Lessons from Prison: A Shackled Pipeline Protester Reflects

(Originally printed in The Tyee, September 24, 2019, reprinted with permission.) My work for the past decade as a writer and a scholar has been to learn with and from water—to follow what rivers and watersheds teach us. I love the Bow River, the Fraser River, the Peace River, the Columbia River, the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, and all the watersheds that British Columbia and Alberta are part of.

How do I express this love?

On August 24, 2018, while British Columbia was in a state of emergency because of record-breaking wildfires caused by climate change, I sang, prayed, and sat in ceremony for about half an hour in front of the Trans Mountain pipeline project's Westridge Marine Terminal. For this act of opposition to fossil fuel expansion that no one can afford, on August 16, 2019, I was sentenced to twenty-eight days in prison by Judge Kenneth Affleck in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, as recommended by the Province of British Columbia Crown Prosecutor Monte Ruttan.

After I left the courtroom, I was handcuffed, shackled, and transported in a chilly van with fellow political prisoner Will Offley. He, like me, had argued in our defense that our actions were motivated by necessity due to climate crisis. As I wrote in my sentencing statement, since the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to protect us despite full knowledge of this emergency, it became necessary to act. Judge Affleck rejected our arguments.

Will was incarcerated at North Fraser Pretrial Centre in Port Coquitlam, while I was moved into an overly warm vehicle that ended up in the Alouette Correctional Centre for Women (ACCW) in Maple Ridge. The combination of heat and sliding around on the metal seat gave me motion sickness, so I'd vomited by the time I arrived at the prison.

I was born on Treaty 7 territory in what is also known as Calgary and spent half my life there before moving to the unceded Coast Salish lands known as Vancouver. I love both places. I oppose pipeline expansion because I love the land known as Alberta and see the urgent need to make a transition off fossil fuels.

I feel that the best way to repay my debt to the people who built the oil industry is not to automatically assume that oil is the only way Alberta can survive, but to lovingly assert that there are at least two things more important than oil: water and life itself. As former Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta Grant MacEwan pointed out in his last book, Watershed: Reflections on Water (2000), 75 percent of the water in the Bow and Elbow Rivers comes from snow melt. When we accelerate that melting beyond a certain rate, we are guaranteed to melt the ice caps. Surely we are smarter and better than this.

This is why, since March 2018, I've spent a great deal of time up at Burnaby Mountain. I believe that everyone who lives on unceded Coast Salish lands has a responsibility to uphold Coast Salish laws, which entail respecting and protecting the land that gives us life. This is why I was arrested and sentenced to time in prison.

My first night at ACCW was spent in maximum security. My cell (Charlie 9) had a bulletin board, on which a previous prisoner had left words "COURAGE & SERENITY." The lights never went off completely in my cell. I threw a sweatshirt over my eyes and slept from sheer exhaustion after writing a letter to friends and watching a bit of APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) on the television. It was a surprise and a pleasure to see Sharon McIvor on TV, talking about the regaining of status for Indigenous women who'd had it taken away by colonial legislative violence. In the morning, I was moved to medium security after breakfast. Though my stay in maximum security was short, I was treated kindly by my fellow inmates, one of whom gifted me a hair tie and another who showed me how the phone system worked.

In medium security, Birch...