Making the News--Cheam Band Blocks Road

The news in my neighbourhood this week is Road Blockades, protests, and threats. Young First Nations men in army surplus fatigues, with bandanas covering their faces, are standing behind roadblocks. Their chief, June Quipp, of Cheam First Nation, is threatening to block the highway, to charge a toll to cross the bridge, until the provincial government acknowledges their longstanding land claims grievances and acts to negotiate a settlement. The new premier of the province (British Columbia) refuses to negotiate under threat. It is the beginning of another long hot summer.

The outfits the protesters are sporting, whether deliberately or inadvertently I am not sure, remind us of outlaws and train robbers from western movies, the bad guys, and they remind us of images of Oka and Gustafson Lake, stand-offs that occurred in the last decade in Quebec and in the BC Interior. In both of those stories, provincial governments responded to a local conflict by sending in armed police and military personnel to enforce their wishes upon native people who were determined to stand up and fight for what they believed was right. The rest of us watch the moving pictures on television, feeling utterly helpless. The same way we watch our neighbour government send armed agents in to Waco. Or Seattle. Or Neah Bay. Or Miami. Where people trying to demonstrate a faith, to take a stand, a position, are confronted by others with a different opinion, who try to persuade them, or try to stop them.

All the media coverage of road blockades, on television, in the Vancouver papers, reminds us that the only stories about those of us who live this far from the city involve weather (record snowstorms, landslides covering major highways), accidents causing multiple deaths, or angry conflicts threatening to escalate. Land claims. Disappearing natural resources. Disappearing jobs. About who has rights and how those rights are determined. About who obeys and who defies. The more colourful the demonstration, the louder the confrontation, the wider the coverage. It's called "making the news." And its purpose seems to be to manipulate public opinion, or to exert pressure, to impose one opinion upon another, to make, force, someone else to do something.

Every time this happens here in BC, every spring it seems when First Nations youth take to the barricades, or environmentalists take to the trees or the water, my stomach knots up and I begin to feel that sick stress one feels when boxed into an untenable position. Trapped. Powerless to act; powerless to influence others to act; skeptical that anyone involved, any elected politician, any appointed official, is motivated, informed, or empowered to resolve the issue. Leery of ill-informed public opinion, of rising frustration and unleashed anger. Distrustful of public opinion's manipulative big brother, the news media. Aware that the more blood is let, the higher the body count, the more they are interested.

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