Photos and text by Bronwyn Cragg, YCLer in Toronto (Dorise Nielsen club)
On Saturday, December 11, Indigenous people and their allies held a rally and march in Toronto. Starting from Nathan Phillips Square, the rally featured several prominent speakers, including Mohawk Turtle Clan filmmaker Layla Black, Land Back Lane activist Skyler Williams, and Anishinaabekwe educator and artist Briskool, among others. The rally was organized and promoted by Rising Tide Toronto, a grassroots collective that focuses on Indigenous struggles and the impact of environmental exploitation on Turtle Island.
For over a decade, Wet’suwet’en land defenders have been attempting to block construction of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline through the Yintah, their unceded territory (in British Columbia). If constructed, the CGL pipeline would run through 190 km of land that legally belongs to the Wet’suwet’en people, not the Government of Canada. After the RCMP detained and removed land defenders from the Yintah in early 2019, construction work began on the pipeline. In late 2019, land defenders again erected a blockade of their territory, and CGL was granted an injunction in court to continue construction.
February 2020 saw a second court injunction and several arrests of Indigenous people by the RCMP, which have continued into this year. Similar shameful scenes have been echoed in Secwepemc territory (near Kamloops, BC) against the Trans Mountain Pipeline, and in Ontario at 1492 Land Back Lane. These “removals” of Indigenous people by the RCMP and local police forces directly contradict the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, passed in 2007, which Canada opposed for being “fundamentally incompatible with Canada’s constitutional framework.” This has been made especially clear by Canada’s colonial police forces over the past few years.
Before beginning to march, Skyler Williams was one of the rally’s final speakers. Williams is well known for his activism at 1492 Land Back Lane, where a housing development in Ontario has been attempting to encroach on Haudenosaunee territory. On Wednesday, December 22, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Skyler Williams had previously been denied an opportunity to be heard in court, scrapped the long-standing injunctions against the land defenders, and ruled that the housing development must pay him $20,000 in legal costs.
During the march through downtown Toronto, activists stopped at multiple major Canadian banks. Some occupied the nearby TD Canada Trust, hanging a banner that read “RCMP out of Wet’suwet’en land.” TD and several other Canadian banks (including RBC, BMO, Scotiabank, and CIBC) have been key shareholders in the development of the CGL pipeline, contributing over $200 million of working capital to the project. They are joined by a number of international shareholders, including JPMorgan Chase and the National Australia Bank (the latter of which hides behind a so-called “Indigenous Australian Support Line” and “Reconciliation Action Plan” in Australia, despite its huge investment into illegal incursions onto Indigenous territory).
Over 600 people participated in the rally and march. Much of it was filmed and livestreamed by Rising Tide Toronto.
The speeches from the rally can be viewed here, through Facebook.