INDIGENOUS GUARDIANS OF THE NUXALK
How one British Columbia First Nation is building its vision of the guardian conservation model being adopted by Indigenous Peoples across Canada
How one British Columbia First Nation is building its vision of the guardian conservation model being adopted by Indigenous Peoples across Canada
O N A MAY MORNING in British Columbia’s Bella Coola Valley, Clyde Tallio, a longlimbed 31-year-old Nuxalk intellectual, and I walk a dirt road that gives way to a forest path up a bank from Thorsen Creek, swollen with spring melt. As we slip beneath the forest canopy, we move between worlds: from rural Western Canada to sacred Nuxalk territory. These are the lands of Tallio’s people, who are emerging as protagonists in an Indigenous epic unfolding on this unconquered expanse of Pacific coast. Tallio calls out in his Nuxalk tongue, an endangered language with fewer than 10 fluent speakers that he spent years studying instead of attending university. He announces our presence to the animals, ancestors and spirits, clearing our path and asking for protection. We turn our bodies in a clockwise circle, the same way dancers spin before entering the dance floors of the big houses that are the spiritual hearts of Indigenous communities along the coast. Thorsen Creek, or Squmalh in Nuxalk, a tributary of the lower Bella Coola River cut into the valley by retreating Pleistocene glaciers, connects us to Nuxalk creation. Ahead, watching us from the rainforest’s soggy verdant floor, are dozens of ancient petroglyphs etched into rocks lining the stepped trail. The glyphs, carved in stone thousands of years ago (estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000 years), date roughly to the MidHolocene, a period of significant ecological change that made resources like western red cedar — an essential material for building structures, wares and artworks — more abundant and accessible to coastal peoples. Tallio dates the glyphs to “the time of the fixing of the Earth.” In poetic, if not archeological terms, he might be right. Tallio describes each image as we ascend the hill: the guardian caretaker of this place; the frog, a transformer who takes many forms in life; raven, the meddlesome trickster whose follies and transgressions animate many Nuxalk stories; the four ancestors representing the four generations who survived the four catastrophes (the falling of the sky, the burning of the world, the flooding of the land and the famine of the people). Like biblical plagues, these calamities led to the creation of Nuxalk laws, or, as Tallio puts it: “the way of being, being at the place.” The Nuxalk followed and enforced these ancient decrees in every aspect of their social life, from summer fisheries to winter ceremonies. The explorer Alexander Mackenzie learned just how serious the Nuxalk were about their laws when he travelled the Bella Coola River in 1793. Admiring a large fishing weir, Mackenzie asked for a closer look but was refused as a visitor unpractised in the Nuxalk way. The village edict appears stern, but across the generations, laws like these, which controlled access and mandated fair distribution, fostered, in the summation of historian Lissa K. Wadewitz, “a world negotiated for the benefit of both salmon and people.” Tallio and others are working to bring Nuxalk rights back to this place and many more throughout Nuxalk territory. In the coming years, many places in the Nuxalk homeland, roughly from Dean Channel in the north to South Bentinck Arm in the south and King Island in the west to the Bella Coola Valley in the east, may come under Nuxalk jurisdiction for the first time in more than a century. “As a much older nation,” Tallio tells me in his professorial tone, “we have to show Canada how to manage these resources.”
AT THE NUXALK BAND, I meet Wally Webber, Chief Councillor of the Nuxalk, whose grey shoulder-length hair and plain black-rimmed spectacles make him look like an aging hipster. Webber heads the Nuxalk elected government responsible for policy and welfare on the reserve. He also holds the hereditary title Snxiluulhla, a name that hails from “Sunny Village,” the land the band office stands on today. We are joined by Ernie Tallio, the stout and soft-spoken manager of the Guardian Watchmen, a Nuxalk environmental stewardship program. The three of us pile into his white GMC pickup and ride down to the wharf. At the docks, Blair Hans, 21, and Keith Windsor, 37, dressed in khaki Watchmen uniforms, are preparing their vessel. Clyde Tallio is here too.
As you learn to connect and dance with these beings, you’re able to learn more about yourself and what it means to be human’
From April to October, Ernie Tallio, Hans, Windsor and three other members of the Watchmen patrol the labyrinthine inlets, islands and fiords of their Nuxalk homeland. The Guardian Watchmen program provides secure jobs to First Nations people in a region with few. In the 1990s, logging corporations pulled out of Bella Coola. Combined with the steady decline of the fisheries, the departure of the forestry industry left many in the community unemployed. According to Statistics Canada, more than one in four workers and more than 40 per cent of men are unemployed. More than half of the population can’t work because there aren’t enough jobs. But the Guardian Watchmen program provides more than just employment. As eyes and ears watching over water and land, the Watchmen are enacting a simple but potentially revolutionary principle: the return of territories and resources to Indigenous protection. “This is how governance and sovereignty, if you will, are being exercised by the nations,” says Paul Kariya, a Coastal First Nations senior policy advisor, in his 16th-floor office in downtown Vancouver later that week. “They’re saying we have to coexist. They’re saying we have to protect the environment in a way that creates longevity and opportunity for us.” The Nuxalk established their Guardian Watchmen program in 2009 as part of the broader Great Bear Initiative negotiated by First Nations and the government of British Columbia. Through the Coastal First Nations alliance, the Nuxalk cooperate with eight other communities to protect, monitor and restore natural and cultural resources. The Coastal First Nations Guardian Watchmen program is funded by the $58-million Coast Funds endowment. They also benefit from $6 million in annual revenue from carbon credits created through the preservation of the temperate old-growth Great Bear Rainforest, which acts as a vast repository for climate-changecausing carbon dioxide emissions. The Nuxalk program was inspired by the path-breaking Haida Watchmen initiative formalized in 1981. Today, Guardian programs draw on the Haida model, the Indigenous Rangers program piloted in Australia in 2007 and a growing network of similar initiatives in Canada. The Indigenous Guardians Toolkit, developed by The Nature Conservancy of Canada in conjunction with Indigenous partners, counts more than 45 communities conducting Guardian activities across Canada. The 2017 federal budget includes $25 million over five years to fund more pilots. Under the wispy morning f og, the Guardian Watchmen, Webber, Clyde Tallio and I set out onto the choppy waters of North Bentinck Arm. As we travel, Clyde Tallio narrates the Nuxalk history and place names of his territory. Below us, on the seafloor of the ocean-flooded valley of North Bentinck, lies the house of the chief of the undersea world, Q’umakwa, whose name we do not say out on the water. While Clyde tracks our patrol through linguistic history, Ernie uses an app on his standard issue Guardian Watchmen tablet to collect data. Last year, the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen traversed 14,723 kilometres of territory on 139 patrols. They are well on their way to exceeding those numbers this year. The data they collect is uploaded to the cloud where First Nations policy-makers combine it with science, analytics and traditional Indigenous governance systems. Indigenous governance and environmental science often advance in tandem. The Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen recently helped to wrap up a bear study that advanced knowledge about bear behaviours and populations in their territory. The Watchmen are often the only authorities out on the land. They rarely encounter BC Parks or Fisheries and Oceans Canada rangers because those understaffed agencies can’t afford regular patrols. As a more constant and reliable presence, the Watchmen are
As you learn to connect and dance with these beings, you’re able to learn more about yourself and what it means to be human’
increasingly called upon to uphold not just Indigenous and environmental laws, but also public safety. Just three days earlier, the Nuxalk Watchmen rescued three teens who capsized their kayaks near the mouth of the Bella Coola River. And last November, they recovered the body of a man whose houseboat was ripped to pieces by a ferocious windstorm. Later in the season, the Watchmen encounter sport fishers, wildlife viewers, commercial trawlers and professional prawners. They give the visitors they meet a friendly reminder that this is Nuxalk territory and ask that all respect the Nuxalk way. Before the British Columbia government banned the trophy grizzly hunt in 2017, the Watchmen would run into bear hunters on occasion. When they did, they did not shy away from expressing their opposition. Now that resident grizzlies are mostly safe from people, local residents need to be protected from the bears who wander into town. A month after I depart Bella Coola, a grizzly sow mauls a man in his backyard. The Watchmen sometimes assist with bear patrols, aiming to minimize human-grizzly run-ins. Through their actions, the Guardian Watchmen are steadily building a case for Indigenous governance of this coast. And among the public, the Guardian Watchmen are gaining favour with fishermen, tourists and the locals they encounter on patrol every day. As we near the end of Ats’aaxlh, or South Bentinck Arm, where the Taleomy and Noeick rivers converge into the inlet at Taleomy Narrows, we approach the ancient village of Talyu, the home of Clyde and Ernie’s Tallio ancestors, the Talyuumc “Descendants of the Queen of the Undersea,” a Nuxalk borough that included the homes of not only the Tallio Clyde Tallio ( top), one of fewer than 10 fluent speakers of Nuxalk, joins Nuxalk Coastal Guardian Watchmen member Keith Windsor ( middle) and Chief Council of the Nuxalk Wally Webber ( bottom) on a patrol.
but also the Hans and Snow lineages. An Indian agent evicted the last of the Snow family, who maintain the hereditary title of Snuxyaltwa, “The Light of the Universe,” in the 1930s. He threatened to take the children and prosecute the parents if the family did not relocate to Bella Coola. Loggers burned what remained of the village not long after. Interfor, a logging corporation, clear-cut this part of South Bentinck Arm in the 2000s. We board a dinghy to make our way to shore. In a clearing at the edge of the forest, a massive totem pole rises amid the trees. As the Nuxalk reassert rights to their homelands, they have erected poles like this one — traditionally used as grave and boundary markers — throughout their territory. In 2009, the Snow family hosted a potlatch to raise this pole, carved by Harry Schooner and his assistants, to reassert rights to this place. The pole tells the Snuxyaltwa Smayusta, or origin story, depicting the loon, the whale, grizzly, thunderbird, sun and angel Yulm, the eldest of the four mythic Nuxalk carpenters who helped Creator make the world. We gather around the pole, peering up at its intricate carved and painted black, blue and red designs. Windsor runs his hand over a fresh gash on Yulm’s belly, where a grizzly has marked its own claims. We linger awhile. Clyde takes a seat at the base of the Snuxyaltwa pole and lights a cigarette. He bows his head, looking down between his feet at the muddy turf of his ancestor’s home and exhales.
AS CLYDE TALLIO and I crest Thorsen Creek trail on that May morning, we approach the last of the rock carvings. Tallio points to his favourite: a dancer with wide eyes and circular orbs fluttering above his bulbous cranium. Tallio tells us that these circles symbolize the dancer’s strivings and achievements. “The Nuxalk word for human being is Tl’msta,” he says. “Tl’ms means to awaken, to aspire, to achieve, to accomplish, to be aware, and then ta means real thing: a real human being awakening, becoming aware, aspiring to achieve and accomplish.” Beyond the tl’msta figure stand carvings representing the spirits of the next world, or si’ukws. Si’ukws are like a cross between patron saints and platonic forms. They care for particular parts of the world — the mountain, the forest, the trees, the rocks — but they also epitomize emotions and ideals like anger, laughter, medicine and the hunt. Nuxalk spiritual leaders came to this place to learn their dances. “As you go through their story and understand them and learn to connect and dance with these beings, you’re able to learn more about yourself and what it means to be human,” Tallio explains. These rocks inscribed with epistemologies that have endured across millennia gesture at something more permanent than paper edicts, digital currencies and national governments, connecting Tallio and me to the hands and truths of the First Peoples of this place: another way of being, another potential. Tallio and the Nuxalk are set on carrying this, the imperative of their history, their roots and their people forward. There will be tension, undoubtedly, as residents of the Bella Coola Valley and lawmakers in Victoria and Ottawa reckon with these resurgent Nuxalk, their renewed authority, their hereditary leadership and their Guardian Watchmen. But there will be cooperation, too. Three weeks after I depart Nuxalk territory, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travels to Prince Rupert, B.C., a port town north of Bella Coola, to sign a reconciliation agreement with 14 coastal First Nations, including the Nuxalk, promoting collaboration in the management and protection of the coastal ecosystem. “The First Nations of the Pacific North and Central Coast have been protecting Canada’s waters for millennia,” Prime Minister Trudeau says in a statement. “Working together, we will protect and preserve the Pacific North Coast, and we will advance reconciliation along the way.” Climate change, igniting boreal forests, melting mountaintop glaciers, warming North Pacific waters and shifting political currents will undoubtedly complicate this unfolding story. But whether this new geological age marks a catastrophe, a beginning or both is not yet written in stone. At the crest of the trail, the threshold where we greet carvings depicting spirits of t he next world, there is a bowl worn into the rocks and marked with the four directions, where visitors can pray and ask for blessings. One by one, Tallio and I touch the water in the bowl, asking for blessings as we step out into the uncertainty of the next world that lies beyond. Someday, maybe the Nuxalk will dance the stories of these ancestors, the ones who survived the catastrophe of colonization and navigated the turbulent waters of self-determination and reconciliation to restore their way of being to this world and this place.
Read more about the Nuxalk Nation’s selfdetermination at cangeo.ca/nd18/nuxalk.