As lawyers and legal academics living and working on this part of Turtle Island now called Canada, we write to demand an end to the ongoing violations of Indigenous nations’ internationally recognized right to free, prior, and informed consent — for example, with the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines routed through unceded Indigenous lands, including Wet’suwet’en lands.
Canadian law and legal institutions — from legislation like The Indian Act to court decisions legitimizing treaty violations with racist stereotypes — have long served as instruments of settler colonialism. And they continue to do so with the legal authorization of the violent dispossession, suppression, and criminalization of Indigenous land and water protectors.
“Think about everything that First Nations people have survived in this country: the taking of our land, the taking of our children, residential schools, the current criminal justice system,” as the late Mohawk legal scholar Patricia Monture-Angus wrote. “How was all of this delivered? The answer is simple: through the law.”
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This pattern is perpetuated with the repeated issuance of injunctions — enforced with violence and threat of lethal force by the RCMP — against the Wet’suwet’en working against the Coastal GasLink project, authorized without the consent of the hereditary chiefs vested with jurisdiction over the decision.
The right of free, prior, and informed consent enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) logically flows from the recognition that Indigenous governmental, legal, and political orders have existed on this land from time immemorial, long predating the arrival of European settlers.
