This weekend’s video is a short trailer for the documentary The water protectors’ journey. This film about the Alton Gas resistance documents a journey along the Sipekne’katik River, which leads to a sacred island known to the Mi’kmaq as the traditional campsite of Glooscap’s grandmother. The full film premieres in Halifax this Saturday March 31.
News release by Alton Gas water protectors: “Sipekne’katik/Fort Ellis — Alton Gas has posted signs outside the Treaty Camp at the Shubenacadie River naming water protectors on site as trespassers and criminals. Grassroots Mi’kmaq water protectors have been holding down a protection camp at the Shubenacadie River for nine months to prevent Alton Gas from dumping thousands of tons of salt brine into the sacred river every day. They are outraged by Alton Gas’ bully tactics and intent to resume work on the project without allowing Sipekne’katik to complete its community consultation process.”
This weekend’s video is about the Alton Gas water protectors who need a bit of solidarity and support because strawbale houses don’t build themselves.
New contributor Lori Oliver, who grew up in the Digby area, takes a look at the tensions between white and Mi’kmaq lobster fishers in South West Nova Scotia. The issues go deeper than most newspaper reports suggests, she writes, poverty, racism and colonialism are at the root of the current problems.
Retired school teacher Carolyn van Gurp offers up a brief and powerful lesson to Halifax mayor and councillors. “You have a chance on Tuesday evening to begin to right years of wrong by placing the symbol of this treaty violation and subsequent atrocity where it belongs, in history books and a museum, not on a pedestal in a public park. Please make the decision to remove or relocate this statue in time for us all to truly celebrate Treaty Day together in October.”
This week’s brand new weekend video shows highlights from the recent town hall tour organized by a coalition of individuals and groups opposed to the Alton Gas development. It seems only shareholders and politicians are in favour of the Alton Gas project. Everybody else, not so much.
A quick read on how all that focus on “conquered people”, shameful as it is, ignores a larger question. How come government lawyer Alex Cameron was allowed to make a very similar argument in June?
A group of Haligonians headed out in the drizzle to Victoria Park last night to express their disapproval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. In doing so they joined many others in similar events from coast to coast. Also very much on their mind were the water defenders of Standing Rock Sioux Reserve, where police violence seems to escalate by the day. Art Bouman reports.
Premier McNeil has said he didn’t know that a government lawyer was calling the Mi’kmaq a conquered people in court, and the duty to consult non-existent. The language may have been more subdued, but that same lawyer made the same argument in June, and that he held these controversial views was widely known.
Arguing in court that the Sipekne’katik Band is a conquered people and that therefore the duty to consult does not apply is exactly the wrong thing to do for the McNeil government, writes contributor Art Bouman. But he isn’t surprised, it’s all about money and fossil fuels.