Dialogue on Aquaculture in First Nations Drum April 2009

 

Canadians for Reconciliation continue to meet with success

The Elders from Sto:lo, Stat'myx, Salish, and Nisga'a nations needed to be housed out of the elements during the Chinese New Year's Day Parade in Vancouver, B.C., as it happened to be a cold one on Jan. 27, 2009, "A very cold and wet event this year," said Bill Chu, who organized an assembly of First Nations in the parade on Main Street.

Bill Chu's guests, the wait for the march of the dragons and that doesn't normally happen. Bill has organized similar multi-cultural events over the past few years in Vancouver.

"It always seems to be raining on the New Year's Parade," said Bill, "but this year it was bitterly cold." Bill Chu is a driving force behind Canadians for Reconciliation, "a peaceful non-partisan grassroots movement committed to developing a new relationship with aboriginal people, one that signifies a deep apology for past injustice, a willingness to honor truth now, and a resolve to embrace each other in the new millennium."

There is some missing pieces too, that they would like to embrace. "A professor at UBC informed Bill that the 1881 census in B.C. revealed 20 percent of the non-Aboriginal population in the province was Chinese. "There were more Chinese than any other single immigrant group. There is no history books that explain this, and it paints the Chinese of British Columbia in the completely different light."

Chinese were indeed a populous group, but not exactly a uniform one because the in-migration was practically entirely men. Furthermore because of the misinformation in the history books, "Today we are seen as recent immigrants. Our history has been suppressed to benefit of the white guys. Aboriginal people and our people were treated similar ways. We suffered similar discrimination and all of it was written right out of the history books.

"In the 1800s when the government of B.C. would give away free tracts of land only two groups of people were excluded from this privilege: Chinese and Aboriginal. We were useful to work on building the railroad and working in the mines, but we were never welcome and they used us out of necessity. It was a cheap way to finish the railroad." As a result the years 1881 to 1885 compose a memorable chapter of labour exploitation of Chinese men.

"It's not just about wages," said Bill, "and we didn't get those every day of the year either. We were only paid nine months of the year. During winter there was no work and they stopped paying us. It trapped the people in place with no health care, inadequate constructions to survive to winter, and no way to save any money." Everything they saved was spent on surviving three wintery months with no income.

The Chinese began turning to the only alliances open due to the draconian systemic racism that was blossoming in the North American continent, with B.C. distinguished by particular complications related to the location on the Pacific Rim, namely, Pacific-based people. 

Bill said, "The Aboriginal story I like to tell is from a Chinese restaurant owner who was passing away, and he gathered his children around him, and he told them, 'You have to treat the Aboriginal people well.'

"'Why must we do this?' asked the restaurateur's children, 'Way back when I was a railroad worker who got injured I was left by the tracks to die because that is what they did for us. Nothing. A few agonizing days a group of Aboriginal people walked by and picked me up and took me home where they nursed me back to health. And I became a restaurant owner.'"

Bill noted, "That's just one insight. The fact is that in 1885 the white guys decided, 'We don't want the Chinese here anymore.' They started the head tax in 1885, slapped on the infamous head tax $50 to enter the country. Only the Chinese, nobody else, had to pay the head tax. At that time for $50 you could buy a house. It was a lot of money"

The Chinese already in the country for many years may have once intended to return to China but their chances of that had always been slim and now they were none. He said the era of the head tax put the Canadian Chinese in a big dilemma. Here they were, many of them since 1858, and suddenly it is was stick around in Vancouver enduring this horrendous discrimination and scraping for a living. That was the moment when some of them intermarried with Aboriginal population."

Bill Chu is hopeful that a wider body of research begins to develop in the history of Chinese in British Columbia because it precedes Canada and the Chinese should be acknowledged for their place in the foundations of an important nation in the world.

The way it’s got to be for mining in B.C.

The B.C. First Nations Mining Conference late last year in Prince George, B.C. contained intensive discussion at an open mike from representatives of First Nations across the province. The microphone was open to the First Nation leadership, and the mining industry in attendance listened to input throughout the conference.

“It was within the modern day treaty making process, the recommendations that came forward front and centre, that said you have to deal with each other with respect,” said one speaker from the Dease Lake area of Northern B.C.. 

“What does that really mean?" he asked. "Does that mean offering as little as possible, disrespecting our people by the offers on the table? I think that here we are trying to find solutions about how to get along with industry, and how to be partners, and how to find solutions together. I think that can be most effective if we clearly understand what that word respect means.”

He said, “We wouldn’t have to coerce government to change legislation or the regulations about how we conduct business with our people if we lived respecting people and others. If industry regarded that word and its full meaning, and some of them do, I don’t paint the brush broadly, because some come to us and say, ‘We want to work together,’ but the thing is that with the climate here and the unresolved issues we need to spread that message, even to our own people. To me it’s an important word.”

Another speaker from the Treaty Eight area (north-east B.C.) said, “We were in the process of negotiating mining agreements with companies in our area, and they told the government that they were talking with us.”

He explained, “After that little bit of information was exchanged they stopped talking to us. We’ve got mining happening all over our area, and they opened another mine to start producing coal, and there is not one person from our community working in it.”

He noted with some frustration, “They offered $700 for education in our community. Seven hundred dollars doesn’t even cover the cost of busing our kids to school in Chetwynd.”

A speaker from the Campbell River area, John Henderson, former chief of the Campbell River Indian Band, said, “Up and down the coast, isolated remote communities have felt the impact of the logging industry as well as the overfishing. They are now left with very little in those communities. So the challenge that we have regards mining a sustainable resource. If the answer is no, it isn’t sustainable, how do we insure that the First Nations and non-First Nation communities are sustainable after the mining resource is gone?”

“You know as First Nations it is very difficult to do business. We get the finger pointed at us and the non-Native community won’t talk to us. We’re going through a lot of that at home right now. If we’re going to be true partners then let’s have First Nations at the table. Let us develop a partnership. Let’s talk about business.” 

Henderson noted, “We’ve got all kinds of boards and associations across this country where First Nations aren’t even a part of anymore. We need a voice, whatever that may be. If we’re going to be partners with a mining company or an oil and gas company then 50 percent of that organization should be First Nation. There is no question about that. So how do we get there?”

He said, “It’s up to council members to make sure they buy into the process. But if there is nothing on the table and the end of the day what is the point? We can’t just be pawns in the business world there. “The way it comes out, it is prejudice. And that is what the non-Native community is saying to us, ‘You want the door open. You want guaranteed employment. What about us? Where are our jobs?’”

“That’s on the other side of the table. That’s got to stop. There is nothing unions and all those things that are out there.”

Henderson concluded, “It’s a long story every time we talk about partnership with non-Native organizations. How do we fix it? Like I said, there should be First Nation involvement in the true sense of the word. Because there is no BS’n about it, that’s the way it's got to be. 

Fraser River Salmon Table Society meeting to devise new long-term strategies

The Fraser River Salmon Table Society is working toward consensus, said to Richard McGuigan, PhD, co-chair of the table (along with Marcel Shepert, Pacific Salmon Treaty) meeting in Prince George, BC, Sep 18 07, at the Prince George Native Friendship Centre.

 

Dr. McGuigan said, “Cooperative Decision Management is the way to achieve consensus,” for the fledgling table society.

 

By this emerging method interest-based negotiations are conducted through (three) stages and everybody abides by a final consensus. Cooperative Decision Management allows no veto to any party, and is not co-management, which, “has a negative reputation and gives regulators a lot of power,” said co-chair McGuigan.

 

The salmon table process must respect the ability of First Nations to represent their constituencies,, said Doug Kelly, Sto:lo Tribal Council, “especially regarding the inter-tribal treaty process.” The table is open as long as Aboriginal rights and title are respected.

 

David Moore has worked on table planning, “One goal of the salmon table is to create transparency in marketing, ultimately to resolve problems like selling caviar for as low as 11 cents per pound and finding out it fetches $15 a pound in the US food market.”

 

This transparency is the goal of a Siska First Nation demonstration project, to, “catch, process, and sell their fish harvested from a fish wheel,” with approval of CFIA, BC Food Safety Act, and BC Centre for Disease Control.

 

Salmon is a commodity from the wild realm, and salmon is still largely misunderstood in terms of behaviour and even physiology. Moore explained, “We have learned colour of the flesh is not determined by how far up the river the fish has gone,” a previous assumption, “rather, maturity is the determinant in quality and colour of the flesh.”

 

This is interesting because the old view was the farther up the river salmon were caught the less red and more dark the flesh would be (and dark is inedible). Now upstream fishers can join the mainstream market.

 

“The key is flexibility in marketing,” said Moore to the table society meeting. He said, “Micro-processing can be done profitably without over-capitalization.” A boondoggle may exist in the provincial management of food health via Regional Health Authorities in BC.

 

The BC government says on the internet, “This structure, introduced in December 2001, modernized a complicated, confusing and expensive health care system by merging the previous 52 health authorities into a streamlined governance and management model.”

 

Today, said Moore, “these regional health authorities are charged with supplying permits required for the catching processing and selling of fish.”

 

The commercialization of fresh caught salmon may be advanced through a new process, noted Moore, that now includes a specific container for storing a fish, a card-board, wax-coat that preserves ice and fish together for the few hours required to get a fish a proper larder.

 

The problem is, however, a lack of fish to market. Teresa Ryan works in Vancouver as a fish biologist on the Pacific Salmon Commission and a scientist representing coastal First Nations. They were all asking the same question: where have all the fish gone?

 

A report in the Prince George Free Press said low salmon returns found along the Fraser River this year show nets producing a tenth the expected catch. As a result people are not going fishing.

 

Obviously this is a major concern in Canada’s North West Pacific where often the First Nations are losing of a way of life. Traditional salmon harvests unite communities but this year nobody goes to the river.

 

These people are facing a disappearing cultural diet, a staple food for the poor, and a lack of control over problems associated with the loss.

Kiteboarding the Inside Passage in winter

Northern Gateway Pipeline - Ten percent equity for First Nations in Northern Gateway Pipeline Project

Enbridge interviewed 2008

 - Ten percent equity for First Nations in Northern Gateway Pipeline Project 

The Enbridge Pipeline Northern Gateway Project is back in the news after sitting on the shelf since 2005. The Enbridge people have scheduled a series of public meetings called Open Houses in October and November this year in Alberta and B.C..

Roger Harris is Vice President of Community and Aboriginal Partnerships and he told Native Journal, “We do have a number of processes to address the issues including workshops, 800-numbers,” and a major plan to get out and meet and greet the general public.

Then come the First Nation liaisons, which are presently unscheduled in order to maximize the flexibility required for accommodation, he explained.

”We are preparing our First Nation meetings at their convenience,” Roger said, and the process is underway to some degree. “I've been have meetings since May this year."

He took the VP job in March, “We want them to help us design the project, including their short term and long term involvement.” So far, said Roger, “We have been very well received.”

To his mind the short term benefits are less important than the long term ones.

The pipeline construction is a linear project, five years and it's gone. I want the people to have business opportunities in a $4.5 billion (2006$) project,” which price, he said will undeoubtedly go much higher.

He also addressed the impact on the environment of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, “We will look to First Nations for environmental monitoring and we will offer equity partnerships of up to 10 percent of the project.”

In fact Enbridge will be providing capacity-building to the communities, training welders and tradespeople for jobs to found in half-a-dozen construction camps along the route.

“The trades aspect in pipeline construction is only a three year window of opportunity, from 2001 to 2015,” he said. “Between now and then we are laying the groundwork. We've been investing in learning institutions, for example, Kitimat Valley Institute in has received $30,000 a year for the past couple of years.

“First we need to know where the line will be laid,” and who is affected and how. Roger takes the project to heart because he settled his family in Terrace and his adult children stayed. He spent 20 years in Haida Gwaii, and has an understanding of First Nations politics. He was MLA for Skeena.

He said, “I have priorities for this project like, one, it has to be environmentally sustainable. Two, the economic activity is huge so the focus has to be on the communities where it comes through.”

Enbridge will engage the environmental concerns, and even make the project a stimulus to increasing the environmental awareness already found in the Interior and coast of B.C..

“The ports of the northern coast,” said Roger, “are expanding in Prince Rupert, Kitimat, and there is serious discussion about Stewart, B.C.,” next door to Hyder, Alaska, “turning into an international seaport,” And Roger shared a reminder the Alcan is expanding their aluminum smelter in Kitimat.

“We see the Gateway Project as a catalyst to increase the capacity of environmental stewardship,” on the coast and on the rest of the pipeline route.

So Enbridge is deeply committed to learning how to involve First Nation communities in safeguarding an infrastructure to create a comfort zone in the territories.

The Delgamuukw decision of the Supreme Court of Canada called for 'accommodation' of Aboriginal Rights and Title inherent to the First Nations.

“If it wasn't the law we would want to do it anyway. We are going to be innovative,” to find the accommodation, "and that is what the equity ownership percents are all about."

Enbridge wants to learn what parts of the lands involved are 'special', “We want to avoid going through the Skeena,” which sounds (ahem) unlikely, since the Skeena is the largest pristine watershed remaining on Mother Earth, even when it arrives at Kitimat.

Here is the schedule of  meetings:

Week # 1

October 20th - Whitecourt October 21st - Mayerthorpe October 22nd - Morinville October 23rd -  Bon Accord October 24th - Bruderheim

Week # 2

November 3rd - Tumbler Ridge November 4th - Dawson Creek November 5th - Fox Creek November 6th - Grande Prairie

Week # 3 November 17th - Kitimat November 18th - Prince Rupert November 19th - Terrace November 20th - Houston November 21st - Smithers

Week # 4 November 24th - Burns Lake November 25th - Fort St. James November 26th - Vanderhoof November 27th - Prince George

Roger Harris phone is 1-604-###-#### to inquire about unscheduled meetings.

Host of contrasts on the coast

The coast is a host of contrasts and a primary one is cultural. For example, First Nations are people of the Potlatch who express a lot of national heritage in artistic endeavours that are indelibly cultural. The First Nations identify a presence and their communities with iconic art found in dozens of locations up the coast. When you come to see major features in First Nation art you are likely in the midst of a First Nation community.

Tourism travel on the coast leads visitors into adventurous activities like tours of whale and bear-watching that take people to places like Bute Inlet, Toba Inlet, Desolation Sound. And when you go farther north, tours take visitors into the Broughton Archipelago, Knight’s Inlet or Kingcome Inlet, or around the top of Vancouver Island. As a cultural exploration, Vancouver Island is but one of a seemingly countless number of islands, many of which were inhabited, while others were cultivated, and others were used for communal harvest of vegetation or wildlife.

It is surprising how many people lived in places no longer considered for habitation. In some of these places there are communities holding extinction at bay with one or two Band members living in remote locations like Hopetown or Gilford Island. At Kingcome Inlet, very top of the world when you are there, 125 souls keep a solid First Nation footprint on the ground (even though the houses are on stilts).

Victoria is a picturesque city full of art shops and museums often honed in on the First Nation culture of the Pacific Coast, but Victoria is a city. On the opposite side of the prominent Malahat from Victoria and still southerly on Vancouver Island is the city of Duncan, halfway point between Victoria and Nanaimo. Duncan is a great place to see the cultural contrast in full bloom. They call Duncan the City of Totems and there are totem poles set around the city but the main attraction is the Quw'utsun' Cultural and Conference Centre. It’s a re-created Salishan village nestled beside the Cowichan River and a beautiful representation of past and present Cowichan Tribes community.

The north end of Vancouver contains more rugged beauty enhanced by temperate weather, and the rainforest is more readily available to visit. Hiking, touring, fishing, and outdoor life continues on a year-round basis, top to bottom, on both sides of the big island, but when you arrive at the community of Alert Bay on Cormorant Island you could ask about visiting Yukusem where you will learn about the study of Culturally Modified Trees (CMT). This is the study of human beings working to organize around rainforest resources. What David Garrick, anthropologist, uncovered on Hanson Island is the 'transgenerational' management of vegetation by First Nations at the north end of the Inside Passage, and it is amazing.

This careful study of transgenerational management provides evidence that First Nations used forest resources in coastal rainforests in complex arrangements. Special preserves of rainforest under carefully defined jurisdictions were ‘managed’ to create and provide essential resources. Social groups conducted large scale horticulture within particular groves of cedar trees on Yukusem’s 16 square kilometres, doing so on a truly grand scale. Together they made cedar trees do the most incredible things horticultural.

David Garrick uncovered cedar-shaping in CMTs during his long and fruitful tenure of archaeology on-site at Yukusem. This amazing process involves planning that spans centuries. This cultivation was done in a manner that shaped trees and modified them to produce a surplus of bark while maintaining the integrity of a living cedar tree. First Nations maximized cedar bark production by modifying the tree, doing this in a way that left the cedar tree to heal, thrive, and produce more surplus bark. It was a strategy of development that occurred because cedar bark was a staple product in the social and economic development of coastal life. This cultural product was used in an apparently endless array of purposes. The practice to cultivate giant cedars was millennial to make trees produce a surplus cedar bark into a raw material for production of manufactured goods.

Nothing was left to chance or waste. The term old-growth forest was meaningless within a culture that practised continuous and specialized cultivation in the growth of the forests over several centuries. Even a burnt forest was an opportunity to harvest a different list of highly-prized resources. Meanwhile, everything on Yukusem was planned around the need to produce cedar bark for future generations. A prime example of the transgenerational planning policy occurs on a site called Bear Grove on Yukusem. Garrick’s mapping points out the existence of at least 55 shaped cedars per hectare in the Bear Grove sector of the island. This is an intense concentration of evidence indicative of creating surplus bark. It becomes obvious from concentrations of CMTs of this magnitude that an organized effort was made to cultivate and exploit cedar bark in patterns showing sustainable, long-term, transgenerational planning processes.

The people of Yukusem living 1,350 years ago cultivated a specific tree to furnish Namgis carver Beau Dick with raw material for his canoe project in the modern age. Also in this transgenerational context, ancient people provided a modern chain of evidence to Harry Alfred and Don Svanvik, CMT researchers from Alert Bay who are able to exert First Nation jurisdiction over Yukusem cedar groves in the present. The vital (and heretofore missing) evidence was produced from messages in trees hundreds of years old. The fingerprints of this interaction with forests have been uncovered in many of the forests of B.C., even so, it was a long and arduous 20th century for the folks around Yukusem. Only in 2004 did the First Nations recover jurisdiction over Yukusem.

CMTs studied in this way by Garrick provided scientific resources and evidence to give First Nations proof of former jurisdiction. It is interesting to note, however, there was no apparent conflict in the management of Yukusem resources until about 1930, Garrick explains. His archaeological time-line shows that before the cataclysmic culture shock treatments took form (residential schools, banning of potlatchs, et al), the arrival of industrial foresters was a not-unwelcome event to a degree. The industrial foresters were cooperative by taking only a few trees from Yukusem’s treasured groves, and Garrick reports they apparently left cedar trees untouched, cedar was for the cedar shapers those who used it as a specially-managed and treasured resource. Thus Garrick has proven how two management paradigms co-existed!

It required an exercise of federal government policy to alienate First Nations from their management and jurisdiction over cedar shaping activities. From the time such government policies were introduced until Yukusem Heritage Society was formed in 2004 the cedar groves on Hanson Island faced dire circumstances. Garrick’s archaeological study was the one thing standing in their way, and in a pleasant turn since his study began a series of scientific facts have freed people to exert their sovereignty.

“I am the land and resource officer of the Namgis First Nation,” said Harry Alfred, one afternoon in a communal garden on Yukusem. Alfred described how people have rebounded because of Garrick’s work in these groves. Cultural energy burst from the CMT research and in a way people have regained a sense of cultural balance. New community energy has been born from the old secrets. Alfred and Don Svanvik sit on the Yukusem board of directors on behalf of the Namgis First Nation. Two other Bands share jurisdiction over Hanson Island (Tlowitsis and Muntagila). Alfred and Svanvik have become CMT experts within their communities. “The Namgis Nation,” said Alfred, “comprised about 4,000 km.” With a sweep of his arm he described a rectangular shaped territory with Yukusem sitting almost at the centre.

Furthermore, under the guidance of Namgis artist and lay-historian Beau Dick a group of volunteers has built a few community facilities on the south-west quadrant of Yukusem to teach people the meaning of the old ways. Dick described how one social organization took people into the silvan wilderness and constructed dugout canoes. It is known that canoes were constructed in the cultivated cedar groves in areas adjoining other food or health or community-based cultivated resources. The canoes were dugouts, designed in a technically superior manner to take people back and forth between communities and fishing grounds or ther harvest areas throughout the Broughton Archipelago.

The communities of old are buried today in the forest floor in the surroundings of etchings of harvest found in ancient cedar trees. A volunteer canoe project amounts to a defacto form of reclamation of Yukusem and was the idea of Dick who grew up in a Big House society that remained standing in the splendour of Kingcome Inlet, representing a miraculous survival where traditionalists dodged bullets (literal and figurative) through many previous decades.

Dick learned to carve from his grandfather and father and obtained teaching about hidden meanings in a unique form of artistic expression. Life goes on, yes, and Beau Dick, despite being a realist, believes he is restoring historical significance to the nation by uncovering the old secrets of cedar forest management. On the southwest quadrant of Yukusem he is staging a come-back by building a cultural camp to teach people the old ways -- sharing a forest in a transgenerational and environmentally sustainable way.

B.C. Justice system has specialized First Nation advocates

Patricia Jackson volunteers as treasurer on the board
of directors of the Northern BC Crisis Centre

 Patricia Jackson is a Youth & Family Advocate for the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of British Columbia, and, as noted on the title (or index) page, Patricia was declared the Aboriginal Woman of Distinction by Today’s Woman for the 7th Annual presentation of the northern award. She received the honours during a banquet in Prince George, at the Coast North Inn, this fall. She won this recognition from tireless work at an urgent task.

 

“We are supporting clients who are facing an imbalance, and we advocate correcting injustice.” Patricia Jackson comes to the job with the correct set of personal experiences because, it is true she is young enough to have avoided residential school horrors (by falling outside an age demographic), but Patricia underwent her own disturbing experiences in concert with what Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (Ret.) calls systemic racism against First Nations in Canada.

 

Systemic racism causes people to land in precarious, severely prejudiced, government-legislated losses of human rights from which there is no escape by any means, because it is race-based.

 

Patricia was put into a system of foster care where she grew up in a system of policies under Bill Vanderzalm, renowned and renounced as a form of zealot as then-minister of families, and Patricia lived in one of those ‘foster’ homes filled with frightful encounters, in Valemount, BC.

 

She describes endless days filled with assault and battery, deprivation, and insane rants and dictates about the problems caused by Indian people. These actions were apparently foisted upon dozens of First Nation kids wrenched thousands of kilometres from home. She was, for example, born in Metlakatla, BC, and is a member of the Tsimshian Nation.

 

She said then-minister of government Vanderzalm issued specific orders for social workers to look the other way, which permitted wider and more longterm abuse. The former premier gained a reputation from a lot of bad decisions and poor judgement. This incident, according to Patricia, paints a very dark picture of his period, as a former BC government minister.

 

She survived to raise a family and turn to a profession that provides hope of retribution, in other words, a highly noble cause for the creation in society of behaviour that treats everybody with the same justice, where justice prevails more than here and there.

 

Systemic racism in Canada has been no less absurd, no less arbitrary, no less cruel, no less obvious, and equally as destructive as any system of racism the world has ever seen.

 

Canadians are fortunate to live in an evolving society that has been proving capable of bringing about change. Patricia Jackson is one of those people who is able to lead the way. She has co-workers at the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of British Columbia www.nccabc.ca who cover the territory by following the circuit court, meeting clients and pursuing the cause of justice.

 

Jackson has toiled in a Quebec Street office in downtown Prince George to bring about change in one life or hopefully one family at a time, working to salve wounds suffered either by hook or by crook. She is happy to report the NCCABC offices are moving to new quarters.

 

She has worked at 154 Quebec Street, Prince George, in a historic property. It may well be one of the first commercial properties in Northern British Columbia, indeed, may have been a trading post. It is quaint, cramped, creaky, a false front, and they are moving.

 

A woman of this stature is too busy to pay attention to false fronts and antiquated notions. Jackson is building a place in society for people, and sometimes she delivers unexpected landings for kids. For instance, starting last year she worked with the business manager for the WHL Cougars, Brandi Brodsky, to build a program with businesses to put hundreds of kids in arena seats, fed, clothed, housed, and often over the moon with joy to receive an invitation to the spectacle of world class junior hockey.

 

Disadvantaged, at risk, handicapped, or just lucky for once, some kids might to turn a corner through heartfelt endeavours. She knows for a fact it is worth the effort. She has been mentored by others and Jackson speaks about Gloria George, a Hereditary Chief , who inspired a program to create retribution and healing in the Prince George Provincial Corrections facility. This program is presently underway dealing with residential school trauma.

 

“This program is entering another phase," said Jackson, "and the trauma workshops are being funded by the Anglican Church for this next round.” Jackson noted, “This is the first corrections facility in Canada to offer recovery assistance to residential school survivors,” and the program owes its existence, she said, to Gloria George. The United Church contributed the funding for the first phase.

 

Jackson points out another essential ingredient in the association’s success, the NCCABC is entirely First Nation operated and staffed. “My Regional Manager is Arthur Paul, and he works out of the 50 Powell Street, Vancouver BC office. He lets me do my job to the best of my ability.

 

"He has been responsible for making me a better employee,” where she has been at NCCABC for 2 years, "and on Dec 8, 2007, will be entering my third year of employment.   The NCCABC,” including Darlene Shackelly, Executive Director, “has empowered us," she said "by believing and supporting us.”

Beau Dick canoe carving project

Hawk Hawkins and Beau Dick, circa 2008, Yukusem Culture Bivouac on Hanson Island, B.C..

Beau Dick is a machine when it comes to working with wood. He is a Kwakwala carver of renowned ability whose life includes meeting the British Royal Family, and includes possession of the highest ranking bloodline.

Beau Dick was raised in Kingcome Inlet, B.C. (an obscure postal code), and grew up within a Big House society still standing in the splendour of its generations.

Kingcome Inlet represented a miraculous survival where traditionalists had dodged a lot of bullets, both literal and figurative, through many previous decades.

Beau Dick learned to carve from his grandfather and father and the teaching contained the deeper meaning of this unique form of artistic expression. He learned these important lessons at the archetype level, from which level was born a life-force.

With this knowledge and energy Beau Dick has launched himself into the community to show people the deeper meaning of their old ways.

The timing is right for Beau Dick. He found it easier to create a significant cultural revival since the return of Hanson Island to First Nation custody. It is an opportunity to break out of systematic oppression.

Proof of Aboriginal stewardship of this island has been uncovered in rich Hanson Island Old Growth cedar groves, because the Cultural Modified Trees are filled with archaeological evidence of Aboriginal Rights and Title.

Hanson Island has been returned to the custody of the First Nations. CMTs have restored once-hidden knowledge about shore-based societies constructed around rainforest cedar groves.

David Garrick, anthropologist, coined the term “transgenerational” management of forest resources to explain a social arrangement in forests. Rainforests were ‘managed’ under carefully defined  jurisdiction.

Social groups practiced grand scale horticulture on stands of cedar on Yukusem’s (Hanson Island) 16 square kilometres. They made cedar trees do the most amazing things. Excess bark was produced for harvest,  which might take a couple hundred years to get to.

Harry Alfred (et al) has taken scientific evidence to carve a role in management. He is one of the board of directors of Yukusem Heritage Society, which has custody of most of Hanson Island.

He is also, “land and resource officer of the Namgis First Nation,” he explained, one afternoon in a Garrick-constructed garden in Yukusem heights.

“The Namgis traditional territory,” said Alfred, comprised, “about 4,000 sq km.” Extending an arm to four corners he described a rectangular shaped territory with Yukusem almost centre.

Harry Alfred said the community rebounded due to David Garrick’s work in cedar groves on Yukusem (over 20 years of hands-on research). The First Nations managers have devoted nation-building energy to CMT research.

A hundred people been trained by Garrick and these are people who have regained cultural balance from the experience.

Life goes on, yes, and Beau Dick, a realist, knows this. He is adding something to a historically significant nation using the old secrets of majestic Indian Nation jurisdiction.

On the southwest quadrant of Yukusem he is staging a canoe carving project and building a cultural camp to teach people the old ways about sharing a forest in a transgenerational and environmentally sustainable way.

Visit the Carving Studio of Alert Bay