This was a strange one. The RCMP had pushed the line all the way past River Camp and I and another photographer stopped to visit Grandfather Tree near the end of our trek up to visit the frontlines.
Just a few meters down the road, was a blockader wearing PPE and being tended to by RCMP officers in a way that suggested the insanity of the last few weeks was behind us.
We were led to an exclusion line where a handful of supportive blockaders, including the notorious Lady Chainsaw.
Further down the road, a group had gathered under an un-occupied tripod while a “green guy” dismantled the perch.
Not long after that, one gutsy blockader managed to climb up the tripod and reclaimed it. Blockaders cheered as he worked to create a make-shift perch from miscellaneous items his comrades managed to get to him via a bucket on a pulley.
Indigenous story-teller Chiyokten led the group in ceremony, while RCMP looked on. He spoke at length about how everyone had been brought together through love of the great mother earth and he asked for healing for all the damage that had been done to the land and its’ people. As the ceremony came to a close, a backhoe was busy destroying saplings in the background and as Chiyokten raised cedar boughs into the air to close the ceremony, a blockader managed to throw a locking device up to his comrade.
That seemed to change the way the RCMP approached safety. I’d been admiring the way this new crew had managed the group of blockaders with firmness, but also patience. They had pushed the group backwards to a strategic yet fair location without incident.
Unfortunately, the “green-guy” who performed the extraction put an end to that. One witness claimed that he was the officer responsible for securing the tripod and if that’s true, it could explain what I witnessed afterwards.
The blockader, who was a minor, was not given any PPE while the officer grabbed his face, removed his t-shirt and sawed the tops of the tripod off within inches of the blockaders face. I heard the blockader request the name and badge number of the arresting officer and he was denied. Later the blockader was lowered to the ground by what appears to be a double strand of rope tied to his waist.
I asked the group of RCMP officers holding the line where the medic was, but none uttered a word.
Lady Chainsaw asked to be helped up so she could look an officer in the eye and communicate to him the way she (and many others) viewed law enforcement based on her personal experiences.
I thought that was the end of enforcement for the day, but when I returned to the junction of Pacific Marine and Granite Main, I was told there had been three other arrests that I had not seen. All indigenous youth and all claiming to have been roughed up.
As of publication, I don’t have any information on which officers made the arrests.