Keynote Address: The State, the Company, and the Police: Who Invaded Wet’suwet’en Lands?
What is the particular mix of Canadian sovereignty and corporate power? Three highly militarized police operations have been deployed since 2019 to remove Wet’suwet’en people from their lands along a natural gas pipeline route under construction in northern British Columbia by Coastal GasLink (CGL). Despite abundant media coverage, hiding in plain sight is a story that has not yet been told about how governments, police, public banks, private capital, the land claims commission, the courts, and the environmental assessment office undermined and denied Wet’suwet’en constitutional and Indigenous legal rights.
Working with thousands of pages of unreleased access to information requests, unpublished legal proceedings, and interviews with key figures, this lecture explores the political artefact of the “company state” and its relevance to theorizing advanced settler colonial capitalism.
