St’át’imc, Nlakápamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan, Ktunaxa, Sinixt, Stölo, Musqueam, Katzie, Kwikwitlem, Kwantlen, Tsawwassen, Haida, Nootka, Tsimshian, Nuxalk, Heltsiuk, Tlingit, Carrier, Sekani, Tahltan, Kwagiulth, Dene, Cowichan, Nisga’a, Gitsxan, Wet’su’wetn, Nuu-chah-nulth.

All these countries have set up blockades to repel colonization and extraction. All of them are now within the claimed boundaries of the colonial province of British Columbia. The province claims jurisdiction over this million square kilometers of land, lake, river and stream, coastline and coastal water off thousands of Pacific islands. Its assertions of title are rejected from every Indigenous side, and the roadblocks continue.

The roadblocks continue when the colonial courts throw Indigenous Peoples out of court, discrediting them. They continue when no amount of negotiations can bring the province around to acknowledging the legitimate title of the Indigenous People, and respecting that, especially when it comes to sacred areas or decisions about preserving life-sustaining systems.

The only currency an Indigenous nation has ever had with the colonizing forces is a roadblock. At times, the roadblock has kept the colonizer out. At other times, it has forced the negotiating platform higher. At still other times, it has raised the moral majority – while failing to exact change of any kind on the ground, on the earth, on the trails which we and others walk. And still at other times it has unleashed an intended massacre.

The roadblock is the scar that Mother Earth wears with pride, as she counts her children and shelters them. When a line is drawn in the dirt, Mother Earth feels protected. She rides on the back of the babies she once saw come into this world, and proudly sits, an old lady, on their backs as they carry her. At the same time, what we call a “roadblock” is a reoccupation.

The roadblock has always been a resistance at the last minute, the final hour, before some machine came to whir and grind at the sinews of existence. The roadblock has always been the last resort – occurring after friendly meetings were welcomed, attempted. Even after agreements were made: like the one with Governor Simpson when Hudson’s Bay Company men traveled and met with various national leaderships, including Stölo, Secwepemc and Okanagan, and agreed that 30% of all improvements or profits would go to the Indigenous Nation, 30% to the Queen, and 30% to the Company for the making and maintenance of infrastructure. By 1865, the Secwepemc, for one, were barring access to the white Game Warden with rifles.

The roadblock is always the last hope. But it is always that last one hope.

From instantaneous conflicts with British and American sailing merchants, where the Nuu-chah-nulth scuttled ships and took hostages in repayment of extortionist exchanges, to the blockade of railroads today, where Indigenous nations in the interior apply tourniquets to the lifeblood of the colonial economy in repayment of generations of extortion, resistance has been the balance of interaction where the other half has always been theft and violence – and coercion to assimilation with the newcomer capitalist.

Indigenous Peoples draw out Non-Native allies to blockade ferry sailings, highways, downtown streets, logging operations, mines, urban development, apprehension of children: any exposed aspect of the giant industrial, political and social machinery which has descended on their lands and peoples. And while the roadblock has marked the pulse of invasion here, it has managed to fall short of the attentions of discriminating colonial academic minds which document and investigate and pronounce upon the society which has, until now, managed to feed itself by breaking through and crushing those boundaries every time.

Sometimes roadblocks come after the fact, as barriers to the prevailing colonial narrative documenting history. Countless research papers, position papers, testimonials, conferences and submissions to Royal Commissions, even letters to newspaper editors, serve as roadblocks to the perpetuation of a highly inaccurate and misleading public record. The narrative cannot continue in the direction it was going after these documentations were recorded.

Indigenous Peoples have not only roadblocked material incursions, but indecent offers for complicity and silence. Like in the time when the chiefs went to England and at Buckingham Palace the guards shoveled around gold and treasure in front of them, the British diplomats offering some in exchange for silence on the point of the Peoples’ rights back home in their own country. The chiefs never did accept.