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In early January 2020, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, representing that nation’s hereditary chiefs, served an eviction notice to Coastal GasLink, the subsidiary of TC Energy that is building a 670-kilometre pipeline to transport liquefied natural gas from Dawson Creek to Kitimat, British Columbia. If completed, it will cut across territory roughly the size of New Jersey that is home to over 3,000 Wet’suwet’en people in the northwestern Central Interior.

The notice came days after a second injunction was issued by a B.C. Supreme Court judge against those who had erected a camp to block the construction and assert their ancestral land rights. Although TC Energy had signed agreements with the twenty band councils along Coastal GasLink’s path — including five Wet’suwet’en bands — the authority of elected band council chiefs extends only over the parcels of reserve land created under the Indian Act, whereas the hereditary chiefs assert authority over all 22,000 square...