The following is all information that has been sourced from multiple places, including court documents, the Office of the Wet'su'wet'en website and this high school text book
Conversation
The governance system is divided into thireteen houses. Each of those houses belongs to one of five clans, but the houses are where the decision-making power is held. Each house has a head chief, as well as wing chiefs.
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12 of the 13 houses are involved in the Office of the Wet'suwet'en, which is a non-profit that was set up to do things like manage lands and communicate with gov't under the direction of the hereditary chiefs. One house — Dark House — broke away from the Office a decade back
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Now we're going to get slightly messy. Court docs show that in the past, Unist’ot’en was represented as spanning 3 houses, all in the Big Frog Clan. But more recently Unist'ot'en has been used interchangeably w/ Dark House, while the other 2 houses remain affiliated w/ the Office
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So those are the thirteen houses, including Dark House/Unist'ot'en.
On to whether these houses are opposed to Coastal GasLink or not
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For this I used four sources.
The Office of the Wet'suwet'en's listing of houses/chiefs: wetsuweten.com/culture/clan-s
The Jan. 4 2020 eviction notice to CGL: unistoten.camp/wetsuweten-her
And the agreement from Hereditary Chiefs to meet with the province on Jan. 30. wetsuweten.com/files/January_
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Based on these here's what I was able to discern, which matches pretty closely what's been reported already.
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Here's my listing of head chiefs, their publicly-facing positions on CGL and whether or not their position as head chief is disputed
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About those disputed positions: there are 3 women who say they are the rightful holders of names but they were stripped of them. Two have previously been listed on the Office of the Wet'suwet'en website as holding the chief positions they claim, while one held a wing chief name
If you want to learn more about this controversy, the Globe and Mail has reported on it here theglobeandmail.com/business/artic
and here
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there are also sources that paint one side or the other in a more unfavourable light, but yeah that's that story
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So:
•13 head chief positions
• 3 vacant, but one of those with a wing chief who lays some claim to a position
• 10 filled, but 2 of them disputed
• Of the 10 filled, 8 clearly opposed
• 2 of those 8 have title disputed by previous title-holders
• 2 w/ unknown positions
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As a bonus, here's a bit about how Wet'suwe'ten are represented by elected chiefs and councils.
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There are SIX bands representing Wet'suwet'en. They are:
• Wet’suwet’en First Nation
• Burns Lake Band (Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation)
• Nee Tahi Buhn Band
• Skin Tyee Nation
• Witset (Moricetown) First Nation
• Hagwilget First Nation
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Five of those six have signed benefits agreements over CGL. Hagwilget has not. I've seen two, possibly related reasons why...
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Reason one: The Canadian Press reported that Hagwilget refused to even think about making a decision about the pipeline because it's up to hereditary chiefs to make the decision vancouversun.com/news/local-new
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Reason two: the Globe and Mail reports Coastal GasLink was told it did not need to sign an agreement b/c Hagwilget Village is not along the pipeline route theglobeandmail.com/canada/british
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I've not done a dive into the decision-making among other elected councils in terms of choosing to sign agreements. Maybe some other time. /thread
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