
Molly Wickham and Cody Merriman are raising their three-year old son at a tailings pond blockade on unsurrendered indigenous land. The family has just moved into a cabin that overlooks a pristine body of water, known to the government of British Columbia as McBride Lake and to the native Gitdumden Clan as Lhudis Bin. Nanika Mines, proposing to dig molybdenum out of Nanika Mountain, seeks to turn one end of Lhudis Bin into a tailings pond—a permanent holding pool for toxic waste.
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“Tailings ponds don’t go away ever. People aren’t thinking about that—they’re going to be there forever and they’re not going to last forever,” Molly said. “These tailings ponds take hundreds of years of management and they don’t have hundreds of years of business plans. They’re not going to be around to take care of it. Once their project’s done, they’re done, they’re gone,” Cody clarified.Wet’suwet’en territories have hosted some of the most damaging mining accidents in Canada’s history. A Silver Standards tailings spill five decades ago into Owen Lake, Molly said, meant that “you couldn’t even swim in it, you couldn’t drink the water, and you couldn’t eat the fish. Just now people are starting to return to that area, but even then we were just told that another smaller mine up the mountain is leaking tailings into the lake as we speak.”
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“Sam Goosley was historically one of the richest Wet’suwet’en territories—most abundant, most game, most plants,” Cody added. “That tailings pond busted and it completely wrecked that area. The moose are still not healthy in that region.”The family has moved out to the territory to watch out for development that is taking place without the Gitdumden clan’s consent. I rode with them as they searched the region for signs of pipeline workers who they intended to evict. “The only way to defend the land is to know the land and be occupying the land,” Molly said.Beyond acting as watchful eyes over the territory, the family seeks to practice a traditional way of life as has been lost through colonization. Their three-year-old son Liam is becoming fluent in the Wet’suwet’en language, and becomes ecstatic over hunting and picking berries with his parents. The family hauls drinking water from a nearby river, and fed me local salmon when I came to visit. Though they are weaning off the fruits of settler society, they are still somewhat dependent on outside food and resources.
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“We don’t intend for it to be just one family that lives here. We want other people to join, we want to help people heal, and offer healing to other people and to ourselves,” Cody said. “We know one of our elders wants to live here. I think it would be a beautiful thing to have Wet’suwet’en communities out on the territory,” Molly added.Gitdumden Clan’s hereditary chiefs, Molly explained, “decided that this would be the cabin site because of the pristine beauty and wilderness of this place and how untouched it is relative to many of the other territories.” The site, chosen by Nanika Mines as an ideal tailings pond, is also historically significant to the clan. It is physically marked by centuries of Gitdumden life through cache pits, where the clan used to store food underground, and culturally modified trees, which were partially harvested for kindling and food. A former head chief, Woos, lived in a cabin where Molly and Cody’s home now stands.
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