Opponents of the Gitxsan Treaty Society spent Monday preparing themselves for arrest. For much of the day, Gitxsan community members crowded at one end of Omineca Street before the Gitxsan Treaty Society offices while police assembled a block away.

The day had a strange character. A hot, sunny day in the north, people set up lawn chairs, visited friends and family, and wandered down the block to buy ice cream. Children played on the sidewalk, while elders sat and talked. However, beneath the conviviality of community life lay deep-seated tensions.

"The truth about stories," declares Native author Thomas King, "is that's all we are." Wet'suwet'en people know their identities and territories through the songs and stories that connect their people to their land, history and ancestors. These stories and songs are evidence that the Wet'suwet'en people have occupied the land since time immemorial.

The Wet'suwet'en term for oral history is kungax. Literally translating as "trail of song," the kungax allows Wet'suwet'en to trace the tracks of past generations across their territories and map the path of their people into the future.

The late Mitchell Sharp, who came of age during the great depression and served in the cabinets of Pearson and Trudeau, once said that while his generation most feared the spectre of another catastrophic economic slump on the scale of the 1930s', subsequent generations were spooked by other spectres -- the spectres of run-away inflation during the 1970s and early '80s, and of uncontrolled public debt in the 1990s.

As we begin a New Year it is as good a time as any to contemplate the spectres for our time. Others will differ, but Hill Dispatches thinks the spectres that haunt us, or that should be haunting us in 2012, are: the spectres of growing inequality and of unsustainable development.