• The largest Wet'suwet'en reserve, Witset, has a total membership of around 2055 people.

• The last Chief Councillor was elected with a total of 92 votes.

• Less than 300 people participated in the band council elections.

We have an "elected" band council that is being artificially propped up in the mainstream narrative by Canada, BC, CGL, and the RCMP, despite a huge lack of participation within the electoral process.

The percentage of the population that decided who is currently in power is in the single digits. As a band councillor myself from a neighboring nation, I can assure you as well that people don't vote people onto a council based on pipeline views.

People vote in their families, as the reserve was designed as a site of confinement, entitlement, and systematic impoverishment. Also as a band councillor, I can assure you that the band council has no mandate or legal title to any lands outside of reserve boundaries. Even within reserve boundaries a band council has no title, as it is considered Crown land. If an election doesn't represent the will of the majority, where have the referendums been to decide whether or not a band should enter a benefit agreement with CGL?

I am only aware of one, where the N'kazdli band membership voted 70% no to the proposed pipeline. The band council signed onto a benefits agreement anyways. On a final note, what kind of democracy is based on blood quantum and racist legislation like the Indian Act? The system was designed to phase out the voting membership and eliminate status with successive generations. Why are Canadians so willing to accept this? There are many Wet'suwet'en peoples who lost their status, due to blood quantum, marriage, or even enlistment.

Under the traditional laws of the Wet'suwet'en, none of those are factors, and their form of hereditary citizenship holds together the many people who have been displaced by the Indian Act System.

Hereditary does not mean a monarchy or elitism. In the case of the Wet'suwet'en, it literally means that every person in a Wet'suwet'en house or clan is related.

The so called "handful of chiefs opposing the pipeline" each are the spokespeople of houses containing upwards of 500 people each. The chosen leaders of the Hereditary houses are uncles, grandmas, grandpas, aunties, fathers, mothers. As the spokespeople, they deliver messages and decisions made by consensus of the house. Typically, every branch of the extended family will have representation from a chief or wing chief within the system.

That's just my two cents, because I'm sick and tired of the same narratives being spun by BC, CGL, and the RCMP. This whole notion of civilizing the way our peoples govern is pretty racist as well.

On a final note, it's the Hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en who have a legally recognized title across all 22,000 square kilometers of Wet'suwet'en traditional territory. The band councils were literally imposed to facilitate the theft of these territories. This has not changed.