Watch: Award-winning film on indigenous fight against illegal pipeline

Source: Community Peacemaker Teams

Yintah is the Witsuwit'en word for "land". This award-winning documentary tells the story of an Indigenous nation in western Canada fighting for sovereignty and resisting the construction of oil and fracked-gas pipelines across their territory.

The film follows Tsakë ze' Howilhkat Freda Huson, Tsakë ze' Sleydo' Molly Wickham and their fellow land defenders over a decade, as they reoccupy their traditional territory and galvanize their nation against several of the world's largest fossil-fuel companies.

Yintah is about an anti-colonial resurgence - a fierce and ongoing battle for Indigenous and human rights. The film reveals the hypocrisy of the Canadian government's promise of reconciliation, while Indigenous land is still being seized at gunpoint for resource extraction.

The hereditary chiefs' jurisdiction over the territory is supported by a 1997 Supreme Court of Canada decision. When a lower court effectively sidesteps this ruling, granting oil and gas companies access to Witsuwit'en land, the nation's leaders put their bodies on the line, building barricades to keep the corporations out.

Yintah had its Canadian premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival earlier this year. It won the Hot Docs Audience Award and the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary.

Watch Yintah here: www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/inside-the-witsuwit-en-nation-s-fight-to-defend-their-lands-against-fossil-fuel-companies-1.7321276?blm_aid=58072