The Wetʼsuwetʼen are a First Nation who live on the Bulkley River and around Burns Lake, Broman Lake, and François Lake in the northwestern Central Interior of British Columbia.
They speak Witsuwitʼen, a dialect of the Babine-Witsuwitʼen language which, like its sister language Carrier, is a member of the Athabaskan family.
Their oral history, called kungax, recounts that their ancestral village, Dizkle or Dzilke, once stood upstream from the Bulkley Canyon. This cluster of cedar houses on both sides of the river is said to have been abandoned because of an omen of impending disaster. The exact location of the village has been lost. The neighbouring Gitxsan people of the Hazelton area have a similar tale, though the village in their version is named Dimlahamid (Temlahan)
The endonym Wetʼsuwetʼen means “People of the Wa Dzun Kwuh River (Bulkley River)”
The Wet’suwet’en First Nation was formerly part of the Omineca Band. However, in 1984 the Omineca Band split into the Broman Lake and Nee-Tahi-Buhn bands. The Skin Tayi band later split off from Nee-Tahi-Buhn. Today, the Skin Tyee Band, Nee Tahi Buhn Band, Wet’suwet’en First Nation, Moricetown Band and Hagwilget Band make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.
In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area.
Another conflict with the settler state has been the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which seeks to transport liquefied natural gas from northeast BC to a terminal on the coast near the town of Kitimat.
The 670-kilometre (417-mile) pipeline will cut across traditional Wet’suwet’en lands that cover 22,000sq km across northern BC.
The hereditary chiefs, who under Wet’suwet’en law claim authority over those traditional territories, said they never gave their consent for the project to move forward. They have raised concerns about the pipeline’s potential effects on the land, water, and their community.
In late July, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step in naming Dsta’hyl Canada’s first ever designated prisoner of conscience, and now demanding his immediate and unconditional release.
“The Canadian state has unjustly criminalized and confined Chief Dsta’hyl for defending the land and rights of the Wet’suwet’en people,” Amnesty International’s Ana Piquer stated in a press release. “As a result, Canada joins the shameful list of countries where prisoners of conscience remain under house arrest or behind bars.”
In October 2021, Dsta’hyl was arrested and charged with criminal contempt after confiscating and decommissioning heavy equipment utilized by Coastal GasLink to construct its LNG pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. Dsta’hyl said he was enforcing Wet’suwet’en laws as the company did not have the free, prior and informed consent of hereditary chiefs to build the pipeline.
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Veteran status as a protected class in and outside the US is on my mind because of the general outrage at the Twitch streamer Frogan for saying “U.S. military, boo-fucking-hoo, I hope you get PTSD”. You may have heard of Frogan from being banned by Twitch for a month for participating in a hummus tier list.
https://hexbear.net/post/3733513
Something however that was less talked about was the push from liberal/right wing people attempting to get her de-platformed for discrimination against veterans which are under US law considered a protected class against illegal discrimination along with race, religion, country of origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability, et cetera. Even in Twitch’s guidelines this is explicitly stated.
From my perspective one of these things is not quite like the others. This seems like a very US brained thing to include in your terms of service especially in an international company where there is an international community of streamers who may be veterans of many different armies. Let’s say for example someone who served in the Taliban started Twitch streaming and was talking about their experience gunning down Yankees. I would strongly assume the same people who wanted Frogan de-platformed, would also want this hypothetical person de-platformed, but this person would be by definition a veteran and thus included as a protected person and could not be taken down for talking about their war experiences if they were consistent with what they claim/pretend to be their values. This thought experiment is basically just to highlight that it is incredibly unlikely that this “protected characteristic” would be actually treated consistently by those invoking it.
I think there is almost nothing to do about this on US run platforms like Twitch as a streamer who cares about not being banned. You should probably just never mention veterans because at any point if you say something even somewhat controversial you could be banned for discrimination/hate against veterans. In the eyes of the Twitch terms of service saying you wish PTSD to US veterans, even if those veterans are war criminals, is equivalent to saying you wish HIV to US gay people. I think this will be weaponized more and more especially since people will see that Frogan got banned for a month for an unspecified reason and will try to use this same strategy to attack people who criticize IDF/US soldiers and get people banned for talking about war crimes and other atrocities, and this is now going to start being considered a legitimate vector to de-platform people on spaces like Twitch.