It’s life-or-death survival for us to fight for our land.
Get her. He is choking her.
Don’t throw me around you f*cking *sshole!
This Indigenous Secwepemc community has has faced off against pipeline workers and police
as it fights to keep this oil pipeline out of its territory.
They plan to put these tiny homes along the construction
route to stop this process.
The tiny houses are like little battle tanks to us.
We feel safe in them.
And they're up against a long history of oppression in Canada,
from systemic abuse in residential schools to the murder and disappearance of Indigenous women.
I'm doing this to protect my family, to protect my sister,
and obviously I don’t want no one else feeling that pain.
At the heart of their protest
is a centuries-long resistance against colonial rule in all its forms.
This is a white supremacist country.
White men can get away with attacking Native women.
I feel like breaking, physically
and emotionally feel like breaking, but I just don't let myself.
Indigenous midwife and tattoo artist Kanahus Manuel
is one of the founders of this land defense movement.
Tiny House Warriors started because we knew we needed to be on the ground,
on the territory, to stop the pipeline.
Canada's Trans Mountain Corporation is building a pipeline that will carry
crude oil from the Alberta tar sands to the coast of British Columbia.
We started to build tiny houses on wheels
with a group of women and volunteer builders.
We have a large territory to cover.
Over 518 kilometers of this pipeline goes
through Secwepemc territory - so over half of this pipeline.
So just by leaving the Indian reserves with a home on wheels
and being able to put it in just different parts of our territory is a big accomplishment.
To defend our lands, our water, our sacred sites.
These homes are not only mobile, they provide land defenders
with shelter during the winter and protection against potential attacks.
We're in Blue River, so we're halfway in between Edmonton
and Vancouver, so we're like middle point of this pipeline.
It'll be four winters this winter we'll be here.
The Tiny House Warriors have been protecting this area for more than three years,
and now the Trans Mountain Corporation
is building a camp that will accommodate hundreds of pipeline workers.
Kanahus and her group have been protesting since construction began,
using methods that sometimes lead to confrontation.
You guys don’t even have a deed to your land.
Activists captured this video of protesters clashing
with Trans Mountain workers on Sept. 15.
These are Trans Mountain workers throwing rocks at us.
Kanahus’ twin sister, Mayuk, is also one of the group's founders.
That day we were attacked by
Trans Mountain man camp workers.
Mayuk says some of the camp workers involved in the incident
are former Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
You're not the cops.
Get her! He's choking her!
They tried to arrest us and say you're under arrest.
You're under arrest.
Let her go, go, go, go.
I am documenting this for human rights abuse.
Just stop, just stop!
Babe, babe! Honey, honey!
And they got their hands on me and knocked me to the ground.
I see this from video footage, but I have no recollection of it, it's black.
The police arrested Mayuk and four other land defenders.
They were later released and have not faced charges.
This is the first time that Mayuk saw some of this footage.
And so it's really triggering, so to go back and say what happened.
Yeah these f*ckers came out and thought they could rough up us Native women.
They thought they can have free reign and just
throw us around, attack us.
This is a white supremacist country.
White men can get away with attacking Native women, and there's no repercussions.
Actually, the police are on their side.
And this whole area that we're intended to protect by being here
has been completely clear cut,
and now the Earth is being moved to house 550 men here.
Yeah, but this is our home, this is, this is our home.
For Kanahus, home consists of roughly 70,000 square miles of unceded First Nations territory.
We come from this unceded land where we never signed treaties with no crown,
not Great Britain, no colonials,
and we can stand here in the silence
and be Secwepemc.
We can really be Secwepemc.
Canada’s Supreme Court recognized that this land has never been ceded through treaties,
but for the Secwepemc Nation it has been a constant struggle
to assert their aboriginal rights over their land.
The reality is that Indigenous people, we are being surrounded
and we are being bombarded by every different kind of industry you can think of.
Tourism, mining, logging, all different types of resource extraction.
But we come from one of the most resource-rich areas in the world.
There's so much raw resources here that the government
and the crown are still violating Indigenous rights to get to these
raw resources, and one of them is bitumen from the Alberta tar sands.
Bitumen is the liquid binder in asphalt that occurs naturally in the Alberta tar sands.
Refining oil from it requires more energy and water, and produces nearly
four times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil extraction.
Some experts say this is the dirtiest oil on the planet.
And they want to bring it down through the mountains,
through unceded Secwepemc territory all the way to the ocean.
Not all Indigenous communities are opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion,
but many like Kanahus believe that Indigenous people
have not been adequately consulted on the project.
This is where we say no, you know, as Tiny House Warriors
and as the Secwepemc women and mothers and warriors and land defenders,
we say no, we have to have a physical presence on the ground.
The Tiny House Warriors say that since construction began in September,
they have been under constant police and Trans Mountain security surveillance.
You move your truck.
Hey, this is our private f*cking driveway.
I am documenting this. I am moving her vehicle right now.
Go.
The police followed us through the town
even as we tried to find a quiet location to interview Kanahus.
F*ck you! Why the f*ck is he just f*cking positioned there for?
The RCMP, they came by, that was around the third time they rolled by
and there is just nonstop surveillance.
There's even mobile units that they brought with towers with cameras
and floodlights, and there's 24-hour surveillance that they can access.
This workers' camp is just south of Highway 16,
a route along which so many Indigenous women have gone missing
that it’s called the “Highway of Tears.”
Land defender Chip’s sister is one of those women.
Chip and his family are still looking for Angeline.
Meanwhile, he's dedicated his life to his work as a land defender.
I'm doing this for my family, to protect my family,
to protect my sister, and
obviously I don’t want no one else feeling that pain.
None of the Tiny House Warriors have filed sexual misconduct reports against pipeline workers,
however, several studies link oil industry worker camps
to an increase of violence against women.
In the tar sands, when they're building, sexual assaults will increase
and this pipeline is tar sands infrastructure construction.
Our fear is that the rapes and assaults are going to continue to go up.
It's a lasting effect in our communities when a woman is assaulted.
No one is, you know, exempt
from that in their families here, in so-called Canada for Indigenous people.
We have murdered and missing Indigenous women in our families.
My grandmother was murdered,
and some of my personal, my
first cousins were abducted into human trafficking.
Indigenous women in Canada are about 6 times
more likely to be killed than any other group.
Kanahus hangs these red dresses along the fence of the workers’ camp
to represent the violence committed against these women.
Every time we put these red dresses up over here,
they remove them, and we put them here to honor the
the Indigenous women and our sisters
that were stolen
and taken from us.
It holds the spirit
of those women that were murdered and missing.
This is how we honor them.
For this Indigenous movement, fighting for their land is crucial to keeping their culture alive.
They wanted to disappear us.
They wanted to assimilate us into Canada.
But with these tattoos,
we're saying we won't be assimilated.
In a time when there's just so much oppression,
we see our people tattooed and it just gives so much life and happiness to us
because they can't, they can't hide us anymore.
I decided to, you know, rise up for my Kyuquot family
and get a Kyuquot tattoo design from Nahan traditional warrior tattoo.
Being part of this movement has helped Chip cope with multigenerational traumas
as a result of decades of policies of cultural genocide.
My mother, unfortunately,
went to residential school. During, like the rough, very rough
upbringing through residential school and all, she suffers from alcoholism
and drug addiction and whatnot.
And she's still currently homeless.
It's painful to live without your culture.
Do you want to look at it on your phone?
Getting facial tattoos has also been a part of Mayuk’s healing process.
All like the pain and suffering of like losing our tradition for so long
and then just finally bringing it back is like this relief. Like, the pain is gone, you know.
Well, there is so much times I feel like breaking.
I physically and emotionally
feel like breaking, but I just don't let myself.
Instead, we go to the water, we go up to the mountains
and we find the coldest, coldest creek and we dip in that coldest creek.
We bless ourselves with those little swirls that are created from the very top of the mountain,
where our prayers are heard the strongest.
So those ceremonies are important, so
we continue living.