Jennifer Wickham documents the fight of the Wetʼsuwetʼen against pipelines, pollution and plunder

Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous people and an end to the war against nature. Yintah is now on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8192...) after striking a deal with the streamer that will see it reach a broader audience. I was thinking about what it means to distribute a film like Yintah, which challenges the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Canadian law, on a platform like Netflix. The goal is strategic, of course: leverage the sites of power that are currently available. But the strategy is maybe more self-reflexive than it seems: in this interview, Jennifer talks about her conviction that people who identify as allies with the Indigenous nations that are resisting neocolonialism aren’t always conscious of what that declaration of solidarity means. From Wickham’s perspective, a more powerful and lasting movement of settler allyship would involve a more authentic commitment to collective survival and a sense of the sacrifices that entails. This film is beyond sobering. It exposes the continuum of tyranny imposed by the RCMP on Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates how corporate greed and the collusion of the state are creating a kind of asymmetrical war over the land itself, and energy, at a time when we understand better than ever that the only way to address the climate emergency is to leave oil and gas in the ground. Don’t develop it. Stop killing the Earth and the people who are most connected to it. I do have to acknowledge my own complicity as a white settler in Canada, and how even wanting to be correct on these issues, the desire to express solidarity in the right or best way, can work against decolonization because it gives us a sense that, at the discursive level anyway, we get it. Actions speak louder than words, and the direct action represented in Yintah is a source of inspiration for anyone that feels the battle against fossil capital is sisyphean.