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The Nisga’a drew upon clan songs and stories to trace their claim to the Nass Valley. But other First Nations also sing of the valley. Whose music will the mapmakers hear?

WE CALL THE MONTH November, but in the liquid syllables of the Nisga’a language it is Gwilatkw, the moon in which the first snows arrive in the Nass River valley, a signal that Earth has begun to robe herself in preparation for the long winter sleep.

Smooth and dark as volcanic glass, the 380-kilometre river carves through the declared homeland of the 6,000-strong Nisga’a. Glittering, snow-clad mountains millions of years older than the Himalayas tower over deep fiords. Mist-draped forests of fir and cedar ascend to echoing canyons.

Here in northwestern British Columbia, a historic treaty more than a century in the making attempts what was once thought impossible — to mesh non-native federal and provincial laws with aboriginal concepts of title. When Nisga’a chiefs arrived in Victoria in November 1998 to celebrate the treaty agreement with the B.C. government, the moment was charged with symbolism. In 1887, a Nisga’a delegation to the legislature was turned away. Now the chiefs were welcomed to the floor of the house itself — aboriginal rights had moved to the heart of a political process that once marginalized and ignored them.

This remarkable event also marked a precedent-setting and profoundly important juncture of two protocols for managing real estate as different in world views as November is to Gwilatkw.

On one side — a system descended from William the Conqueror’s feudal Domesday Book, the first official registry of land holdings in England. This detailed description of the land, based on oral testimony and completed in 1086, named present and former holders, and determined the population base. From this, the administration of private property was set, the precepts of which eventually found their way into Canadian law. On the other side of the divide — the Ayuukhl Nisga’a, an oral code of clan law and custom in which sovereignty and communal or clan title are recorded in stories, songs and the ownership of names and crests.

At the 1998 Victoria ceremony, drums throbbed. Black ceremonial robes displayed vivid scarlet crests of the Nisga’a Wolf, Eagle, Killer Whale and Raven clans. White eagle down representing peace and friendship drifted through the air, helping to purify the ground where the hereditary chiefs of the great houses walked. As they moved up the steps to the legislative chamber, the time-obscured names of ancestors who had begun this journey were recited.

Then, less than three weeks after this triumphant day, a challenge to the Nisga’a agreement erupted. The tribe’s northern neighbours, the Gitanyow, headed to court to declare that Canada and B.C. had no right to hand over control of areas that they traditionally claimed as their own. More than 80 percent of Gitanyow traditional territory now sits within the Nisga’a wildlife management area. And, they say, they have historic maps and oral history to prove it.

"This is an act of aggression," says Glen Williams, chief negotiator for the 2,000 Gitanyow, repeating a refrain their leaders have used for more than a decade with little effect. "They’re invading our territory and we will be forced to defend it."

Such words echo back to a dark history in the Nass Valley and its adjacent territories, to stories of bloody campaigns for territorial sovereignty between the Nisga’a, Tsetsaut, Tahltan, Gitksan and their Gitanyow cousins. Such admonitions are also an ominous portent for the 51 First Nations involved in more than 40 other treaty negotiations now underway across B.C. Many involve parcels of land claimed by more than one tribe.

BIOLOGISTS MARVEL at the diversity of this ecosystem in which huge grizzlies and magnificent bald eagles live in an often mysterious symbiosis with the vast runs of sockeye, pink, coho, chinook and chum salmon that teem in the waterways. Sure-footed mountain goats and bighorn sheep scramble along cliff faces, while moose splash through the shallows and wetlands.

The Nass River drains a watershed of 21,567 square kilometres, an area more than three and a half times the size of Prince Edward Island. For those who have lived here the longest, the map of the valley is defined not by latitude and longitude but by names and landmarks. The river is a fundamental part of a collective identity. According to aboriginal cosmology, the river is in constant motion, waxing and waning like the moon with the seasonal increase and decrease in mountain melts. Boundaries, too, are fluid, expanding and contracting in the timeless rhythms of kinship, need and available resources.

The Nisga’a have lived on the river they call Lisims in the valley known as Ts’ak’hl Nisga’a (the common bowl) for at least 8,000 and probably 10,000 years, practising their same law, harvesting the same runs of salmon and oolichan, telling and re-telling the same ancient stories that often spring from the dramatic imperatives of the land itself.

The eruption is part of European history, too. It can be traced to 1775, when Padre Miguel de la Campa’s diary speaks of how the crew of the Spanish ship Sonora suffered from the heat of "the great flames which issued from four or five mouths of a volcano and at night lit up the whole district, rendering everything visible."

This melding of histories both exhilarates and troubles Frank Calder. As founder of the Nisga’a Tribal Council, the 84-year-old is a living legend. Calder’s name is attached to a 1973 Supreme Court case in which the Nisga’a sought a declaration that title to traditional territories had never been extinguished. Although dismissed on a technicality, the case forever changed the face of Canadian jurisprudence on native rights. While split on whether Nisga’a title had been extinguished, six of the seven judges agreed that aboriginal title might still exist in law. It was "enough to move the mountain," says Calder. The federal government responded by negotiating comprehensive land claims where aboriginal title had not been extinguished by treaty. That meant most of B.C.

Calder putters around his Victoria studio, exuding the avuncular ease of the born storyteller. His eyes twinkle and flash, his face is expressive, his narrative punctuated with dramatic pause and gesture. "To us, the boundaries are defined by the water that flows down from all the heights of land to the valleys below. This is Nisga’a territory," Calder says, leaning suddenly into his point, emphasizing it with a thump of his finger. Asked to elaborate on what belongs to the Nisga’a, he recalls his words to the court in the 1970s: "From mountaintop to mountaintop ... everything that flows into the Nass. It’s been passed down from generation to generation from before anyone can remember."

From Calder’s perspective, problems with neighbours began when the Nass Valley began to be viewed in terms of the European concept of private property. Prior to the arrival of European surveyors, he says, tribal relationships were not between nations as understood by Europeans, but between house territories governed by kinship obligations and mutually respected rights. Permission was always required to travel into another’s territory, but sharing resources would never call into question territorial sovereignty. Jurisdictional shifts could flow from marriages between the houses, friendly alliances or, more rarely, battle.

"I’m a Killer Whale," says Calder, naming his clan. "Through the generations, if Killer Whales had a place rich in a certain seasonal resource, then they would welcome other Killer Whales to come and share. When the oolichan start to appear in March, all the other tribes come to us, even the Tlingits from Alaska. They all come to the mouth of the Nass to get oolichan and we welcome that. It doesn’t mean the Nass is their river. We were all connected by our clan relationships and this created a sense of obligation to share.

According to my understanding, there is very few fertile land in the world. The population is increasing, but the fertile land is decreasing day by day. Canada occupies 7% of the world's land but we have limited fertile land. Tsawwassen land is one of the most fertile lands in BC. If we use such a fertile land for other purposes than farming, there will be negative impact in ecosystem. Infrastructure like an airport, port, housing, roads, railway etc should be constructed on a non-fertile land. We have to think sustainable development. So Tsawwassen Treaty is concern only for business purposes - it only tried to make money by constructing a port instead of farming.

The treaty was driven by the Gateway - the provincial plan to expand the port and connect it with new and wider highways. This ignores the collapse of the US dollar, the steep decline in cross Pacific container traffic, the availability of new routres such as the North West passage and the widened Panama Canal and the key role played by the railways in moving transcontinental freight. All these issues are dealt at length in my blog - stephenrees.wordpress.com and on the Livable Region web site
livableregion.ca.

This is typical of the short term thinking that bedevils our political system. We need to take a strategic view of how our world is changing - and how to cope with that. Unfortunately, the appeals to justice in the TFN process have been ignored by the grab for the quick buck. A sad day for Canada and the Tsawwassen, who both deserve much better leaders with real vision

The TFN treaty was done without proper consideration of the Semiahmoo First Nation treaty, the protection of our Agricultural Land Reserve, or the Environment. This is not about giving TFN its due... its about expanding DeltaPort at the expense of our farmland, the Fraser River estuary, and our air quality in a area that shouldn't have been considered for a port in the first place. Tsawwassen First Nations accepted individual cash payouts from the government for signing the treaty and now we will all have to live with the blight of container sprawl on some of the best farmland and most important wildlife habitat in the world.