—some from other parts of B.C., some from other provinces, two from the United States.

Outside supporters were careful to ensure that images, video, and media coverage primarily showed Indigenous faces. This is a common tactic across protest movements: the optics of Indigenous resistance, managed by non-Indigenous organizers.

Tait Day named this pattern directly in her testimony. The protest organizers, she said, were “conveniently hiding beneath our blanket as Indigenous people, while forcing their policy goals at our expense.” She added: “This compromises our Nation’s social well-being and our people’s economic futures.”

Hiding beneath our blanket as Indigenous people. This is an Indigenous matriarchal leader’s description of activists exploiting Indigenous identity to advance a separate agenda.

MP Cathy McLeod identified the same dynamic in the House of Commons in 2020: “What we have here is not a classic conflict between Indigenous people and resource developers… I wonder if their motivation is supporting the hereditary chiefs as much as moving their own agendas forward. It seems that a vast majority of the action has been initiated by activists who are willing to engage selectively in the politics of Indigenous rights and will actually weaken the people they claim to be supporting.”

The quiet majority

When Wet’suwet’en communities tested support through votes and surveys, the message was not subtle: the project had clear majority backing. A Witset survey found that 80 per cent of respondents supported Coastal GasLink. Eighty per cent of Burns Lake Indian Band voters supported it too.

The numbers told a story that the protest coverage did not. All twenty elected First Nations governments along the approved Coastal GasLink route signed project agreements. As of January 2020, over 350 Indigenous women and men—including Wet’suwet’en members—were already working on the project. Indigenous businesses had been awarded $620 million in contract work, with an additional estimated $400 million in contract and employment opportunities available during pipeline construction.

And yet many supporters stayed quiet. Tait Day told Parliament that citizens who supported Coastal GasLink were reluctant to speak out in such a polarized environment. Candice George put it more plainly on CKNW: “Non-Indigenous people are speaking up… the blockades are causing further harm in our community.”

I cannot decide what was the most moving thing I encountered among the matriarchs of Wet’suwet’en country. But the enchanting berry-picking song sung for us travellers by Candice George stays with me. George hailed from the eastern reaches of the territory, where her people spoke a different language—Dakelh—than the Wet’suwet’en. Yet the song was set in the gently sloped western reaches of the Morice River valley, the very place where the theatrical protest antics were revving up—lands where her people had picked berries since ancestral times.

Only then did I grasp a fact that the protest narrative had entirely obscured: the allegedly exclusive Wet’suwet’en lands claimed by the protesters as their own sovereign domain are, in fact, the very same lands where the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council asserts its own territorial claim. The movement’s story depended on a clean, simple line of jurisdiction—one Nation, one voice, one answer. The reality, as Candice George’s song quietly testified, was that these lands held overlapping histories, overlapping peoples, and overlapping claims that the protest movement had no interest in acknowledging, because complexity was the enemy of its narrative.

McLeod quoted Candice George’s description of what elders told her when she asked how they felt about people who are not Wet’suwet’en protesting without asking for their guidance. The answer, George said, was: “Why do they do that? I’m right here. My tongue is not broken.”

My tongue is not broken. Those five words capture the entire problem. Elders and matriarchs did not need anyone to speak for them. They were silenced anyway.

The outside architecture

The involvement of outside groups was not incidental. It was invited, cultivated, and eventually industrialized.

In the early years, the Unist’ot’en camp sought independence from outside influence. That changed around 2015, when leaders identified groups that could grow the movement through funding, public awareness, media, and other support. Freda Huson herself described the shift in a 2014 interview: “We decided as a clan that we did not have skills to do peaceful and safe demonstrations. We constructed a cabin in the GPS route of Enbridge and PTP. So invited groups like Indigenous Environmental Network, Ruckus Society, and Council of Canadians to assist in organizing our first annual action camp.”

What began as a request for help became a full protest infrastructure. Organizations like Dogwood provided media amplification to an aligned urban audience, mobilized letter-writing campaigns, and provided direct media relations support — including accompanying protesters who disabled CGL machinery. Certain media outlets embedded with the blockade and consistently provided coverage that celebrated the protest narrative, finding supporting evidence in everything they reported.

The same professional protesters appeared across multiple campaigns. The same tactics—tree sits, cantilever logs, people chaining themselves to driveshafts, “hedgehog” barricades—showed up at both Coastal GasLink and the Fairy Creek logging protests on Vancouver Island. Self-described eco-anarchist Anton Bueckert, arrested at a CGL protest, said the alignment was deliberate: anarchists, he explained, have for years been “supporting the indigenous factions whose politics are resonant with theirs.”

The escalation had consequences—consequences that remain unresolved to this day. On October 26, 2021, eight vehicles, half of them RCMP, were torched. Just a week earlier, protest figurehead Molly Wickham had publicly suggested that “Indigenous warriors and anarchists” work together. A CBC investigation, “When Anarchists Attack,” later traced the connection between this deliberate alliance and what came next.

In the early morning hours of February 17, 2022, a mob of 15 to 20 masked people spilled out of the forest 60 kilometres from Houston, B.C., near the remote Morice River drill pad site. Some cut locks on a barrier so that those armed with axes, flare guns, and other tools could temporarily take over the worksite. Frightened security guards and nightshift workers were powerless as the mob destroyed heavy machinery and portable buildings, scrawling graffiti slogans like “Land Back” and “CGL Evict.” Damage was severe, widespread, and in the millions. RCMP officers dispatched to the scene were blocked by fallen trees and bonfires on the road. One officer stepped on a board with nails embedded in it.

Notes to a Parliamentary Committee at the end of April 2022 suggested the incident was inevitable. “The recent arrival of several known individuals from other major Canadian Indigenous protests have amplified the situation,” the document said. “An increase in inflamed rhetoric, making public references to ‘war’ and direct action against police and industry have been prominent on social media amongst key members of the protest groups, and at protest sites.”

Following the incident, the number of on-site protesters dropped significantly. The violence had finally exceeded what the local community could tolerate. But the damage—to property, to trust, to the matriarchs’ ability to be heard—was done.

The illusion and the duty

But a voice inside me said: surely the other side—those building a project intruding into the lightly populated lands of the region—had its own things to answer for? Yet on close examination, the project had been through years of process. The doctrine of ESG was firmly established. The rule of law had given the courts a say to anyone able to bring forward a case. The project was legitimate, accepted, and deemed by the highest authority in a democratic nation to be in the national interest.

In the place the Wet’suwet’en call Wedzin Kwa, the scales fell from our eyes. Nearly everything about the anti-project movement was an illusion—spare the authentic and legitimate duty of care held by those Wet’suwet’en members who stood up for proper practices in their yintah. That duty was real. The infrastructure built around it was not.

Noam Chomsky wrote about the manufacturing of consent—how power structures shape public agreement through media and institutional pressure. What we were witnessing in the Bulkley Valley was its mirror image: the manufacturing of dissent. A deliberate, funded, strategically staged campaign to construct the appearance of opposition where broad support already existed—to make a community’s yes sound like a no, and to broadcast that fabricated no to the world.

It was a case of any tactic justifying the means in a propaganda war. And the casualties of that war were not the pipeline executives or the government ministers. They were the matriarchs, the elders, the 80 per cent—the people whose silence was mistaken for consent to a movement that did not speak for them.

What they were actually saying yes to

Majority support was not a vote for a pipe. It was a vote for jobs, training, local business contracts, revenue for community priorities, and a fundamental shift from being consulted to being partners.

Tait Day asked Parliament for something specific: for the federal government to provide the resources necessary for the Wet’suwet’en Nation to co-develop a path forward for economic reconciliation. Not charity. Not consultation as a box-ticking exercise. Partnership and a voice.

The direction of history is now bearing out the matriarchs’ position. The Haisla Nation is the majority owner of Cedar LNG. The Nisga’a Nation has a stake in the Ksi Lisims LNG project and has announced plans to buy the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline. Indigenous ownership and equity in natural gas development is increasing precisely because communities said yes—and fought to be heard when others tried to say no on their behalf.

Sovereignty includes the right to say yes—even when outsiders disagree.

Eco-colonialism by another name

Some Indigenous leaders have a term for what played out around Coastal GasLink: eco-colonialism. Others have called environmental groups who oppose development on Indigenous territories “latter day missionaries.”

The old missionaries arrived saying: we know what’s best for you—accept our values. The new missionaries arrive saying: we know what’s best for you—reject your economic aspirations and accept our environmental values instead.

When activists and institutions amplify only the Indigenous voices that fit a predetermined anti-development narrative, they are not practising reconciliation. They are practising paternalism with a green flag.

And when a governance system that was designed to centre women’s authority is captured by a small group of male chiefs—and that capture is cheered on by organizations that call themselves progressive—the word for that is not allyship. It is the oldest pattern in colonial history, wearing new clothes.

What true reconciliation requires

Reconciliation means Indigenous communities decide which voices count, and what economic future they want.

It means respecting matriarchs, majorities, and elected agreements—even when the answer is yes.

It means calling this pattern by its name: eco-colonialism dressed up as allyship.

And it means listening, finally, to the voices that were made to disappear. Rita George spoke up because silence would be misread as support. Candice George watched non-Indigenous protesters speak over Wet’suwet’en people while causing, in her words, “further harm.” Theresa Tait Day travelled to Ottawa to warn Parliament that protest organizers were hiding beneath her people’s blanket. An unnamed elder, asked what she thought of outsiders protesting without guidance, replied with five words that should anchor every conversation about this conflict.

My tongue is not broken.

•  •  •

Four years later, no one has been charged for the February 17, 2022, attack on the Coastal GasLink drill site—the most costly unsolved act of domestic terrorism in Canadian history.

Ten months after the attack, with seemingly no leads, the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, along with Crime Stoppers, advertised a $100,000 reward seeking information leading to the arrest and charge of anyone involved. It remains unclaimed.

More action has unfolded in the courts, but not around February 17, 2022. Last October, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen decided that three protesters arrested in the preceding November would not face further jail time. Among them was Molly Wickham—the same leader who had publicly called for an alliance between “Indigenous warriors and anarchists” just weeks before the attack.

RCMP Chief Superintendent John Brewer said more than six suspects had been identified. The attack, he said, was “planned, practised, and carried out in a very methodical manner.”

Planned. Practised. Methodical.

Who planned it? Who funded it? Who provided the logistics for 15 to 20 people to appear out of a frozen forest, execute a coordinated assault, and vanish on snowmobiles—leaving behind fallen trees, bonfires, and a board studded with nails?

The matriarchs know what the silence costs. The rest of Canada is about to find out.

•  •  •

Coming Monday, February 24:

Part 3 — “The Protest Industrial Complex”

Following the money. Tracing the networks. And closing in on the night of February 17, 2022.

•  •  •

Stewart Muir is a Canadian journalist and the CEO of Resource Works. This is the second instalment in “Manufacturing Dissent,” his five-part series examining how the Coastal GasLink protests became a cautionary tale about Indigenous economic sovereignty.