Fatima Syed: Every social movement has a trajectory it goes through. Usually they start peacefully, marches, sit-ins, sign posts, hashtags, calls to action. You know the deal. But at some point, tensions arise and conflicts begin. Police standoffs, arrests, hate. Then there’s a moment of futility, a feeling of exasperation that nothing the movement says or does is leading to change. A feeling of deep despair that the political and legal and social systems aren’t responding fast enough or constructively enough. That’s when things become radical.
News Clip: It’s a shame that it has to come to this. I don’t want to be strapped to a log.
News Clip 2: The sights and sounds of another clash between police and those in a homeless encampment ringing out again.
News Clip 3: The group had blocked traffic for almost 24 hours, defying an injunction. They say they’re supporting a small group of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs in Northern BC who oppose a natural gas pipeline.
Fatima Syed: The movement fighting for climate action and Indigenous rights has hit that moment in recent years. People are trying radical and dangerous things to force companies and governments to change their ways. They’re physically disrupting railway lines to shut down economies in solidarity with Indigenous communities. They’re sabotaging pipelines to disrupt oil and gas activity. They’re even tying themselves to pipelines to shut them down, and they’re getting punished for it. At the heart of these radical forms of protests is a war of world views. In the face of continued inaction on climate change and consistent disregard of Indigenous rights, some activists and advocates have lost hope that the institutions that are part of the problem can fix the problem. So what do they do? How do they send a message? And how far is too far?
Fatima Syed: I’m Fatima Syed, sitting in for Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Hilary Beaumont is a friend of the show and a freelance investigative journalist based in Toronto. She’s back here to talk about her latest story in The Guardian. Hey, Hilary, how’s it going?
Hilary Beaumont: Hey, Fatima. I’m good. How are you?
Fatima Syed: I’m great. You wrote a really fascinating story that I have lots of questions about. So let’s dig into it. Talk us through what happened on November 28th 2020.
Hilary Beaumont: Sure. So while we were all distracted with the huge wave of the pandemic in the winter, there were two activists who were on the railway tracks in Washington state, just South of the Canada-US border. And so just before midnight on November 28th, in the dark of night, Samantha Brooks, who is 24. She crouched on the railway tracks and she installed something called a shunt on the railway tracks. And shunt is a wire that connects the two tracks together. And it basically sends a signal to other trains that there is a train already on the tracks. And it causes oncoming trains to engage their emergency breaks, which can cause trains to derail. She and another woman were there allegedly doing this, and their movements triggered a motion sensing camera that sent an alert to the railway. And the railway called the police, who found these two women on the tracks in the middle of the night and arrested them and found that they had a bag full of wires and a drill. And they also found a shunt installed on the tracks there. And so they charged them with terror charges under US law that prohibits terror attacks and violence against railways.
Fatima Syed: How big of a deal was this? Has an arrest like this ever happened before?
Hilary Beaumont: So, this is extremely rare up until recently. So back in the 90s, there was an Amtrak train that was sabotaged, and that’s still an unsolved case. But recently there have been more than 41 incidents of railway sabotage in Washington state alone. And the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating these. So there’s been kind of like a flurry of the sabotage incidents of people installing shunts. And the most serious case actually happen on December 22nd, 2020, when a train derailed and exploded in a fireball in Custer, Washington, and it spilled 29,000 gallons of crude oil and forced 120 people to evacuate. So these incidents are happening more and more frequently and are becoming more and more dangerous.
Fatima Syed: Can you explain to us what Samantha Brooks’ motivations were to do something like this? I know she’s pleaded guilty in court, but describe her reasons.
Hilary Beaumont: So just to be careful about this, we don’t know yet what her specific reasons are because she hasn’t spoken to her motivation yet publicly. But what we do know is that around the time that these shunting and sabotage incidents started, there were people posting anonymously on anarchist blogs claiming responsibility for this, and they were saying, We are taking the action to stop the Railways to shut down the Railways in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation, which is in Northern BC, which has been opposing the Coastal GasLink Pipeline through their territory. They have never ceded their land. They have never signed any treaties or sold their land. And they had actually sent out a call for solidarity actions in January 2020 because they were facing imminent RCMP raids, violent raids. People across Canada at that time shut down the railways. They blockaded the Railways and stopped the trains right across the country. And so this sabotage activity was happening in Washington state at that time and throughout 2020 in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en to say, we need to take a stand. We need to recognize that this is Indigenous land.
Fatima Syed: How did the Wet’suwet’en and respond to what Samantha Brooks did?
Hilary Beaumont: So I asked Molly Wickam, who is with the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation that’s part of the opposition movement to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. And she said that she was really disturbed to hear that two young people who are supporting her struggle were facing terror charges and facing up to 20 years in prison. She said that the charges really tell her that police are trying to discourage solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty because the Wet’suwet’en struggle threatens the legitimacy of Canada. And I would extend that to the US as well, that they threaten the legitimacy of these colonial States. She had said that what Canada is doing to Indigenous people has deep roots in racist capitalism and genocide. And she pointed toward all of the conversations now happening about Indigenous childrens’ graves being located at residential schools. She said that that is why people are going to such extremes to challenge the systems that are in place. She basically had said that she thinks the Shut Down Canada movement inspired a lot of people who believe that dramatic change is necessary. And that’s how she framed what Samantha Brooks and allegedly another woman had done.
Fatima Syed: Can I also ask, it’s unusual to me to hear of terror charges being applied in this case, but can you briefly just walk us through the legal reasoning for such charges in this matter?
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah. Absolutely. So the US actually has terror laws connected to the Railways because the Railways are very vulnerable. They’re very critical infrastructure. Basically, anyone could sabotage them at any time. They run all over the country. There are very few protections in place. And so the US has specific laws to charge for terror and violence against those Railways to try to protect them. And so those laws come with very high sentences for anyone interfering with the railways.
Fatima Syed: Would you call this kind of action protest? Would you sort of fit it into that vocabulary, or is this something different when it comes to the larger Indigenous rights and climate action movements that have been growing over the past several years?
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think this is something different. This is the departure from that. So this fits into what we would call direct action. We’ve been seeing a lot more direct action associated with the climate movement in recent years. So that can include blockades and opposition to pipelines and pipeline construction through Indigenous land and blockades of logging roads at Fairy Creek, for example, or, for example, with the Encampment Support Network in Toronto holding hands and making a ring around the tents of unhoused people in parks to stop arrests and stop police from pushing them out. So this can all be considered direct action where people try to challenge the status quo with civil disobedience, which is usually peaceful, right. Like, people take direct action in peaceful ways. But what can happen is that sometimes activists think, like, okay, peaceful direct action is not doing enough. We need to take a step further, and that’s what we’re starting to see with these incidents of railway sabotage. Is people taking it further and saying we’re willing to sabotage the Railways at almost any cost, and this can become extremely dangerous and violent.
Fatima Syed: There’s a great quote in your Guardian piece about the Samantha Brooks case from this historian who talks about how any major social movement in history has had this debate. You know, should we stick to peaceful forms of protest to get the change that we want to see in the world? Or should we engage in more radical forms of activism because the political, legal and social systems aren’t changing as quickly as we need them to? So when you look at the Samantha Brooks case and you look at the few other cases that you described earlier for us, do you think they’re going to shift the conversation on Indigenous rights and on climate action?
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah. I mean, this is a really difficult question, right. Because I think you have to weigh all outcomes from this. I mean, first of all, this is an extremely dangerous form of activism, right. Like if you think about all of the railway workers who work on these trains who are at risk from these kind of devices, engaging emergency brakes and causing derailments, we could see injuries or deaths if these incidents continue. We also know that crude oil spilled from one of these incidents. I also really want to be clear that it’s not just Samantha Brooks and maybe another woman allegedly doing this. It’s actually likely more than just two people who are doing this. Just from the variety of different sabotage techniques and the timeline of events, it looks like a decentralized movement that is doing this. And so this is extremely dangerous.
And when we think about what they’re trying to accomplish, they say in the anarchist blogs that they are trying to make delays in the supply chain. They’re trying to make an economic dent and kind of stop the supply chain. But I don’t know that that is that effective ultimately, like, I don’t know that they’re having a huge impact on the supply chain from these shunting incidents. And so potentially the best argument that they have for doing this is that they are continuing an important conversation about Indigenous land rights. But the question is, at what cost, right. That this could get extremely bad. We know the case of the Lac-Mégantic Railway derailment, which was an accidental derailment a few years ago in Quebec that killed 47 people because a train carrying hazardous materials exploded and took out the good part of a town. And so we really need to be thinking about what are the goals ultimately, and is this, is this truly helpful, or could this really be putting people at risk?
Fatima Syed: But beyond the physical dangers of a radical form of activism like this one, what other options, I guess, do movements that are fighting for climate action, that are fighting for Indigenous rights have? Because there is only so much you can do and so much you can say that hasn’t been said to fight for these rights, to fight for climate action and then to fight for the rights of Indigenous communities. So are we at this point now where we might see an increase in more direct action because people are just sick and tired of having the same conversations over and over again. And if that’s the case, well, that less than the power of these movements?
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah. I think you’re right to say we’re definitely at this moment where we are likely to see more violent direct action. I think that the climate movement has been using peaceful direct action for a very long time now and has done so pretty effectively when it comes to opposing and delaying pipeline projects. I think a lot of people who use direct action also see it as one tool in a toolbox of different ways to challenge the status quo. So that can include divestment through banking systems and companies or court challenges against projects or pushing for lawmakers to pass new legislation. So there are a lot of different ways that activists have been pushing for change in the climate movement.
But, yeah, you reach a point, and I think a lot of people are beginning to reach the point where it’s like we as a society need very abrupt change to try to meet the moment of the climate crisis that we are currently living through. And I think that the more climate emergencies that we see in all of our communities, our local communities, we’re going to see more radicalized actions in response to those. And I think we have already been seeing those for a few years, but this is going to increase and potentially become more violent. And I do want to say the climate movement as a whole, at least in North America, I think, is very cohesive and very united around peaceful direct action. So I don’t want to paint the climate movement as violent at all. It’s not. This is a new form of direct action that is emerging. I’m interested and concerned to see where it goes, because you also see in previous movements that when violent direct action is used, then it can actually split movements as well and divide them.
Fatima Syed: I mean, you’ve been covering the climate action movement for several years now. To ask a very blunt question, do you think what Samantha Brooks did had any impact on the Wet’suwet’en movement?
Hilary Beaumont: I mean, it’s really hard to have a concrete answer to that. I think that, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine last night about this, and I almost want to fast forward, you know, 50 years from now and look back and see what everyone was doing at this time to address the climate movement and address the issues of colonialism and Indigenous land rights and see how things played out. But there’s no way to know right now what impact this will have. I mean, I think that Samantha Brooks’ actions can be traced back to the Wet’suwet’en Nation calling for solidarity actions, right. And so I think that their call for solidarity around Indigenous land rights had a huge impact. I think that echoed around North America. And you saw people, you know, stand in solidarity with that nation, saying they are on unceded land. We stand with them, and we’re going to blockade the Railways and shut down the trains and cause Via Rail layoffs. And so like that had echoes. But I don’t know if we can say that the shunting incidents or the sabotage incidents in Washington state has had on their own some kind of real impact.
Fatima Syed: Over the past several years, after all the climate action and Indigenous rights movements that you’ve seen and reported on, what’s been the most powerful and the most effective, and why?
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that in recent years, you’ve been seeing this, like, incredible movement towards Indigenous sovereignty. This is coming after years of decades and centuries of boarding schools and residential schools being used in Canada and in the US to kill the culture, kill Indigenous culture and practices and ceremonies and language. And then you’re seeing a new generation of Indigenous people really reclaiming their culture, reclaiming their land. And a lot of that movement is happening around pipelines in particular and opposing pipelines through territories that are unceded or untreatied. I can’t pick just one movement because you’re seeing it happen all over the continent. It is very inspiring to see Indigenous people reclaiming their land, often as they do that they are criminalized. Part of the reason you’re seeing this more violent sabotage action happening is because you’re seeing non-Indigenous people say we want to stand in solidarity with Indigenous people as they reclaim their land. And so I think you will see that happen more. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of these incidents happening elsewhere, too.
Fatima Syed: Hilary, thanks so much for walking us through this. It’s a fascinating case, and it’ll be interesting to see how it ends.
Hilary Beaumont: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me I’m really happy to discuss this with you.
Fatima Syed: That was Hilary Beaumont, a freelance investigative journalist based in Toronto, and that was The Big Story. You can find more at thebigstorypodcast.ca. If you want to speak to us, you can find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can also send us an email, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com.
I’m Fatima Syed. I’ll be your guest host for just a few more episodes while Jordan Heath-Rawlings enjoy the last few days of his vacation. I hope you’ll listen.
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