Wet’suwet’en land defender Molly Wickham speaks to The Breach Show podcast about RCMP C-IRG violence and spying

Published by Brent Patterson on March 15, 2025March 15, 2025

Image from The Breach Show.

Wet’suwet’en land defender Molly Wickham, also known as Cas Yikh wing chief Sleydo’, recently met with journalist Desmond Cole in Toronto for an interview about the resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline for The Breach Show podcast.

The full interview can be found here.

Key excerpts from this interview include Wickham telling Cole:

Court injunctions do not consider “the risk of police violence or state violence to Indigenous people”

“Within the colonial court system, they work within silos, so the Supreme Court of Canada decision [that the clans of the Wet’suwet’en nation, hold title to 22,000 square kilometers of land] is not being taken into account in this injunction case. That makes injunctions really dangerous to Indigenous people and all people, because the test for it is very narrow. They only look at the economic impact and harm that could be done to a company. They don’t look at our access to our land, our culture, our way of life, the risk of police violence or state violence to Indigenous people, if there is an injunction in place.”

We know that “the police don’t care about Indigenous women”

“We just know that the police don’t care about Indigenous women. They talked about us like monsters, like animals. That’s how they see us. I think the fact that nothing is happening to them is just indicative of the situation that we find ourselves in. Through colonialism and colonization, they had to undermine the authority of the women. They had to dehumanize us so that they would only deal with the men, and they did that in really violent ways. Through the priests, through the RCMP, throughout our whole history.“

C-IRG force against civilians “should be alarming to people”

“[John] Brewer, who is the gold commander of C-IRG, which is now—they’ve changed their name to the Critical Response Unit—he’s the gold commander of that special industry unit of police. The fact that they have to use that kind of force, that they’re using that kind of force against civilians in so-called Canada, I think this should be alarming to people. I think that it indicates that, one, we’re a real threat, but also that we are a police state, and that nobody’s going to be free from the kinds of violence and repression that are coming if we don’t fall in line with the status quo and extract every little last resource on this planet.”

C-IRG spying and harassment is “a tactic to try to drive us off the land completely”

“Since the police have started coming around, they’ve really honed in on a few individuals, and really looked at and followed what the hereditary chiefs are doing.  We’ve even had spies in our feast halls, police officers who’ve worked in the community that have been actually spying for the government on our people. We know that that’s been an ongoing thing for years, and then with C-IRG coming into play, it’s just been exponential, to the point where it’s actually just a tactic to try to drive us off the land completely. We’re threatened, followed around everywhere, threatened with arrest all of the time.”

For the full interview, go to ‘Inherently racist’: Wet’suwet’en leader on the crime of defending her land (The Breach Show, March 14, 2025).