On Sunday December 11, 2016, Kwantlen Nation led an anti-Kinder Morgan pipeline rally in Fort Langley, partnering with the PIPE UP Network. Kwantlen leaders and community members marched and spoke out against the intrusion of the recently approved pipeline into their unceded territories.
Nearly 200 people took to the streets of Kwantlen territory on Sunday. We met at the Community Hall in Fort Langley, where Kwantlen community members gathered us together with songs. We marched to the old colonial Hudson’s Bay Company fort a few blocks away, an appropriate destination that illustrated ongoing links between colonial corporations from the founding days of Canada to the present.
As numerous recent actions in response to the news of Trudeau’s green-lighting of the pipeline have shown, Indigenous leaders and communities alongside allied groups are refusing to back down from the fight against the TransMountain pipeline. The message sent to Trudeau and his corporate cronies should be clear: No Pipelines on Indigenous Lands. And the message that the Kwantlen leadership on Sunday is sending to us in our various communities is also clear: Join us in our resistance – it is just beginning.