RCMP bring 60 drawn guns, dogs, assault rifles, to serve injunction on the wrong road

by Miles Howe
Halifax Media Co-op
October 18, 2013

After van, main blocker, removed the night before, RCMP seem hell-bent for violence in early dawn encounter with Warriors

Moncton, New Brunswick – I have been camping at the current blockade along highway 134 since the inception of the encampment, filing almost daily reports for the Media Coop. During June and July of this year, when protests against shale gas exploration in New Brunswick were of far less national interest, I was doing the same.

Around 6 am yesterday morning, October 17th, RCMP forces again blocked off both sides of the anti-shale gas encampment along highway 134,

this time with an as-yet-unseen amount of police force. For numerous days prior, RCMP were allowing first walking traffic, then one lane of automobile traffic, to pass freely through the blockaded area. Anti-shale activists, as a measure of good faith, and in deference to emergency vehicles in particular, had days earlier removed two felled trees that had completely blocked off vehicular traffic.

The move, of course, allowed traffic flow to resume to near normal. It also allowed unhindered access to RCMP, who as it will be made clear were scouting out the area and making plans for an ultimate take-down of the traffic-slowing, but completely peaceful, protest.

Yesterday, I first heard that the roads were blocked off by someone screaming in a tented area near the entrance gate to the compound that housed SWN Resources Canada’s seismic testing equipment, in the vicinity of where I was camped. At the time, I was asleep.

I could hear police beginning to identify themselves, and a rustling through the trees that suggested numerous bodies moving around. RCMP, I surmised, were everywhere, and the always-possible event of the RCMP serving SWN’s injunction against blocking their equipment was upon us.

SWN, the Texas-based gas company, had earlier been given a ten-day extension to their injunction against the encampment, due to expire on October 21st. We had heard that the injunction had been printed in Irving-owned newspapers. Due to Irving’s collusion with SWN (the compound in which SWN’s equipment was housed, for example, is Irving-owned), there had been something of a ban on Irving newspapers. We had also been advised by various sources that peace would remain at the encampment until at least Friday, October 18th, when a public hearing against the injunction was set to occur at the Moncton courthouse.

Clearly not.

I grabbed my car keys and ran the 100-odd metres towards the Mi’kmaq Warrior encampment.

What I saw was surprising.

The ditch opposite me was already filled with 20-odd police in tactical blue uniforms, pistols already drawn. Three police officers dressed in full camouflage, one with a short-chained German Shepherd, were also near the ditch.

In the far field, creeping towards the Warrior encampment – which was comprised of one trailer and about ten tents – were at least 35 more police officers. Many of these wore tactical blue and had pistols drawn. At least three officers were wearing full camouflage and had sniper rifles pointed at the amassing group. The Warriors, for their part, numbered about 15.

Through a police loudspeaker towards the highway 11 off-ramp, an officer began reading the injunction against the blocking of SWN’s seismic equipment. This was all before dawn.

Still in the pre-dawn dark, about seven molotov cocktails flew out of the woods opposite the police line stationed in the ditch. I cannot verify who threw these cocktails. They were – if it matters – lobbed ineffectively at the line of police and merely splashed small lines of fire across the road. A lawn chair caught fire from one cocktail. Two camouflaged officers then pumped three rounds of rubber bullet shotgun blasts into the woods.

Shortly after, three so-called warriors with a journalist in tow – who claim to have arrived two nights ago from Manitoba – appeared to have determined that the situation was too extreme for them. Two of them have since been identified as Harrisen Freison and ‘Eagle Claw’. They promptly ran down the road towards the far end of the police blockade. Until last night no one had ever seen these individuals before.

About ten minutes later, with tensions now becoming highly escalated between the encroaching line of police in the field adjacent to the encampment and the Warriors now on a public dirt road, two officers approached Seven Bernard, chief of the Warrior Society. They attempted to serve Bernard with SWN’s contentious injunction. Dozens of guns from all angles were pointed at all of us.

Seven Bernard began to walk away from the officer attempting to serve him the injunction. If it matters, the officer in question was the same Sergeant Rick Bernard who had earlier in the summer arrested me on charges of threats and obstruction of justice – both of which amounted to nothing and were subsequently dropped.

Sergeant Bernard threw the injunction at his namesake, saying: “Consider yourself served.”

I could hear the RCMP surrounding us speaking about someone having a gun. I did not see any Warrior carrying a firearm. I can say with certainty, however, that no live round was ever fired by the Warrior side. If, as the RCMP are now claiming, a single shot was discharged, it was not from this altercation.

Before continuing, it is important to note that the Warrior encampment was on government – or Crown – land. Crown land, legally, is being held for Canada’s indigenous people, in this case the Mi’kmaq people. Through negligence of the Crown, this is often forgotten, especially by Canada’s non-indigenous populations.

Equally as forgotten is the fact that none of Canada’s Maritime provinces are ceded land. The Crown is tied to the original indigenous inhabitants – and their land – through treaties of peace and friendship. Nothing more.

It is also important to note that the entire encroaching police formation was focused on a group of about 15 Warriors, all of whom were now on a public dirt road, away from SWN’s so-called blockaded equipment.

The injunction was meant to focus on protestors blocking access to SWN’s equipment on highway 134. All of the subsequent arrests at this end of the altercation were made on Hannah Road.

With RCMP forces having entirely overwhelmed any remaining activists at the compound gate, the question must be asked:

Why focus on a small band of Warriors, clearly away from all of SWN’s equipment and entirely incapable of reforming a blockade, with over 60 guns of various calibre drawn on them?

Indeed, a van belonging to one Lorraine Clair from Elsipogtog First Nation had the evening before been removed from the compound gate. It was the main blocking factor to SWN’s – or anybody’s, really – access to their equipment.

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE]

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[Potent News editor’s note: I’ve actually met this author a couple times back when I lived in Halifax. I believe his heart is in the right place. While I disagree that the right thing to do is block a road leading to equipment involved with the raping of the land, this article was indeed valuable.

Some texas-based company is HERE in Canada (for some reason) being an example of typical globalization and destruction of sovereignty and killing the earth, at the cost of stuff like increased earthquakes and more.

RCMP will pounce on anyone that doesn’t enforce the status quo. We know that much.

That said, when you cross that line of not being peaceful anymore and you start doing aggressive stuff like parking a van, trees on a road … even if that’s not so bad, it’s still crossing a certain line, and when that line is crossed it opens up the opportunity for the government to be more successful with these shady provocateurs they’re obviously planting. Usually it’s better to take the “high road”, no pun intended.

If I blocked a road because Canadians weren’t paying attention to the blood they have on their hands with respect to Canada’s support for Israel, for example, and supporting the official bullshit narrative concerning the situation in SYRIA, I wouldn’t be taken very seriously. Even though my people are dying and a world conflict is increasingly being fomented, that’s not the route I would take.

I’m not saying “ignore the problem”. I’m saying people underestimate peace. I understand their frustration. I hate fracking. I even hate that spell-check on wordpress here doesn’t even think “fracking” is a word.  I hate dependence on (possibly artificially) scarce natural resources.  I hate that we don’t run our cars off of hemp, and it’s very possible that the road and the actual fracking they’re talking about wouldn’t have even existed here if North America wasn’t colonized in the first place (hah.. and maybe then I also wouldn’t be “me” too, right?)…

More importantly and more to the point, the mind is the ultimate battlefield and if people were armed with the Trivium Method they would long ago have put their “government” (aka mind-control) in its fucking place and banished it out of existence. Empire and enslavement, long ago, would be gone forever or at least as long as we remembered what “liberty” actually means and made the connection that it sounds like LIBRARY and so we free ourselves by learning and reading. A book is an extremely powerful tool. It allows people to crystallize their life experience and distill the most valuable insights from that experience. Learning about the world through a system of certainty and also learning about ourselves by looking inwards is what makes us strong and able to spot tricks in religion, media, school, etc. Even if the aboriginal people here are in the right, their audience has NO way to decipher fallacies presented in the media concerning their plight.

Fracking is crazy. If we’re going to have any government at all it should be one that outlaws fracking. The road and the people who work at the company are not the issue. Even if they’re successful at stopping fracking at this one site there’s still tons going on in the US, for example, and we can’t expect everyone to put tents near the place and do that shit when most people are living in poverty anyway. The Louisiana sinkhole is growing bigger and bigger everyday. To make matters worse, we’re seeing more crazy space-weather and hence Earthquakes in general too. This is insane. We’re hacking at branches and not getting to the route cause of the issue –> mind-control]

[related article & videos: Native Protestors And RCMP Clash In New Brunswick]