There is no actual wall around the Wet’suwet’en territory in Canada, leaving the indigenous people that reside there to politely ask that any authorities from the other side of the border to stay on their side of the line. This leads to a number of awkward interactions in “Yintah,” where Howilhkat Frida Huson has set up a cabin just next to the road that leads into the territory to keep watch over it and greets RCMP officials on a regular basis, as well as the increasing number of construction workers associated with the Coastal GasLink pipeline that are eager to connect crude oil through Western Canada, with those not granted permission left to wonder what to do with the chopper they’ve brought or where to congregate when the assumption is that they’ll be let through, albeit with no legal standing to be there.
The Wet’suwet’en‘s right to the land is respected up to a point in Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell and Michael Toledano’s galvanizing doc, which bucks the trend of most stories told about the present-day indigenous community when the land they sit on isn’t seen as a place of despair in spite of the tragic history of families being broken up and ongoing attacks on their claim to the real estate. Instead, “Yintah” shows the Wet’suwet’en mounting a vigorous defense and even leading back some like Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a one-time law student who dreamed of a suburban house with a white picket fence to decide to move her family back to the reservation so the kids could be in touch with their roots and perhaps be part of a generation that could renew cultural traditions and carry them forward. That idea is put to the test when 20 years after the territory was declared as belonging to the native Canadians by the Canadian Supreme Court in the Delgamuukw decision of 1997, a deal to extend the Coastal GasLink in what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is happy to declare the largest private sector investment in the nation’s history is struck with fossil fuel giant LNG and a court injunction takes the right of refusal away from the tribe to turn away either the police or the drilling company when granted the permission to work on the land.
While the conflict drew attention across Canada and showed up in news briefs around the world, “Yintah” really benefits from the feature-length coverage as it chronicles a 10-year fight to preserve the reservation amidst increasing tensions between the two sides. While there’s a righteous resistance movement afoot, it’s equally breathtaking to witness the RCMP and LNG employees use temporary legal rulings to arbitrarily take control over more and more acreage over time and although the film is hazy on the “indigenous collaboration” that Trudeau cites that enabled an agreement, Wickham, Michell and Toledano show the misalignment of Canadian law and indigenous law that leaves any attempt at peaceful coexistence all but impossible as both have entirely different mandates. It is smart to center the film around just two central subjects in Huson, whose hair gets greyer over time surely from trying to enforce the policies of Wet’suwet’en, and Wickham, who is a generation younger and clearly accepts the responsibility of keeping up the fight to set an example for her children.
After a major dramatic crescendo about two-thirds in, “Yintah” risks conveying a little too well the tedium of a frustratingly cyclical and protracted legal battle as it heads towards a final post-pandemic reckoning, but it continues to engage when placing the struggle within the larger context of what indigenous communities around the world have had to endure when their legitimacy is constantly questioned and they’ve been systematically picked apart. When, as Wickham says, the only things “to be passed on are abuse and destruction,” beyond serving as evidence of the kind of conflicts that have long been omitted from history, “Yintah” is quite commendable for passing along hope.
“Yintah” will screen again at True/False on March 3rd at noon at Jesse Auditorium.
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