an on-going site-based intervention
survival: Marker for Treaty 8 & the Site C Dam
Protection of food resources and respective species and ecosystems, both for local indigenous communities and more generally, has often been the central motive in First Nations governments acquiescing to the treaties drawn up by colonial governments: for survival in the deepest senses. The subsequent disrespecting of such treaties continues to be central to underlying Canadian cultural and political identities. And reasserting treaty and consultative rights (Gutman 2018) has often been bound to continued efforts of indigenous governments to protect and restore those food sources and relationships for communal sustenance. So the disrespecting of treaties has had a relationship to indigenous cultural landscapes and respective ecosystems, food, and emotions: from individual experiences to collective aesthetics and broader visual cultures.
I grew up in a multiracial family with histories and relationships with four indigenous languages: Chinook that I was taught by my father, Sencoten that was spoken around me as a boy and that is the dominant Salish language in the communities in which I grew up and in which I continue to live, Halkamelen in which my father could converse and which is widely spoken across the Salish Sea, and north-western Canadian French / Métis Michif that maternal relatives spoke in northern British Columbia and that was largely avoided in lieu of standard French. From a very early age, I listened to relatives and elders talk about the disrespecting of the Douglas Treaties, on the east coast of Vancouver Island, by provincial and federal agencies, including BC Hydro. These experiences of the betrayal of treaties by the Canadian state, complaints made and confirmed by the trusted figures in our extended family and community, were formative — though less in generating anger and more confirming an intuitive lack of confidence in the Canadian state and a deep commitment to communal survival.
For indigenous communities in Western Canada, historical memories persist of both mass starvation, as seen in the Prairies for First Nations and Métis communities, and a more general theft, degradation, and displacement of food resources from salmon and eulachon to the destruction of indigenous gardens, crabapple groves and hazelnut orchards. These losses have yet to be fully assessed. So food and the arts for cultivation and stewardship are as cultural as they are political — though far less easily integrated into contemporary economies of artistic production and performance.
For most indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, the disrespecting of treating obligations is ‘old news’. But we often have visceral responses to new forms of ‘macroagression’. With each new disregard for indigenous food resources, there is often rage, sarcasm, the humour of the nearly erased, a thousand levels of sense of helplessness, and the worst forms of despair. And in this mix of feelings, visual culture can be one of the few remaining languages to help us makes sense. Such has been the evolution of my feelings about the recent news of the continued construction of the Site C Dam in north-eastern British Columbia, ostensibly for the publicly owned British Columbia Hydro, even with the opposition of several First Nations governments concerned about food and cultural resources, governments, in contrast to BC Hydro, that continue to abide by Treaty 8.
Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, Treaty 8 was imposed on eight First Nations in British Columbia: Blueberry River, Doig River, Fort Nelson, Halfway River, McLeod Lake, Prophet River, Saulteau, and West Moberly. The communities of what is today north-eastern British Columbia were an ‘adhesion’ to the 1900 Treaty which was centred in what is today the Northwest Territories.
Dams transform regions and in this regard, British Columbia Hydro has functioned as one of the last vestiges of colonialism. The following First Nations will suffer directly from the Site C dam: Doig River, Halfway River, Prophet River and West Moberly — especially in terms of loss of food and other ecosystem-based and cultural resources. Of the First Nations effected by the Site C Dam, the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations have been most active in attempting to protect traditional land-based resources working to suspend construction. Some other First Nations have been willing to push for mitigations, most that have yet to be implemented, to the project design. A larger group of First Nations have been suffering from the earlier dams on the Peace River.
The recent proposal to dam the ‘Site C’ portion of the Peace River watershed, after the 1968 and 1980 dams, have generated a decade of proposals, patronizing consultations, and controversy often with efforts to pit First Nations governments against each other. For example, Pynn noted in 2013 that as well as those governments opposing the Site C Dam outright, “Three other Treaty 8 First Nations — Blueberry River, Saulteau, and McLeod Lake — have agreed to negotiate for compensation and have been offered ‘impact benefit agreements’, confirmed Dave Conway, BC Hydro community relations manager in Fort St. John.” With this ongoing rancour, Site C has been under construction since July 2015, after being approved by the B.C. Liberals with subsequent court challenges (The Canadian Press 2017). After a short suspension, construction resumed after a new provincial government completed a review in December 2015 (Shaw, 2017, Smith 2017, Alaska Highway News 2018). But with new approvals have come growing resistance much of which has played out in the media (Howell 2017) and the courts (Leotaud 2016, Alaska Highway News 2018, Kurjata 2018). While the cumulative environmental impacts may be debatable, what is clear is that at least two of the First Nations most effected by Site C have treaty protections, especially around food resources, that have been effectively ignored. Resistance, on the land and in the courts, continues (Ducklow 2017).
So as First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities have taken back their languages, lands, and resources in the last half century, the new ways that provincial agencies and crown corporations have found to circumvent sincere forms of intergovernmental diplomacy and consultation have become more turgid and pernicious. And these ‘contradictions’, to use an understatement, can be very painful and disturbing to individuals with indigenous heritages: ‘same old, same old’ violence (now sugar-coated). Art making, and in particular intervening in ‘public’ space and symbolically compensating for the loss of communal food resources, is one way to cope and move forward. And if there was a central social function of contemporary art in British Columbia in 2018, it is to create intercultural spaces to share divergent experiences and feelings in the face of state and corporate interventions that threaten the survival of vulnerable communities.
Why a marker for Treaty 8, and its disrespecting with the the Site C Dam, so far away from the Peace River Valley? Salt Spring Island is unceded Salish territory, not specifically covered under any treaty, where currently over a score of First Nations governments are active including Cowichan Tribes, the Lyackson, Stz’uminus, Penelakut, and Halat of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group; the various W̱SÁNEĆ councils especially the Tsawout with the only allocated Indian Reserve on the island (less than 2 kilometres south of the Marker); and the Tsawwassen. Some of these governments have never chosen to agree to the treaties offered them, notably the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group. In contrast, the W̱SÁNEĆ have suffered from colonial-era treaties forced on them through threats of imperial violence and where agreements that were dishonoured by government agencies (treaties that did not specifically extend to Salt Spring Island). More recently, the 2009 Tsawwassen First Nation Final agreement (‘the Treaty’) has been the source of ongoing discussion and skepticism — and has some kind of guaranteed relationship to territories on the Gulf Island. Perhaps more important than the unsettled status from these local agreements to the souther place of the Marker is the geopolitical fact that most of the decisions made for the British Columbia portion of Treaty 8 are made nearby, in Victoria and Vancouver, by agencies and politicians who continue to be adversarial to remote indigenous communities such as these. And the Treaty 8 First Nations in British Columbia were ‘Adhesions’, effectively after thoughts, that have given Victoria and Vancouver far more power over these northern communities than was envisioned by the indigenous leaders who signed the Treaty.
While I was ruminating on the past and impending losses in the Peace River Valley during the heat of late summer, canning plums and blackberries, a surprisingly large BC Hydro crew arrived, unannounced, on August 20, 2018. Workers cleared a large hedge of ‘Himalayan’ blackberry, Rubus armeniacus, a particularly invasive Eurasian species that provides both superb jam and prime rat habitat. The crew cleared a quadrant, roughly 10 metres by 10 metres, for a second electricity pole. The remnants of a garden fence, from the pre-1942 farmers, was exposed. This curiously symmetrical and bare spot, on largely unmanaged ‘public’ landed owned by the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, provides an ongoing space to begin to ruminate on and respond to the horrific losses of indigenous food resources for which agencies such as BC Hydro are partially responsible. The cut also highlighted the neighbourhood’s rich history on the cusp of two Salish languages, SENĆOŦEN and Hul’q’umi’num, traditional Salish horticulture and tree stewardship, land grants to Polynesian sailors in the nineteenth century, and Japanese farms that thrived until the internments and deportations beginning in 1942.
The following are the visual responses and aesthetic interventions in this ongoing project:
photographic documentation of the exposed earth and artefacts and subsequent monitoring;
raking and digging in the exposed soil;
movement of rock and wood including eventually signage and other text;
drawings;
planting a range of local fruit tree seeds and pits, both native, such as chokecherry, and traditional Eurasian trees such as plum;
collaborative cultivation, fencing, harvesting, documentation, tasting, preserving, and crafting;
performances spanning planting, cultivation, and harvesting;
as this orchard of renewal establishes, working with time, time-series, and monitoring as visual practices;
video documentation and the creation of clips for galleries and websites;
performances including around observing the upcoming centennial of the attempted displacement and mysterious disappearance of the last residents of the W̱EN,NÁ,NEĆ village nearby, Zalt and Mary Zalt, of the Tsawout Nation; and
research and writing.
Over the last five hundred years, indigenous peoples have too often been relegated to tiny pieces of earth, sometimes clawing at bare soil. And yet these diverse communities have found and fostered the food resources for our survival. This marker is just one more reminder of the inevitability of survival in the face of one more disrespected treaty.
references
Kurjata, Andrew. 2018. West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations file court claim to Dam construction violates 1899 treaty and is unconstitutional, notice of civil claim says. CBC News (January 16, 2018).