Freda Huson, Chief Howilhkat of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation in Canada, is an Indigenous rights activist for the Wet'suwet'en people. She is wing-chief of the Wet'suwet'en's Dark House Clan. Huson established the Uni'stot'en healing camp on the land that became the federally recognized territory of the Wet'suwet'en Nation, and she is a leader in the global opposition against colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Even as private companies and the Canadian government collude to force the construction of an oil pipeline through their sovereign territory and under their waterways, Freda was kind enough to engage in a brief conversation about the struggle she is currently leading with her people to protect their ancestral homelands and their way of life, and how it connects to the inequity we face in our own neck of the woods.

Matt Halvorson: How does your struggle to protect yourselves and your ancestral homelands from colonial violence impact students and families in Washington State? 

Freda Huson: Well, everybody around the planet, we are all impacted because we are connected by water, air and land destruction. We all need water, we all need the air, and when things are destroyed in different parts of the Earth, it impacts us all because pollution goes into the air and the air is everywhere.

Matt: We get a lot of talk in Seattle about “decolonizing education,” but I don’t know how many of us understand or are directly involved in the work of decolonizing the world — of standing up against this ongoing violence. What does that idea mean to you?

Freda: Decolonizing, from my understanding, to decolonize is for people to re-look at their lives and see how we are following the world standards, which is very colonized. To decolonize we have to do our part in every area, like we are reusing and recycling, not the throwaway culture. Not using all the cheap stuff in the consumerist world, they just break. People need to educate themselves and step back from being a consumer because that’s what is destroying the planet. Use public transportation instead of everyone driving to work and school, carpool, less pollution from your mode of transportation.

The way we are being impacted by industry is by over-logging and the proposed pipeline under the river. When the engineer tested the pipes, they cracked, so they had to put cement casing around them. So even this project coming through the land isn’t safe — their head engineers quit.

So, people need to do their research about all these various industries that are going through your land and what the impacts are, and see what we can do to stop these projects and find things that are safe and find alternate resources that don’t harm the environment. There are many options out there, they just don’t want to go with those. They want the cheapest options that destroy the land. It’s costing the powers that be more overall, though, like in areas where people’s health is impacted because these projects make people sick.