Indigenous activist arrested after Trans Mountain protest in B.C.
CLEARWATER, B.C. — An Indigenous political activist was briefly detained Saturday following a Trans Mountain pipeline protest in British Columbia’s North Thompson Provincial Park.
Kanahus Manuel, a spokesperson for the activist group Tiny House Warriors, was arrested by the RCMP after allegedly defying an eviction order from the BC Parks service that was delivered on Thursday.
The group’s members belong to the Secwepemc First Nation, which released a statement Saturday afternoon calling Manuel’s arrest a “declaration of war.”
In the release authored by the Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society, Manuel is referred to as a political prisoner of “the white supremacist RCMP and Park Ranger goons of the Canadian state,” whom they said are intent on forcing the Tiny House Warriors from lands the Secwepemc consider ancestral territories. The statement adds the territories were never surrendered to a Canadian government.