Coast Salish Territories: Indigenous Land Defenders Denounce Criminalization at Burnaby Mountain - It's Going Down

9.4.18

Coast Salish Territories: Indigenous Land Defenders Denounce Criminalization at Burnaby Mountain - It's Going Down: Suntree recently traveled to Burnaby to stand with Coast Salish peoples to defend their collective Indigenous rights and title. Over half the length of the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline threatens to cross through SunTree’s own unceded Secwepemc territory in the interior.

“We as Indigenous peoples are on the frontlines of fighting for our homelands and lifeways in the face of corporate-colonial threats like the Kinder Morgan pipeline. But whenever we exercise our inherent rights, we are subject to criminalization and human rights violations,” says KANAHUS MANUEL of the Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society and Tiny House Warriors. “Canada is abusing its power by using police and courts to try to silence us. We cannot accept the systematic and illegal criminalization of Indigenous land defenders for exercising our internationally-protected Indigenous Rights and Title.”