Indigenous protesters in Washington declare Trans Mountain won’t be built
VANCOUVER — Cedar George-Parker remembers the moment he decided to devote his life to defending Indigenous people and their traditional territories. It was the one-year anniversary of a shooting at his high school that killed four of his classmates in Marysville, Wash.
“I dropped to my knees and I said, ‘I’m going to make a change in the world,’ ” he recalled.
George-Parker is among the Indigenous protesters in Washington state promising to fight the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Activists call the project the Standing Rock of the north, comparing it to the fierce Standing Rock Sioux protests that stalled the Dakota Access Pipeline for months.
The Trans Mountain expansion — recently bought by Canada for $4.5 billion — doesn’t only affect Canadian waters or land. The project will increase tanker traffic seven-fold in the Salish Sea, which borders British Columbia and Washington, and Kinder Morgan has noted the expansion potential of a connected 111-kilometre pipeline that runs from B.C.’s Fraser Valley to Washington refineries.