LANDLINES REFLECTIONS ON MOVEMENT IN INDIGENOUS SPACE

JONATHAN TAGGART

LANDLINES REFLECTIONS ON MOVEMENT IN INDIGENOUS SPACE

JONATHAN TAGGART

acknowledgements

I have benefitted greatly from the ongoing advice and support of dr. Phillip

Vannini, without whom this volume would have been next to impossible to

research and produce. I am also grateful for the valuable input provided by

dr. Virginia mckendry and Persilia caton of contact gallery. to Phillip,

Virginia and Persilia: thank you.

I am also indebted to those who have been my gatekeepers, guides

and conversation partners over the course of the last six months.

K’ukwstum’ckacw to Vern & sylvia shanoss in the territories of the In-

sHUck-ch nation, and to mark & marie, John & gerry, and charlie

for their valuable insight. Quyanainni to alana and Pippa at the aurora

Research Institute in Inuvik for their unending hospitality, to william and

Jamie for their expert guiding, and to Hank and chuck for sharing their

stories and their time. Finally, Haawa to cait in Queen charlotte for the

connections and the couch, to alan and dale in Port clements, to nika

at the kaay centre, and to kevin and the elders at the skidegate Haida

Immersion Program for their lessons in both Haida and Mollusca.

contents

Introduction 4

chapter 1: In-sHUck-ch territories 8

chapter 2: The mackenzie River delta 36

chapter 3: Haida gwaii 70

conclusions: conduits, meshwork, concentricities 98

notes 102

References 109

3

introduction

5

tHIs book is the result of several months of fieldwork in remote Indigenous spaces–a continuation of my work as a photojournalist and an opportunity granted me through a research assistantship with dr. Phillip Vannini of Royal Roads University. I had originally set out to explore the social and economic disparities that exist in canadian Indigenous communities, as set against the rest of the country1, with a view to situating these disparities in a particular geography of isolation and disconnection. It was a naive endeavor, although one that was inspired by experience and education: I had arrived at this interest through previous involvement with british columbia’s In-sHUck-ch nation, during which I photographed substandard housing conditions and issues of isolation in their traditional territory. as well, symptoms of other disparities have been well-documented and can be seen in aboriginal over-representation in the criminal justice system2, in the child welfare system3, and in instances of substance abuse4, prostitution, and sexual violence5. These symptoms, it has been argued, stem largely from the initial displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands through the Indian6 reserve system7, and the displacement from their cultures through the Indian residential school system that followed its inception8. together these systems formed a federal policy that offered Indigenous canadians little freedom9–the choice to assimilate or atrophy–and were collectively justified by a view of Indigenous peoples as second-rate citizens10. despite my lofty-yet-abstract goal of contributing to social justice efforts11 as a visual communicator, I had been increasingly frustrated by the observation that work such as mine often does little to contribute at the community level and less to influence policy–the result being the continuation of negative stereotypes about Indigenous communities12. In many ways my initial intent presupposed that Indigenous spaces are clearly defined, contained as if in 2-dimensional space by the lines of Indian reservations13, and that crossing an historic and often arbitrary threshold would be as wholly definable as a submersion in ice water14. but Indigenous space has no meniscus, and somewhere in the middle of Haida gwaii, while trying desperately to avoid a literal submersion as I canoed across a narrows in search of delicious guuding.ngaay for the elders in skidegate, I found myself in

something of a concerned existential crisis. In Haida gwaii I experienced an indigenous space undergoing a rapid process of decolonization: non-Haida schoolteachers and youth were spearheading language preservation efforts and driving the length of the island daily as social workers with the council of the Haida nation, and entire communities, Indigenous and otherwise, were uniting in opposition to a large-scale environmental threat. my view of Indigenous space exploded as I re-envisioned culture and practice spilling beyond the lines of the reserve, over beaches and across waterways in defiance of any attempt at government enclosure and the tyranny of history. In mentally re-configuring that space, my position within it naturally shifted: there I was, as passenger and participant, present to feel all the splashes and jabs of an urchin-gathering excursion15. I felt that I could now view myself as an active part of that defiance–a position I had always hoped to hold but struggled to have confirmed. It was a radical reframing, and one suggesting that a better understanding, and a more open perception, of the lives lived in these spaces and the issues faced by these communities could be obtained not through exploring their location and arbitrary containment, but rather by reflecting on the ways in which movement occurs within, around, and through them16. over the past few years I have come to view the act of photographing simultaneous as an act of solidarity and a means of coming closer to understanding. This solidarity exists in the sense that I am fortunate enough to be able to work with communities whose concerns I share, albeit usually on the level of non-stakeholder; this understanding, partial as it can only be, is a result of sharing in the lived experiences of a community, albeit for a short period of time. I argue that one cannot be a humanistic photographer without participating in the life of a community at a basic human level17–an involvement, or series of involvements, that over the past few years has seen me picking tomatoes in community fields18, tracking down barbecues for birthday parties19, coordinating moving days, and recently, cleaning clams, gathering urchins, and helping to check on salmon nets. whenever possible these involvements actively give back to the community, not out of a sense of moral obligation but as a way of conveying gratitude for time

6

given and stories shared, sometimes in more tangible ways than others. over the course of researching for this book I was able to draw on government funding for honoraria with which to give thanks, and in the past I have shown my gratitude through the in-kind contribution of visual materials to support treaty negotiations, as was the case with my involvement with the In-sHUck-ch nation20. In addition to giving back, I place great importance on building trust21, and in this sense I realize that I may be hindered by historic precedent. The precedent I speak of is a history of exploitative photography–photography undertaken largely by non-Indigenous photographers for the purposes of constructing alternate narratives about Indigenous people22. among these narratives is that of the romanticized, pre-contact american Indian, idealized in the turn-of-the-century images of photographers like edward s. curtis. curtis had the best of intentions: “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other; consequently that information is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind . . .”23, but it is difficult to gauge to what extent these images served his express purpose of cultural perpetuation. an opposite narrative is that of the warlike, “wily old savage”24, elusively portrayed in captain James Peters’ battlefield photographs from the war of 1812, in which distant mounted braves and foggy prisoners of war serve to convey a sense of an intimidating and victorious colonial force. It has been argued that these enduring narratives serve no purpose other than the bolstering of archives25 and the building of journalistic careers26. similarly, I would argue that images of poverty and disparity, with no further attention to culture or context, can be considered as sontag considers images of war: “they reiterate, they simplify, they agitate27”–a false suggestion that all who view them share in the concern over how the realities they depict came to be. In my earnest attempt to break with these traditions, I present here not a reiterative critique of Indigenous poverty but rather my interpretations of emerging and enduring patterns of movement in Indigenous space. It is my hope that these stories may be useful in reframing an understanding of

the challenges facing many Indigenous communities, and in aiding in their mitigation. In the following pages I present three vignettes: three recountings of stories shared and experienced in Indigenous spaces in british columbia and the northwest territories28. This book is a distillation and memorialization of six months’ worth of relationships and revelations, compiled in such a way as to allow me to give thanks for the relationships formed over the course of this fieldwork and to seek validation of the knowledge co-constructed through them. It is important to share these experiences with the communities from which they emerged, and to this end merging online platforms make it easier than ever to share books; I have learned over the past few months that even communities in extreme isolation hold fast to their internet connections to the outside world29. The book form is more comprehensive and more concrete than a journal; it is less fleeting than a blog post or an essay published on the web, but the stories and images collected here do indeed take these forms elsewhere, and I view them as an integral part of the circular processes of thinking, photographing, reflecting, rethinking and rephotographing. They are also an integral part of the process of engaging in dialogue with both the subjects of research30 and a wider audience31. The book format also lends itself to–rather, it implies–a certain finality, a sense of closure. I have spent the last five years working with(in) Indigenous communities in canada, and I imagine I will spend many more; therefore I tend to view the book as a capsule, a coalescence of ideas from a particular moment in time. what I present here may, in all likelihood, seem incomplete when considered amongst future bodies of work by myself and others. If the project here is to describe emerging and enduring patterns of movement in Indigenous space, and to grasp at how we may use these to understand the challenges facing many Indigenous communities, I see no end to it; Indigeneity is heterogeneous, as is the non-Indigeneity of those who visit or inhabit it as outsiders, and this heterogeneity lends itself to ever-emerging approaches to adversity.

7

in-shuck-ch territorybritish columbia

9

I leFt VancoUVeR one morning in late February, the truck loaded with

camping gear and a cooler complete with a week’s worth of food. The last

time I visited Vern and sylvia I arrived just before they left to spend time

with family in mt. currie–a demonstration of the malleability of time and

engagements I should have expected from my time spent on reserve. Had

it not been for a cautious gas station stop in Pemberton I would have had

to have turned back, rattling two hours north to pick up supplies before

turning around and doing it all again: as it was, I survived that handful of

days camping out in their backyard, sustaining myself on a poorly-planned

combination of onion bagels and peanut butter.

This time I was better prepared, however, and a good thing too: the

snow started falling heavily shortly after I left the city, and as I sat stopped

behind a snowplow watching sedans spin their wheels into ditches I had

plenty of time to consider the folly of my city-born belief in the inevitability

of arrival. once moving again, my unintentional traveling companions–

those not in the ditch–made an interesting migratory convey. we traveled

at a speed dictated by the lowest common denominator of technology and

skill1, those unfamiliar with winter driving conditions plodding their two-

wheel-drives ahead of an increasingly frustrated pack.

The reserves of the In-sHUck-ch nation are scattered along both

sides of british columbia’s lillooet River in an expanse of traditional

territory stretching 100km north and south between the towns of Pemberton

and Harrison lake. like many of canada’s Indigenous communities, the

In-sHUck-ch settlements exist in semi-isolation2: from Pemberton, 150km

north of Vancouver, you must travel 40km south by flood-prone logging

road to reach the sachteen reserve. In theory the southernmost community,

tipella, can be accessed by heading north from the town of Harrison,

but more often than not locals deem this road impassable due to snow or

flooding. I first visited the communities in december of 2008 while working

with the In-sHUck-ch provisional government to document changing on-

reserve conditions in support of the nation’s ongoing treaty negotiations

with the province of british columbia, and in many ways my trip in 2012

represented a continuation of that involvement. a year earlier, in 2011, the

power lines that ran the length of the lillooet River Valley had finally been

connected to the In-sHUck-ch reserves, 50 years after being built by the

provincial utility, bc Hydro (then bc electric).

despite this relatively recent electrification, traveling the logging

road south from Pemberton still felt like a descent into darkness. I stopped

on the edge of the precipice as I prepared for the descent, stepping outside to

twist the knobs on my forward hub caps to lock the wheels into four-wheel

drive, cold air blowing off the lillooet as I transformed my vehicle from ‘city

truck’ into ‘bush truck’3. as I transitioned from highway to asphalt to gravel

road and finally to dirt I was acutely aware of regressing down a hierarchy

of accessibility4. my route, too, was laid out in descending fashion, and as I

left the relatively straight Highway 99 the road began to swing, following the

smooth yet decidedly unordered curves of the lillooet River5. The road to

sachteen takes an hour and a half to drive on a good day: the posted speed

limit is 40km/h, but the speed of anyone who enters the territory with an

exit in mind is about 30km/h. The truck rattled incessantly, unnervingly,

macro-level bumps and sways felt bodily while micro-level vibrations shook

coins in the cup-holder and jangled anything else not packed down tight,

and I imagined myself driving a wagon down the same route one hundred

years earlier and not feeling much different6. cell phone service ended at

kilometre marker 13; the canadian broadcasting corporation decided that

kilometre 20 was far enough for it, but the lillooet River followed along

diligently, visible over my right shoulder for the duration of the trip.

These forms of remove7–disconnects from highways,

electricity and communication, specifically–were what drew me to the

In-sHUck-ch communities in 2008. The community’s recent electrification

offered an opportunity to revisit and learn how life had been altered with

the advent of reliable power, but my drive into the territory suggested that

while life may be changing within the walls of In-sHUck-ch homes, issues

10

spaces: this is the new command post, and it allows Vern to host treaty

meetings on the reserve rather than in the distant towns of mission or

Pemberton, far outside the usual range of the territory’s elders. The office

has a reliable internet connection, which brings the added security of Voice

over Internet Protocol calling in case of emergencies. “now we can plan

for more activities for our people,” he says, “and we don’t have to go out

there”–referring to the lower mainland. “Power will increase our standard

of living, but also our awareness of who we are as a people: people who have

looked after this territory since time immemorial.” There’s a cultural revival

happening, says Vern–one that is enabled and documented by technology,

“and it’s high-speed. we’re still picking berries, we’re cutting fish, but at

high-speed. It’s a global world, thanks to the internet. It’s just like electricity:

a positive power, constant, ever growing.”

His optimism wanes when talk turns to the road. “emergency vehicles

won’t come down here,” he says, and that has influence on the communities’

remaining elders. For those with deteriorating health, the road acts as a

conduit, pulling them preemptively towards urban centres where hospitals

are within easy reach. “wally’s out there because he has diabetes and needs

transfusions,” he says, referring to one skatin elder, “and the community

loses someone who contributes to religious, spiritual, cultural life... a person

that speaks the language. nobody fills that void.” For other members of the

community, Health canada flies a doctor into each of the communities via

helicopter once a month for regular check-ups, but even that feels tenuous.

“It’s a third world situation when you have to fly the doctor in,” says Vern, but

he acknowledges that with a population of 200 spread over 5 communities

and nearly 100 kilometres, there simply isn’t justification for a live-in doctor.

The next day marie, a skatin elder, offers a similar assessment of

the local school’s ability to retain teachers. marie teaches Ucwalmícts, the

language of the In-sHUck-ch people, at the school, where there are 28

students enrolled from kindergarten to grade 10. “when they head out for

grade 11, they get put back 2 or 3 years,” she says. “It’s not a good education.

of access and isolation were still very much present.

life had indeed changed within the walls, and without. as I drove

the long driveway to Vern and sylvia’s home at kilometre 42 I did a double-

take: snow was falling up ahead, backlit by a street light. In the community

of skatin, a few kilometres down the road, there were a few scattered street

lights before the hydro connection, but sachteen, where my hosts lived in

one of only three houses, had no central diesel generator to power them

back then. now the snow fell quietly up ahead in a new kind of illumination,

lit without the low hum of the family’s small red Honda generator.

Vern and sylvia are community workers with various involvements

within the In-sHUck-ch traditional territory. Their home in sachteen is

built in thick-timbered chalet fashion, with tall windows and a sloping green

metal roof–a far cry from the pre-fabricated and run-down houses typical of

communities further down the road. Inside the propane fire is lit, Vern keeping

it company in his housecoat while sylvia works on needlepoint regalia for

one of the couple’s granddaughters. I marvel aloud at the streetlights outside,

and we quickly get to talking about what else electrification has brought.

“certainty” is Vern’s first response; “something we haven’t had for a long

time.” He points out that the houses in sachteen used to run off a small

micro-hyrdo Pelton water wheel in the warmer months–a system that was

prone to fluctuations in output, resulting in alternating surges and brown-

outs for the community. “Those surges ruined tVs, fridges, toasters,” he says,

and when the road to your nearest grocery store (two hours away) is prone

to closure, a fried refrigerator becomes a very serious problem. “we’ve eaten

a lot of iffy food,” he says, chuckling. There have been no surges or outages

since the electricity hook up, sylvia tells me, “and since we’ve had power

we’ve had a luxury we hadn’t had in five years... ice cream after dinner!”

beyond its impact on basic appliances and frozen foods, Vern sees

this new reliable electricity as a means of bridging the two-hour distance

between his home and the outside world. a short trail leads from his house

to a construction-site-style portable, complete with boardroom and office

11

“You didn’t need the radio–you went to someone’s house or you used a

runner. People don’t go from door to door anymore. electricity separates

people.” The upside of electricity, he says: “The clock on the microwave is

always right.”

charlie’s true Quixotic windmill, though, is the road, and he’s made

it his life’s work to maintain it, through his own physical labour, through

business partnerships, and through political pressure on the logging

companies whose interests are just enough to keep it open. “even the loggers

complain about the road over the radio,” he tells me as he describes one

particularly bad season. That year businesses in Pemberton raised $20,000

to have the road graded (“after all, where do all of us spend our money?”

charlie points out). The grader made it part way down before the road froze

and work had to stop: the money was returned, eventually to be replaced by

funds from the department of Indian affairs. Years before, he was tempted

to petition In-sHUck-ch to close the road to the public after a particularly

nasty accident. It’s the public, he argues, that pose the biggest danger: “local

people know the road, know how to drive it. most of the tourists have good

shocks: they barely feel the bumps. but the potholes are there. You don’t feel

it, but your vehicle feels it.” 8

The next day I pick up mark from his house in skatin. He has offered

to be my guide on a tour of some of the sites along the road, and he climbs in

next to me in his fluorescent yellow safety fleece. “Fuel gauge is broken?”, he

asks, nodding towards the dash. “nope, but there’s a gas station just up the

road, right?” I joke. “Yeah, it’s broken.” This is a bush truck, after all.

It quickly becomes clear that, for mark, the road is a story in

progress9, and as we shake our bones towards kilometre 30 he relates pieces

of community history as they correspond to points along our route. “I know

this road all the way up and down . . . I spent thirty years driving up and

down it,” he tells me, pointing out the site of an old cemetery that was once

relocated ahead of an advancing flood. “some of those graves are from the

late 1800s–half of them died from smallpox or chickenpox. when someone

we need certified teachers. when they come for interviews, they drive our

road and they don’t like it.” Her son mark, in his forties, is sitting across from

me at the family’s kitchen table, his teenage son sitting on the couch in the

nearby living room, lost in a book. “I drove him to school in mount currie

for two years,” mark tells me.

and it’s not just potential teachers who are put off by the road.

“The road is scary for people who don’t know how to drive it,” says marie.

“tourists are scary: they drive fast, they hug the corners. In the winter we’re

pulling them out of the ditches and up the hills.” “and a lot of them come

down here with no spare–they don’t know that they need to be prepared,”

adds mark. There are skills to driving the road, both for staying safe and for

keeping your vehicle maintenance costs down: slow down, don’t ride your

brakes, go easy on your shocks, and “use your radio,” says mark, referring

to the citizens band handsets used by households to communicate between

communities and by drivers to announce their positions on the road. I have

one in my truck, lent to me by Vern for safety on this trip, and it has taken

me a while to get used to the medium’s open stream of consciousness: over

the radio, “47 kilometre, loaded (northbound)” could easily be followed by

invitations for a neighbor to come over for tea or joyful calls of “goodnight,

skatin!”

The next morning the radio crackles with news of a skatin member

stuck in the snow on the way back from tipella. sylvia and I are supposed to

be driving south to attend a craft circle that day, but a few minutes outside

of skatin the road becomes impassable, blocked by snow and by Fidele

Henry’s fishtailed truck. Fidele’s legs stick out from the rear of the truck as

he struggles to put his chains on; behind him the parallel snakes of wild tire

tracks lead the treacherous way down the hill. we turn around, and after I

drop sylvia off back at home I decide to head north to visit charlie, an elder

in the community of Q’alatkú7em, north of sachteen and on the opposite

bank of the river. charlie sees the radios as a small part of the larger problem

that is electrification: “before electricity, you talked to people,” he tells me.

12

little oxbow lake–a section of trail with a gentle curve and no beginning

or end. looking to the road above us, I can image the dangers my hosts

have described to me over the course of the last few days. motorcyclists

have come over the edge and drowned, I’ve been told, and on a couple of

occasions there have been abandoned vehicles found upside down on

the river bank, left to be lapped seasonally by the rising and falling water.

accidents such as these leave a trail of debris in their wake: “oil, tires, car

parts . . . we catch them in our nets,” says mark, as each year he and his

fishing friends perform an inadvertent purification along the line of the

river. Running through samahquam, between the river and the road, is the

old lillooet trail, established in the mid-1800s as a route from Port douglas

(now douglas Indian Reserve no. 8) into the heart of the Fraser canyon

gold Rush. This line, too, mark plays a role in purifying, bringing youth

from skatin, douglas, tipella and Q’alatkú7em to samahquam to beat

back unruly foliage. “when my mom was a kid she would ride horses along

this trail,” he tells me.

on the way back to skatin we pull over. mark points along a faint

goat trail winding almost invisibly upwards towards a rocky outcrop, and 30

metres up I find what he sent me searching for: mud-red berry-and-bear-

fat pictographs hidden between sharp sheets of stone. It is cultural artifacts

such as these, along with his fishing holes and the arrowheads occasionally

found by tourists in improvised campsites, that mark is most concerned

about protecting. as the road improves, he says, “People can come in and

find these things.” while a better road may encourage more youth to stay in

community schools and allow the elders he once cared for to live the end of

their days at home, it seems that for every benefit there is a cost. For mark,

the cultural retention supported by improved access is countered in equal

and opposite measure by extraction, be it by tourists or by loggers calling

“loaded” on their way out of the territory.

passed on we used to wrap them in deer skin and bury them in the fetal

position,” he explains to me. but mark’s somber stories are punctuated with

contemporary appreciations with roots in past practices, and he also points

out a trail to “an excellent fishing spot down here” or “one of the best places

to fish for salmon”. I ask about bringing my fly rod with me on my next visit

and he agrees to show me how to tie bumblebees–a home-spun delicacy for

lillooet River fish.

mark is a cook by training but has spent the majority of his time

in the territory working odd jobs–part of the reality of his community’s

isolation. “People find jobs wherever they can,” he says, “and having to leave

home to work is annoying.” Until recently he worked for bc Hydro as a

bushwhacker, pushing back flora beneath the power poles along the roadside,

but a chemical burn from a pesticide accident slowed his enthusiasm for

“vegetation management”. Years ago he worked as an assistant to skatin’s

elders, preparing meals, chopping firewood and doing laundry, but today

there are only three elders left to care for, so instead he facilitates traditional

outdoors orientation programs for youth from the reserves and from the

city.

we arrive at the trailhead for our short walk to the abandoned

settlement of samahquam, a half-dozen skeletal wood buildings down by

the river bank, left behind as industry in the territory declined in the 1960s.

mark wants to show me a rock carving on the river bank, and we are lucky

to find it where it sits well below the seasonal flood line: two figures in a

canoe stamped into a boulder, a time- and tide-worn memorial to a young

man’s father carved a half-century ago. a short distance along the river

bank, walking back towards the old village, we come across a flattened and

timber-buttressed section of dirt, set back a dozen metres from the edge of

the river. “The road used to be down here, until they built this one,” says

mark, motioning between the ground in front of us and the edge of the

road we have just driven, high above our heads up the embankment. Years

ago the road below flooded and was rebuilt higher up, leaving behind this

View from the river bank, skookumchuck IR 4

children playing, skookumchuck IR 4

In-sHUck-ch Forest service Road, sachteen IR 2a

trucks, skookumchuck IR 4

lillooet River sand flats, mount currie

satellite phone, Q’alatkú7em (baptiste smith IR 1b)

Inside the church of the Holy cross, skookumchuck IR 4

21

Front porch, skookumchuck IR 4

car doors, samahquam IR 1

mark & house frame, samahquam IR 1

25

cemetery, samahquam IR 1

tractor, samahquam IR 1

saw, samahquam IR 1

chaining up, skookumchuck IR 4

Pictographs, sachteen IR 2a

abandoned car and belongings, skookumchuck IR 4

street lights, sachteen IR 2a

35

the mackenzie river deltanorthwest territories

37

tHe HawkeR-sIddeleY 748 is far and away my new favorite airplane.

considering that I’ve never even liked an airplane, this is something of

a transition for me. It’s a sublimation that, in terms of pre-flight nerves,

works in my favour. sitting on the runway at whitehorse airport–a

necessary stopover between Vancouver and Inuvik–peering out my

unshuttered window from my unreclining seat to admire the riveting

on the sleek metal cigar that is the port Rolls Royce dart engine, the

small turbo-prop puts me in mind of what it must have been like to fly

Pan american during the golden age of aviation. I feel like I’m going

somewhere important, in comfort that is not excessive, and that no other

craft could possibly get me there with such economy and efficiency. I am

sitting in the 1930s Volkswagen of 1950s-era airplanes, I conclude, and the

cabin’s interior completes this utilitarian-yet-pleasing image, save for the

rear 8 seats. These are occupied by freight, masked eerily, military-style,

in grey-green canvas and tied down with webbed straps. “we take on as

much cargo as we can when there are empty seats,” the flight attendant

explains. “good,” I think–after all, it’s expensive to ship to the north–and

I’m still contemplating my new found affinity for this aircraft when we lift

off, slow and smooth.

and then there’s a pause.

a stall.

my heart, expectedly, goes to my throat. life, of course, flashes

before my eyes. my eyes dart to my traveling companion, Phillip: the

macchiato-loving, island-dwelling, geocaching professor who got me into

this mess. It was his idea to study the lives of canadians living in isolated

and ice-locked locales, far from continental road systems and even further

from runways of familiar suburban length. He probably never said it, but

I attribute the words to him now as I sit, motionless, upright, possibly

getting what I paid for: “what could possibly go wrong?”

and then, as if nothing happened, we are continuing through the

air in the general direction of up. The “stall”–and I shall cease to call it

that–lasted no more than a half-second, probably the commonplace drag

of retracting landing gear or the delayed inertial shifting of several tons of

dry goods, arctic-bound under their drab drapings in the rear seats. The

Hawker bounces playfully in whitehorse’s southern wind and soon the

Yukon River is visible below, winding it’s way north of the small city to

where it is joined by the takhini. The milk run circuit between whitehorse

and Inuvik includes stops in old crow and dawson city, and over the

course of the next week I become oddly proud of my ability to anticipate

the Hawker’s characteristic take-off lurch1.

From the air the mackenzie River delta–at least, the extent of

its massive area visible through my limited porthole–is an expanse of

white and grey. It’s a monochrome echo of a pattern I’ve seen before: the

spatterings of bacon fat, water and soap left in a frying pan after breakfast,

irregular bubbles of oil like dark polka dots in an orange sheen. In the

summer I can imagine how the scene below me would be reversed, the

menisci of myriad islands pushing back the water of the mackenzie, light

land amid a dark silt stream, but today the scheme is much more subtle.

today, in the middle of winter, stunted trees poke above the snow, the

halftone pattern created by their tops the only hint of land amongst a sea

of ice and snow.

Inuvik, it is explained to us upon arrival at the aurora Research

Institute2, is in many ways a designer town. built in the 1950s after

extensive surveying by helicopter, it was essentially a sovereignty project

in the guise of a humanitarian mission: in aklavik, the largely Indigenous

hamlet on the opposite side of the delta, seasonal flooding was mistaken

for long-term sinking, and officials imagined relocating that population to

the new town after they had been enlisted to build it. Inuvik was designed

to grow, and a capacity for 10,000 residents was supported by a military-

38

length airstrip, a relatively deep shipping channel on the river, and a unique

‘Utilidor’ system that provided heating and sewage services to buildings

via a network of elevated conduits. The population never reached 10,000,

however: the end of the cold war ushered out the need for an extensive

military presence in the north, and the 1970s brought with it a climate of

environmental regulation, putting a hold on much of the region’s oil and

gas development. In addition, many in aklavik opted not to leave their

homes, knowing that flooding conditions were merely the result of natural

fluctuations in water level. The population of Inuvik–ironically, “the place

of man”–currently sits at around 3,500.

The expanse of delta on which Inuvik sits is what locals, Indigenous

and otherwise, refer to as “the land”. as an entity and a medium this land

constitutes both destination and journey3, as the phrase “going out on the

land” suggests. It’s an expression I first hear in conversation with Hank,

an Inuvialuit elder, one morning as he, Phillip and myself sit around the

kitchen table in his home in Inuvik. It means “out on the delta,” Hank

explains. “Here is up on the hillside (referring to the situation of his

home), and back there (the land beyond the hillside) is the tundra.” Half

the delta is crown land, he tells us; the rest is split between the settlement

regions of the Inuvialuit and the gwich’in4–canada’s westernmost Inuit

group and northernmost First nation, respectively. The Inuvialuit use the

land today as they have for generations, for hunting, trapping, and fishing,

and today there are roughly fifty cabins dotting the landscape, each with

its own hunting and trapping area. made out of plywood and measuring

16’x30’ (“although some of the newer ones look more like luxury homes,”

says Hank), most of these cabins and their accompanying jurisdictions

have been handed down through families, and many still operate without

electricity, relying instead on gas lights and wood stoves. There are no

power lines extending into the delta, so those cabins that are wired for

electricity must use portable generators that can take a couple of days to

warm to starting temperature in the winter. Hank has both an inland cabin

for trapping fur-bearers and hunting caribou in the fall and a coastal cabin

for whaling in the summer, and recently he’s been shuttling back and forth

to his trapline by snowmobile, a couple of hours away. “I stay out there

for as long as I can, about three weeks at a time,” he says, “and I just bring

groceries and enough ammo and gas.” and going out on the land isn’t just

weekend recreation: trapping furs makes up a portion of his retirement

income, and hunting caribou is a way of significantly offsetting the cost of

food in the isolated north. “For us it’s a way of subsidizing ourselves,” he

says. “we can hunt year-round, so it’s a huge benefit. and we share with

friends and family and people from down south.”

People from “down south” are those, like Phillip and myself, from

anywhere below the arctic circle, and even for us recent northern initiates

it is easy see the importance of the self “subsidies” Hank is referring to. The

few old pumps at the town’s only gas station read $1.74/l; milk rings in at

$3.00/l, and these, Hank explains, are considered lows. Prices skyrocket

in the shoulder seasons: those limbo periods in the spring and fall when

the ice is in the process of either melting or freezing, not thick enough to

drive on with freight trucks, not thin enough to navigate a barge safely

through. For a few weeks near the equinoxes life gets more expensive in

Inuvik–a fact that makes “freeze-up” and “break-up” occasions for seasonal

celebration as transport once again resumes along the ice road or the open

river.

These limbo periods are also difficult for hunters, explains Hank, as

meltwater under overland snow can impede snowmobiles. In the summer

Hank hunts muskrat in the coastal shallows, often able to bag 200 of

the rodents in a 10-hour day, but despite being able to hunt year-round,

traveling on the land is easiest in the winter, and a world of possibilities

is opened up to residents of the delta when the mackenzie freezes and

turns the labyrinthine moat into an endlessly opportune web of trails5.

Unlike in the summer months, in the winter it matters little whether what

lies underfoot is snow or ice–what matters is the weather above, when the

39

wind blows and the snow drifts, “whiting out” the world all around and

making it very easy to get disoriented in the vast expanse of the delta6.

but even a white-out doesn’t always keep Hank at home, and he

tells the story of the time he proved the gPs wrong in the drifting snow,

ending up back at fishing camp with a fire going, a cup of tea in hand long

before his traveling companion arrived. Hank won a $100 bet that day:

“He didn’t trust my knowledge of the land,” he says of his friend. what

might be construed as a boastful attitude, however, is tempered with a

lifelong understanding of the seriousness of traveling exposed and alone

in the north: “my father and grandfather taught me how to travel on the

land. People ask, ‘How can you travel when it’s windy?’ I know the general

direction of the wind and the way the snow drifts: I have a pretty good feel

of the land so I’m pretty confident in what I’m doing when I’m out there.

and if I don’t feel confident, I don’t go. It’s how I travel.”

It’s not long before Phillip and I get a first-hand experience of the

near white-out conditions Hank described. we are driving to tuktoyaktuk

(“tuk” to locals), a small hamlet on the frozen shore of the beaufort sea,

150 km along the ice road from Inuvik, to meet with chuck, a member

of the Inuvialuit community. The ice road, for all its smoothness, offers

remarkable traction–“take the corners slowly; don’t brake or turn too

abruptly” were the instructions given to us by Jamie, a staff member at

our accommodations in Inuvik–but traction only goes so far when you

can’t see the road. shortly after passing the turnoff for aklavik, the road

socks in, and what was once a pale blue haze above us desaturates until

we can no longer differentiate the sky from the banked edges of our route.

light wind blows lighter snow gently across our path until the tire tracks

ahead are barely visible7, and it is all we can do to keep our wheels in their

faint grooves, the added heaviness of our nervous, nose-to-windshield

breathing creating its own adverse weather patterns inside the truck.

we drive like this for thirty minutes, eerily aware of the absence of

other travelers on the road, and then, like rapidly clearing turbulence, the

white-out lifts and we are on the beaufort sea. The ice takes on a noticeably

richer hue, a chunkier texture with larger and more frequent fissures, and

soon the houses of the hamlet appear before us on a low berm. we find

chuck outside his home on the outskirts of town where he is tending to

trucks and snowmobiles; he opts to take the wheel in our rental (I don’t

blame him, given the price of gas) and we begin our tour of tuk.

minutes from chuck’s cul-de-sac is Pingo national monument,

home to the world’s second-highest pingo. The largest of the domelike

forms is fifty metres high and 1,000 years old, explains chuck. The pingos,

he says, are created by the formation of permafrost and the associated

drying of nearby lake beds, the pressure of the building ice pushing up a

layer of topsoil to create a hill of snow with a skin of dirt; it’s estimated that

tuk’s pingos are growing at a rate of 2cm a year.

but Pingo national landmark might be the only thing growing in

tuk. on our tour of the hamlet we pass abandoned “camps”–barrack-style

former accommodations for the region’s oil and gas workers. “There’s not

too much for work here,” explains chuck, “all these buildings are shut

down, all these camps.” while oil and gas explorations are still underway

in the beaufort, chuck’s assessment is that they are just that–exploration.

“There’s lots of oil and gas here, but there are no production facilities, so

they just cap the wells.” The delta has a long history of resource industry

regulation–“mackenzie Valley Pipeline? maybe in my lifetime!” is a slogan

we have heard, referring to the large-scale oil and gas project shut down by

Justice berger in the 1970s8–and chuck is of the belief that such regulation

is excessive: “too many regulatory bodies scare industry away. sure, it’s

ok to look after the wellbeing of the environment, of the land, but on the

other hand you have to look after the wellbeing of your people. You need

to create work for them. The majority of people here rely on government

assistance, and a community without work is not a happy community.”9

For those with an education there are a few jobs available in

teaching, policing and administration positions; for those without, illegal

40

bootlegging is a lucrative option in a liquor-restricted community. For

others like chuck, guiding commercial hunting charters was a reliable

source of income and, echoing Hank, a way to offset the high cost of

living. “was”, until government regulation undercut the caribou hunt

as well. “Prior to 2006 you could hunt caribou anywhere you wanted to.

caribou is like beef here: you can make anything you want with it. Then

the researchers started saying that the caribou are declining. How can they

make calls like that when they only come up here for a month at the most?

The Inuvialuit have lived here all our lives; we’re out on the land six months

of the year and we know what’s going on.” chuck’s 93-year-old mother, he

says, “has seen the caribou come and go three times in her lifetime. The

caribou don’t use the same migration trails each year–they would have

nothing left to eat if they did. They would all starve. The people know the

caribou are there.”10

Part of the problem in underestimating the caribou population

seems to lie in the rigid patterns flown by research helicopters when

assessing the location and size of herds. “They fly in 10-mile grids,” says

chuck, “How are you going to see a herd of caribou when you’re 500

feet up in the air?” The caribou know nothing of grids, traveling instead

like an undulating coastline beneath an irrelevant overlay of latitude and

longitude.

a snowmobile appears on the frozen bay, winding its way between

the humps of buried boats dotting a similarly undulating coastline, and

again I am amazed by the seasonal transformations of the arctic landscape.

It’s chuck’s son, logan, twenty years old and dressed like a character from

a cold war video game, goggles covering his face and a rifle slung over his

shoulders. He’s been out shooting foxes, and as he pulls up to the truck I

see two animals draped over his knees. “You haven’t shown me how to skin

them yet,” he accuses his father jokingly, and that evening before heading

back to Inuvik we experience two arctic privileges: a plate of caribou

burgers followed by a crash-course in fox-skinning.

The next evening we are taken snowmobiling by Jamie, the friendly

ontario transplant with a knack for breaking trails. our route takes us

along the banks of the mackenzie River before cutting sharply into the

trees, zigzagging between runt pine until we burst forth onto airport lake.

It is completely foreign to me, an urban southerner, this feeling of being

able to travel in nearly any desired direction, over land or water, given the

proper affordances11. “It’s a free country,” Hank had said. “You can travel

wherever you want. You just have to respect it.” It’s a free country, and one

that punishes rigidity, I decide as my vehicle’s right ski breaks from the

steering mechanism after a particularly hard bump. It’s also a place that

defies prescription. Just as shifting pilings and collapsed buildings are the

physical repercussions of any attempt to enforce stiff permanence on the

delta, broken skis and fissures along the ice road are reminders that we

must attend to every moment of our transition along its dynamic surface12.

to belong to the north, I conclude, is to accept these irregularities–be they

in shipping schedules, weather patterns, or caribou migrations–to respect

them, and to be prepared for them.

Houses overlooking the bay, tuktoyaktuk

cabin, tuktoyaktuk

Permafrost, tuktoyaktuk

Underground cold food storage, tuktoyaktuk

Hawker-siddeley over the mackenzie River delta

city planning office, Inuvik

Permafrost-shifted house, aklavik

social housing, aklavik

logan with foxes, tuktoyaktuk

53

skinned fox, tuktoyaktuk

55

Husky, Inuvik

57

Ice road, Inuvik

driving on the beaufort sea, tuktoyaktuk

snowmobiling on the mackenzie River, Inuvik

snowmobile party on airport lake, Inuvik

snowmobiling at night, Inuvik

caribou hide & dogs, tuktoyaktuk

Racing dogs, Inuvik

northern lights over Inuvik

Hank, Inuvik

69

haida gwaii british columbia

71

next hour taking turns, rotating slowly as we carve wide arcs out across the

sand and seaweed. Hanging perilously upside down, the clouds and the

water exchange places–an appropriately inverted introduction to a world

that is governed by the sea.

The skidegate Haida Immersion Program operates from inside a

longhouse on the town’s waterfront, sitting on the bank above the beach,

its glass front facing the sea. Inside, folding tables are arranged in an

oblong ring in front of a large blackboard, their faux-wood tops covered in

microphones and notebooks beneath the massive timbers that support the

roof. sunlight pours in from the skylights overhead, more than making up

for the oceanfront windows papered with posters and phrases. wall space

is at a premium, and all the vertical surfaces are similarly covered with

maps and photographs of fluent Haida speakers who have passed away

since the program’s founding in 1998. The tables might be portable, but the

space has a feel of permanence, like a very large and very important field

camp. sHIP, as it is known, is ground zero for Haida language preservation

efforts, and it is here that skidegate elders spend their free time working to

pull language from the air to put on paper2.

That orthographic process has been tough, says kevin, the school

teacher presiding over sHIP’s efforts. Funding is an ongoing issue: kevin,

on contract with both the skidegate band council and the local school

board for language curriculum development, has been taking salary cuts

for three years. sHIP’s operational costs are scrounged from the aboriginal

affairs and northern development canada heritage programs, because,

as kevin says, “the federal government won’t fund aboriginal languages

in schools because education is a provincial jurisdiction.” compounding

these financial challenges is the fact that skidegate’s elders are aging:

there are only 12 remaining speakers of the skidegate dialect (the two

other major Haida settlements, the northern Haida gwaii town of old

massett and the alaskan town of Hydaburg, each have their own dialects),

and the youngest fluent speaker is 63 years old. “The program is barely

In tHe town of Queen charlotte–“charlotte” to its residents–there is

a tangible sense of agitation. “Haida gwaii united against enbridge” reads

a sign along the main road, and in child’s writing, “don’t let the oil spill!”

The signs along the historic waterfront are in response to the proposed

northern gateway project, a 731-mile pipeline that would connect

facilities in alberta’s oil sands with west coast ports, allowing the shipment

of 525,000 barrels of crude oil per day to markets in california and asia

through Hecate strait–the storm-churned waters separating Haida gwaii

and mainland canada1. The 1989 exxon Valdez disaster spilled over half a

million barrels of oil into Prince william sound, alaska, with devastating

effect on local ecosystems, and the concerned consensus on the islands of

Haida gwaii is that a similar disaster is inevitable should the northern

gateway get the go-ahead. I’m on the islands of Haida gwaii, 80km off

the coast of british columbia, with my partner meriko, and it’s clear from

our first day here that the looming pipeline is going to be a topic of much

discussion.

on our first evening on the islands cait, a student in the local

environmental resource management program run by the Haida Higher

education society, takes us to a beach on the far side of town, a popular

spot for high school students to hang out on the weekends. It’s a popular

spot for their teachers to hang out as well, in a place where urban notions

of nightlife remain blissfully unfulfilled, but the slightly older revelers, we

are told, almost always defer to the younger when it comes to issues of

bonfire territory. a muddy trail opens onto the sand and from there the

beach winds away to the right, past decrepit, land-locked fishing craft and

rotting barges towards a small cluster of homes on the opposite bank. to

the left is a small headland, and from this headland protrudes a massive

tree, standing proud from the visible shoreline erosion a dozen or so

storm-swept metres from the high-tide line. a single well-worn line and

plank are wound around its trunk, stopping just above a tangled platform

of roots. Responding to the visceral call of rope and swing, we spend the

72

surviving, but our elders are troopers,” kevin says, “and they keep coming.

we’ve even had a couple of new silent speakers join us recently–they can

understand the language but they won’t speak it freely”. not surprisingly,

kevin attributes the dearth of Haida speakers to residential schooling

on the islands, adding that a new form of linguistic colonialism is still in

operation: “There should be as much Haida in the school system as there

is english and French, and there isn’t. That doesn’t seem right on the lands

where the official language is Haida.” but tenuous as it may be, and against

all odds, sHIP’s survival is in evidence all around the longhouse, visible in

the stacks of self-published Haida children’s books (21 in all) and in the

wall map of moresby Island, the archipelago’s large southern landmass,

complete with its 2,500 place names and translations3.

my conversation with kevin has been taking place during the

elders’ lunch break (“they may show up late,” cait had told us, “but they

take their breaks on a tight schedule”), and as we wrap up the elders start

to return, taking their seats in the swivel-backed office chairs around the

tables. one of the women stops to chat about meriko’s knitting: “I can

show you how to turn the heel of that sock,” she offers. we’d been warned

that today is a day for cleaning clams in preparation for Friday’s banquet,

and I’m looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and chipping in, not as

a way of ingratiating myself with the elders but as a means of absorbing

as much as I can about eating from the intertidal zone4. a table is cleared

near the back of the room and three large buckets of de-shelled razor clams

are brought out, along with an array of cutting boards and paring knives.

I set myself up next to mary as we turned our quiet attention to the task at

hand, occasionally leaning in to see exactly which bits she was discarding

and how it was that she was making her cuts so efficiently. mary, in turn,

checks in with me every so often, nodding approvingly at my clumsy knife

strokes. later, in the kitchen as I help with the dishes, she shares with me a

story about traveling the shoreline one evening, head down, intent on the

progress of her clam-digging. when the sun went down she looked up and

realized she had lost track of where she was: with the tide out and darkness

upon her she had no sense of the direction of the water or of which way she

had turned. “I’ve been a little afraid of going down to the beach at night

since then,” she admits.5

I learn a lot about the fruits of the intertidal zone that afternoon,

regaled with mouth-watering stories of clam fritters and plied with salty,

crunchy, popcorn-sized bites of dried seaweed. There is also k’aww6–

herring roe that has adhered to thick blades of kelp during the spawning

process. I am told that this is a seasonal delicacy, and, concerned that my

munchings might deplete the large bucket in the kitchen, I decide to leave

the rest of the k’aww to the elders after a small taste. There is also the

mysterious guuding.ngaay7, or sea urchin, not present at our table but the

mere mention of which is enough to make mary’s eyes turn skyward. “oh,

I wish I had some guuding.ngaay,” she says dreamily, half hinting.

The elders, I learn, have a sneaky way of getting what they want–a

kind manipulation that draws partly on fear of disapproval but mostly on

the unwavering admiration and respect they command in the community8.

as a case in point, the next day meriko and I are invited to accompany

alan, a youth worker with the council of the Haida nation, on a

guuding.ngaay-gathering canoe trek to Juskatla narrows in masset9 Inlet.

The put-in lies at the end of a narrow and overgrown logging road just

west of Port clements, where we are staying for a few nights in a makeshift

hostel above the town’s only grocery store, but we never find it. we visit the

site of an abandoned canoe-in-progress, a massive felled cedar overgrown

with moss accessed along a hidden trail, left behind in advance of the wave

of smallpox that gutted the islands in the late 1800s. Here alan points

out another tree nearby, perhaps the carvers’ first choice, marked with the

deep ‘V‘ of an early iron tool cut: “They must have found a weakness inside

that they didn’t like,” he surmises; “you can tell the age of the cut by the

exposed tree rings.” we leave to spend another hour crashing through the

brush in alan’s truck, convinced that the trail markings will appear just

73

around the next bend, but they don’t. launching the canoe from the put-in

would have enabled us to bypass the strongest section of the narrows, but

being conscious of the tides and of remaining hours of daylight, we opt to

launch from the log sort a short distance from town. we park just beyond

the gates to the sort, past a handful of gruff men in orange coveralls. “Park

wherever you want,” they tell us. “If the log boss doesn’t like it, he’ll find

you.”

alan can be forgiven for not finding the trailhead in the maze of

mainlines that criss-cross the centre of the island. He had been out driving

the logging roads days earlier with his father, dale, and had insisted on

taking the wheel in an effort to better internalize the turns and landmarks10,

but it’s a steep learning curve. His father’s company built the roads years

ago, and if dale has yet to fully impart his knowledge of their routes, he

has succeeded in raising his son with a living knowledge of the land and

the bounty it has to offer. “I used to take the boys camping,” dale told me

the day before. “You’ve heard of the 100-mile diet? we’d do the 100-metre

diet. I’d tell them, ‘we can camp wherever you like, but anything you eat

has to come from within 100m of the fire.’ It didn’t take long before they

learned that first you pick your protein, then you place your fire. no matter

where you are, you can find vegetation to eat.”

we make slow progress out to Juskatla: the tide is gently against

us and grows to a steady stream as we approach the narrows. with alan’s

guidance we choose the eastern of the two routes around Fraser Island,

where the water is known to be calmer, and looking across a low sandbank

I can see standing waves to the west. we hug the shoreline where back-

eddies make for slightly less resistance, but there are times when it feels

that we are running to stand still in the current. It’s all we can do to avoid

being spun around in our last open-water crossing: strong whirlpools

spin from my paddle blade as I struggle against the rushing water, and

against alan’s questionable J-stroke, but eventually we make it past the

narrows. It’s as if we had stepped out of a wind storm and into the foyer

of a comfortable home, and suddenly we are canoeing in calm waters and

warming sunshine. we beach the boat; alan ducks into the woods to put

on his wetsuit, and together we scout urchins in the waist-high waters off

the point of a small island.

It turns out that these are not the guuding.ngaay, or red urchins, we

have come in search of, but rather styuu k’amdala11–small green urchins

that are only slightly less delicious. They are also slightly less dangerous,

as, unlike the red urchins, their spines are less liable to inflict chronic pain

upon punctured fingers and feet. we head to the beach once alan has filled

his small mesh bags, and, crouching between boulders marked with rings

left by changing tides, he offers us a taste of urchin fresher than the highest

grade sashimi. His knife point reaches past the stippled outer sphere of the

spines’ reach, prying open the shell to reveal the tender orange flesh at the

centre, and as I eat I think back to dale’s words from the day before. “This

is one of few places left where you can still live completely off the land,” he

had said. “You might struggle to pay your bills sometimes, but you’ll never

go hungry. You’d have to be an idiot or an asshole to starve here. actually”,

he added, “if you were an idiot, your neighbor would feed you. If you were

an asshole, well . . .”

I spoke with captain gold, a skidegate elder, one afternoon outside

the Kaay Llnagaay Haida Heritage centre near, sitting in the sunshine on a

picnic table facing the sea. Ravens landed on the wings of their likenesses

on the totem poles nearby, their throaty wood-block calls interrupting us

at regular intervals. captain–a common given name in post-contact Haida

culture, I’m told–was telling me about the large fleet of fishing vessels that

once sailed from skidegate in the days before the financial regulations

that now make it difficult for First nations to fish commercially. captain

worked on his father’s boats beginning at the age of eight, at a time when

“there used to be boats all along the bay, floating off the beach” in skidegate.

It’s a month before salmon season, and today a single boat is riding the

ring of horizon before us. “I know that boat,” says captain. “I used to be

74

able to recognize all the boats on the horizon.” This statement reminds

him of another story, and he goes on to tell me about the ancient Haida

war canoes, and how raiding parties would return home. “In those days

everybody had a specific seat in the canoe,” he says. “If a warrior was killed

in battle, they would put his paddle upright in his seat. That way when they

came home the villagers could see who had been lost by the position of the

paddles. They could prepare.”

There’s a map of Haida gwaii on cait’s wall. on it, the islands rise

from the sea in lightening shades of green, the blue surrounding them

darkening in stages as it stretches away from the land, shadows filling

the troughs left by glaciers millennia ago. I saw carvers in old massett

performing a similar act of glaciation, pulling cedar forms from a sea of

shavings as they pushed the wood back with their tools12, leaving similar

contours in their wake. From this elevated perspective it seems clear to

me that here food is gathered in concentric circles around the islands.

like the boulders on the beach in the narrows, rising and falling tides

delineate rings that radiate out from all the beaches of Haida gwaii: along

the first line, seaweed is gathered; along another, clams are dug. beyond

the shoreline is the ring of urchins, followed by the ring of kelp on which

the herring deposit their eggs. Further still are captain gold’s sites for

fishing for halibut and salmon, and at the centre of these concentricities

are cultural hubs like sHIP and the kaay centre. The importance of these

sources, and of the threat facing them, cannot be understated, and at a

recent Joint Review Panel hearing in old massett–one of several that, in

theory, will contribute to determining the future of the northern gateway

Pipeline–Hereditary chief guujaaw gave testimony to the significance of

food gathering: “I usually get enough halibut and other things that I need

throughout the months and when they’re accessible,” he had said, “and so

through the year, I’m able to feed my family. Probably five times out of the

week I feed them from things that we had gathered, seaweeds and clams

and the fish that we had put away in various ways. we prepared them in

different ways and so when we serve these foods, we know exactly how

they were handled from the time that they were taken from the earth …

our culture is about how close we can be to the earth. For thousands

of years our people lived here basically surviving from all that this land

provided … this was the highest density of hunter gatherers anywhere in

the world, which says something of the wealth of this land and what this

land has provided for us.”13

“I’d rather die fighting against oil than die by oil,” were the words

of nika, a cultural curator at skidegate’s kaay centre. The conflict has

progressed to brink of militancy, and the Haida are not alone: as one non-

Haida community member told me in Port clements, “I’ve never seen the

island so united. If they want to push this thing through, they are actually

going to have to shoot people.” The banners of protest in charlotte, in

skidegate and old massett are indicators of the premonitions captain

gold hinted at: they are the upturned paddles on the horizon, a sign that

the Haida will be ready when those behind the pipeline realize they’ve

been gathering clams with their heads down for too long, intent on their

progress with only a twilit understanding of the environment in which

they dig.

swing beach, Queen charlotte

alan, Port clements

car parts, Port clements

general store, Queen charlotte

Protest sign, Queen charlotte

Protest signs, old massett

carvers, old massett

gull wings, Queen charlotte

shuttle, skidegate

cait & meriko gathering seaweed, Queen charlotte

mary cleaning clams at sHIP, skidegate

bulletin board, Queen charlotte

Family resource centre, old massett

soccer game, Port clements

91

alan gathering urchins, Juskatla narrows

tree rings, skidegate

tide rings, Juskatla narrows

Ravens, old massett

97

conclusions conduits, meshwork,

concentricities

99

tHe VIgnettes PResented HeRe–capsules of visual and textual

experience collected over the course of several months of fieldwork–offer

three interpretations of emerging and enduring movement in Indigenous

space, felt amid an ever-changing array of social, political and economic

circumstance. In the communities of the In-sHUck-ch nation the

introduction of reliable electrification has gone a long way in improving

feelings of connectedness for citizens like Vern. while few would argue

that this electrification, and the “certainty” associated with it, represents a

large step towards extending the benefits of citizenship to all canadians,

it is not without its attendant dangers and contradictions. Historically,

non-Indigenous canada has been very good at subsuming those lands that

are convenient–lands rich with timber, water, minerals, game and fish,

and ripe for access to desirable waterways and overland routes1–when it

has been convenient to do so. It speaks to observations that culture is not

static2 that members of the In-sHUck-ch nation, like mark, have taken

up the cause of preserving historic wagon trails through their territory.

This adoption, or co-option, is recognition of these routes’ formative place

in In-sHUck-ch history: clearly there is no claim to any form of pure3,

pre-contact culture here. Unfortunately, however, as roads and resource

exploration, both historic and contemporary, have pushed any hopes for

traditional forms of self-sufficiency further from reality, routes through

the territory have not taken up the slack. The game trails that became

wagon trails that became logging roads (a loose progression) also became

unequal conduits4 that served, and still serve, to drain the territory. These

conduits replenish, too, to a certain extent, but their contributions are

vastly disproportionate to their withdrawals, and as economic centres

continue to develop at the opposite ends of these metaphoric pipelines, the

communities of the In-sHUck-ch nation grow increasingly removed5.

Removed, too, are the Inuvialuit communities of aklavik,

tuktoyaktuk, and Inuvik, and although their physical distance from

what Hank would call “southern” canada is decidedly more dramatic, it

is their political distance that seems to have the most profound impact

on lives and livelihoods. while physical insulation may lead to stronger

community ties, political isolation is manifest in regulatory policy that

simply doesn’t fit the landscape, environmental or cultural. The physical

infrastructures of remove are relatively easy to adapt to, as Phillip and I

learned first-hand as we chose our dinners from the frozen food section

of a small grocery or watched our rental truck being towed skillfully out

of a snow bank, and these adaptations impart a decidedly unhurried,

un-urban atmosphere to a place. Fittingly, movement through the Inuvialuit

landscape is done in very conscious consideration of, and engagement

with, its affordances6 as governed dynamically by the seasons: a system of

irregular prescription that influences the patterns of people and animals

alike.

making a living under a similarly-governed economic landscape

is equally opportunistic and responsive, as chuck and Hank demonstrate

through the hunting and trapping that supplement their incomes. In this

sense the north could be interpreted as highly independent, supported

economically by a practice that serves added function as a cultural

touchstone. It is when these practices are interrupted by regulation

which–while no doubt grounded in the best available science–fails to

take into account local knowledge of the fluid dynamics of a herd that

this independence is compromised, placing increased pressure on scarce

alternative industry. Ironically, and with precedent-setting recognition of

aboriginal traditional knowledge, the mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry

of the 1970s ultimately rejected the pipeline proposal based in part on

its potential detrimental impact on traditional hunting and trapping

economies7. by many accounts the pipeline would have provided relief

from dependence on these practices of subsistence, illustrating the

conundrum presented by dissociated governance that argues alternately

for the protection of traditional livelihoods and the herds on which they

are based. The dissociation needed, many in the north would argue, is

100

one that frees the north from the centralized policies of the canadian

south, allowing for ways of life and livelihood that follow the bricolage

of the tundra. In the resource-sparse north, lines of meshwork pattern

an irregular patchwork on the landscape–a pattern that incorporates

the affordances not just of snow, silt and soil but also those of caribou

herds, whale pods, and, when necessary, the pantries of neighbors.

effective northern policy might then, I argue, embolden these patterns

of decentralization, drawing on traditional ways of life and local resource

opportunities in equal measure.

Interestingly, such decentralization can be seen to feed remarkable

localism, witnessed as the communities of Haida gwaii respond to the

threat of the proposed northern gateway Pipeline. It’s a response in

part to a mistaken concentration of values–the idea that the western

lobe of the country is united in support of risky resource extraction and

transportation–and the federal misdirection that all canadians will benefit

from the risky transportation of crude oil8. Haida gwaii’s relative isolation

has largely freed the islands from the urban encroachment experienced in

the territories of the In-sHUck-ch nation; as a result, it is still possible to

live off the land, arguably to greater extent than is possible in the arctic.

Just as the north has been hamstrung by remote regulation, so too will

Haida gwaii be impacted by the remote liberalization that may eventually

allow the pipeline to proceed: in the event of an ecosystem-crippling oil

spill, reliance will be similarly shifted to local industry, the stagnation of

which has already shifted dependence heavily towards local food. like the

caribou to the Inuvialuit, these sources of food, as well as the practices of

gathering, are the cultural touchstones of the islands. dale’s 100-metre diet

tells the greater story of the Haida: first you pick your protein–in this case,

the concentric rings of sea flora and fauna that lap the islands–and then

you place your fire. The Haida placed their fire at the centre of these rings,

and as a result their fires still burn bright in vibrant communities at the

heart of a self-sustaining system.

struggling to find their place within a similar system, the In-

sHUck-ch nation is not fighting for a road, but for what the road

represents: the extension and recognition of citizenship, a conduit that will

transport them to a place of active participation in canadian society and

economy9. In the north, the Inuvialuit are working against the imposition

of a centre based on foreign values–one that fails to recognize that, amid

the fluctuations of the arctic, the strongest centre is in fact none at all–

while on the british columbia coast the Haida are preparing to go to war

for a centre that has for centuries sustained itself through the respectful

recognition of its periphery. collectively these struggles are for alternative

ways of connecting, both to canada and to each other.

These forms of movement and the values they betray are not

unique to the Indigenous actors operating within the spaces described,

and it is my hope that these nuanced lenses of understanding may have

application in the search for innovative solutions to the challenges inherent

in the conception and development of rural infrastructure and economy,

Indigenous and otherwise. I also hope to offer a compelling, localized

argument against an undemocratic and overly-centralized approach

to resource development, and in doing so I have aimed to describe an

alternative researcher–subject relationship: one that places the concerns of

the researched at the centre of inquiry and involves the researcher, deeply,

bodily and emotionally10.

Ts’ii t’a jan gan.

(to continue)

101

notes

103

IntRodUctIon

1. These disparities are not limited to Indigenous peoples and communities

in canada, and similarities may be found in wilson’s (2008) observation

that, in australia, “while recognizing that services are not provided

on an equal basis to indigenous people, the government nevertheless

expects viability and imposes dominant societal standards for

(Indigenous) programs.” (p. 20).

2. la Praire (2002).

3. monture (2010); macdonald( 2009).

4. anderson (1992).

5. Farley, m., lynne, J., & cotton, a. J. (2005).

6. “Indian” is an ingroup expression of identity that I can lay no claim

to. more often than not its use by outgroup members is pejorative,

however it remains in use in official policies of the government of

canada. I use it only when referring to these documents and policies,

preferring the general term “Indigenous” as the fieldwork outlined

here was conducted with both First nations and Inuit communities.

whenever possible I use more specific and positive expressions of

identity: Haida, In-sHUck-ch, and Inuvialuit.

7. Harris (2002). also, a contemporary assessment of the reserve system

as different from an urban existence can be found in whittles and

Patterson (2009).

8. Harris (2002); brownlie (2009); macdonald (2009).

9. on this freedom, or lack thereof, Harris (2002) highlights the role

of “Indian agents”–government officials who were the all-seeing, all-

hearing administrators in and around reservations, and who played

a large role in the restriction of traditional activities such as hunting

and fishing (p. 270). Harris makes reference to the work of michel

Foucault, who’s further characterization of the prison system bears

eerie similarity to the choices offered by both reserves and residential

schools: “In short, penal imprisonment, from the beginning of the

nineteenth century, covered both the deprivation of liberty and the

technical transforming of individuals.” (1977, p. 216).

10. Heidegger hints at the linguistic roots of the prejudice that held

Indigenous peoples as non-citizens–and in fact as non-people–in

building dwelling Thinking: “bauen originally means to dwell . . .

bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am,

du bist, you are . . . The way in which you are and I am, the manner

in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling . . . this word

bauen, however, also means . . . to till the soil, to cultivate the vine”

(1971, p. 147, original emphasis). This agriculturalist perspective

implies, by extension, that if one does not till the soil, as hunting and

gathering societies did not, then one is not.

11. There is some reassurance to be found in the definition of social justice

as offered by chilisa (2012): “social justice in research is achieved

when research gives voice to the researched and moves from a deficit-

based orientation, where research was based in perceived deficits in

the researched, to reinforcing practices that have sustained the lives of

the researched” (p. 17-18).

12. wilson (2008) asserts that “one consequence of such studies, even

though their intentions may be good, is the proliferation of negative

stereotypes about Indigenous communities.” (p. 17).

13. “discontinuous as it was, the line separating the Indian reserves from

the rest became, in a sense, the primal line on the land of british

columbia, the one that facilitated the boundary between the desert and

the sown, though in this case the extent of the desert (the land largely

104

beyond reach and use) was a vastly one-sided colonial construction.”

(Harris, 2002, p. xviii).

14. Perhaps I can be forgiven, as, according to Ingold, “this setting

out, however, is also marked by a switch of perspective, from the

encompassing view of the umbrella plan to the narrow focus on the

initial point of contact between tool and material” (2011, p. 54). I

might consider myself and my camera the “tools”, and broadly-defined

Indigenous space as the “material”.

15. Throughout this book I make loose reference to constellations of

mobility as described by cresswell (2010)–characteristics of rhythm,

route, feel, speed, motivation, and friction–as they relate to experiences

of movement in Indigenous space. additionally, these experiences are

undoubtedly impacted by a further constellation as added by Vannini

(2011): that of remove, or isolation, with its attendant implications of

insulation and isolation.

16. This idea of “dwelling” (Ingold, 2000; seamon, 1979; Vannini &

taggart, 2012) falls under the umbrella of non-representational

Theory. Importantly, Vannini and taggart propose that an island’s

sense of place, “or islandness, is an outcome of what islanders do, and

in particular of how islanders move,” (p. 4) and my argument here is

similar: Indigenous spaces, while defined on maps by reserve lines,

are better defined by the movement that occurs within, around and

through them. additionally, and particularly in my exploration of

Haida gwaii, I propose that eligible movement for such consideration

is not limited solely to that of Indigenous actors.

17. crang & cook (2007) assert that “to be a ‘participant’ in a culture

implies an immersion of the researcher’s self into the everyday

rhythms and routines of the community” (p. 37). I have drawn heavily

on participant and non-participant observation in conducting this

fieldwork.

18. taggart (2009).

19. macdonald (2011).

20. In approaching work in Indigenous spaces I follow a blended Indigenous

methodology as outlined by chilisa (2012), kovach (2009), and wilson

(2008), the characteristics and considerations of which are identified

in the following footnotes. Regarding giving back to communities,

kovach (2009) asserts that researchers can do this “by sharing our

work so that it may assist others.” (p. 11). Regarding my involvement

with the In-sHUck-ch nation, images I produced were given to the

band to support their arguments for self-government. Historic and

contemporary challenges to self-government are outlined in murphy

(2009).

21. Importantly, “for story to surface, there must be trust,” (kovach,

2009, p. 98).

22. Peers & brown (2009). In their outline of a photographic repatriation

project in southern alberta, they note that “over the years, many

aboriginal people have talked to us about the legacy of mistrust of

museums and anthropologists that exists in their communities…

we have also been told about misinterpretations and errors within

ethnographic texts and archival sources that are still drawn upon by

researchers, aboriginal and non-aboriginal” (p. 124).

23. graybill & boesen (1976, p.1).

24. barnholden (2009, p. 61).

25. Peers & brown (2009).

26. as “witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses, renowned

for their bravery and zeal in procuring important, disturbing

105

photographs” sontag (2003, p. 33).

27. sontag (2003, p. 6).

28. Following the example of kovach (2009), in preparing these vignettes

I have employed a writing style that “has three braids, comprising

three writing styles: expository, analytical, and narrative.” (p. 21)

29. I am referring here to a year’s worth of fieldwork with dr. Phillip

Vannini, spent studying the practices and motivations of canadians

living “off-grid”–those at a distance from systems of transportation,

communication and electrification. Phillip and I have noted that,

while off-griders often do without television, very seldom do they

relinquish their connection to the world wide web.

30. chilisa (2012).

In-sHUck-cH teRRItoRY

1. Following Ingold, this skill being seen as the “synergy of practitioner,

tool, and material”–in this case driver, vehicle, and road– executed

along a slippery highway through “the coupling of perception and

action.” (2011, p. 53).

2. a version of this description, as well as early images, can be found in

sasaki, k., nakanishi, a., Yee, s., goto, Y. & sato, m. a. (2009).

3. Following Vannini & taggart (2012), “Your island car is not just an

automobile; it is an embodiment of island roads.” (p. 6).

4. For more on hierarchies of mobility, see cresswell (2010): “. . . speed of

a more human kind is at the centre of hierarchies of mobility. being able

to get somewhere quickly is increasingly associated with exclusivity.”

(p. 23).

5. For an interpretation of the relationship between straightness and

notions of civility see Ingold (2007): “In modern societies, it seems,

straightness has come to epitomize not only rational thought but also

the values of civility and moral rectitude.” (p. 4).

6. cresswell (2010), “Rhythm, then, is part of any social order or historical

period. senses of movement include these historical senses of rhythm

within them.” (p. 24).

7. Vannini (2011) has added “remove”–the concept of relative distance–

to cresswell’s (2010) six existing constellations of mobility.

8. Ingold: “ In between sites he barely skims the surface of the world, if

not skipping it entirely, leaving no trace of having passed by or even

any recollection of the journey. Indeed the tourist may be advised

to expunge from memory the experience of getting there, however

arduous or eventful it may have been . . . “ (2007, p. 79).

9. Ingold: “Thus the act of remembering was itself conceived as

performance: the text is remembered by reading, the story by telling it,

the journey by making it. every text, story or trip, in short, is a journey

made rather than an object found.” (2007, p. 16).

tHe mackenzIe RIVeR delta

1. These jolts and bodily reflexes are but a few of the “feels” of mobility in

the arctic, (cresswell, 2010, p. 25).

2. The information in this paragraph is drawn from an interview with

alana mero of the aurora Research Institute in Inuvik. alana was an

integral gatekeeper during my time in the north.

3. aporta (2004); Ingold (2011).

4. Incidentally, gwich’in means “one who dwells” (osgood, 1970).

106

5. This web of trails can be considered, according to Ingold, “a meshwork

of interwoven trails rather than a network of intersecting routes. The

lines of the meshwork are the trails along which life is lived.” also,

“These lines are typically winding and irregular, yet comprehensively

entangled into a close-knit tissue.” (2007, p. 81, original emphasis).

6. These seasonal dynamics are highlighted in Ingold (2008): “Inhabitants,

I contend, make their way through a world-in-formation rather than

across its preformed surface. as they do so, and depending on the

circumstances, they may experience wind and rain, sunshine and

mist, frost and snow, and a host of other conditions, all of which

fundamentally affect their moods and motivations, their movements,

and their possibilities of subsistence, even as they sculpt and erode the

plethora of surfaces upon which inhabitants tread.” (p. 1802).

7. “snow may be covered by further falls or may eventually melt away,

sand may be sculpted anew by the wind or washed by the tide, mud

may be dissolved by the rain, and moss or grass may grow over again.

Footprints thus have a temporal existence, a duration, which is bound

to the very dynamics of the ground to which they belong: to the cycles

of organic growth and decay, of the weather, and of the seasons.”

(Ingold, 2010, p. 129).

8. This anecdote and accompanying history were provided as well by

alana mero; for a similar summary see salanave (1994).

9. slowey (2009) addresses the “false dichotomy” often present in issues

of resource development and conservation, focusing on the Vuntut

gwitch’in. she argues that “development is not about choosing (culture

or modernity) but rather how to secure the best of both worlds.”

(p. 229).

10. Human routes in the north exhibit similar yearly variance–see aporta

(2004).

11. Ingold (2007); Ingold (2000); Vannini & taggart (2012).

12. These trails–the snowmobile tracks I follow and the tire marks on the

ice road–are self-reinforcing, following Ingold: “In effect, the ‘walk’ of

the line retraces your own ‘walk’ through the terrain.” (2007, p. 84). even

so, their dynamic nature demands the traveller’s constant attention.

HaIda gwaII

1. lemphers (2010).

2. kovach (2009) observes that “colonialism history has disrupted

the ability of Indigenous peoples to uphold knowledges by cultural

methodologies. while colonialism has interrupted this organic

transmission, many Indigenous peoples recognize that for their

cultural knowledge to survive it must live in many forms, including

western education and research” (p. 12). In many ways the work being

undertaken by the skidegate Haida Immersion Program is indicative

of this recognition.

3. In his account of the orthographic and place-naming process, kevin

hints at the process of remembrance outlined by mccartney (2009):

“locations on the land served as mnemonic aids, or pegs, upon which

myriad associations and oral narratives were hung” (p. 85).

4. Participant observation at its fishiest (crang & cook, 2007).

5. “narrative recollections and memories about history, tradition and life

experience represent distinct and powerful bodies of local knowledge

that have to be appreciated in their totality, rather than fragmented

into data” (cruikshank, 2003, cited in mccartney, 2009, p. 86). I am

grateful to mary for sharing her story with me, and have refrained

from analyzing it too much–rather, I have tried to retain its metaphoric

qualities and apply them to other experiences in Haida gwaii.

6. while I believe I did fairly well at remembering skidegate Haida words

107

as they sound, many of the elders I spoke with would have had to refer

to written material to recall the ways in which these words are now

spelled. my own attempts at orthography would be nothing short of

blasphemous, so I have referred to the sHIP Xaayda kil glossary, draft

#13 (2011), for spellings here. to my ear, k’aww is pronounced /gaʊ/

7. to my ear this is pronounced /guː/den/naɪ/

8. manipulation aside, fulfilling the wishes of elders is, in my belief, a

simple act of human decency. It is also an enduring and expected piece

of traditional social decorum and an important element of cultural

exchange and continuity, as explained by Hereditary chief guujaaw

in his oral testimony before the Joint Review Panel for the enbridge

northern gateway Project in old massett: “on my own, I travelled

around the islands on little boats, little rowboats and canoes and just

generally enjoyed the adventure and often brought things to the elders

that were in the village as was proper for a young person to be doing,

and in that way I learned stories from the old people and some deeper

knowledge of the culture and relationship to the land and the places.”

(2012, entry 12369)

9. There is lackadaisical debate over the spellings of the northern Haida

gwaii towns of masset and old massett. while the two towns differ

consistently between one another, highway signs leading into old

masset(t) offer two options within a 50-metre stretch.

10. cresswell (2010); Ingold (2007).

11. I have only seen this word writtena and can only guess as to its

pronunciation.

12. I borrow this visualization from a similar description of acts of

conjuring: wade davis’ (2009) description of Polynesian navigators’

ability to “pull islands out of the sea” (p. 59).

13. chief guujaaw (2012), entries 12371-12379.

conclUsIons

1. Harris (2002); Flanagan, alcantara, & le dressay (2010).

2. chilisa (2012).

3. crang & cook (2007).

4. Ingold (2007).

5. Vannini, (2011).

6. Ingold (2007); Ingold (2000); Vannini & taggart (2012).

7. salinave (1994).

8. This sentiment is borrowed from lempers (2010), although I readily

admit that as a coastal british columbian I have trouble maintaining

objectivity concerning the northern gateway Pipeline proposal.

9. or, as Ingold says regarding the straightening of the line, towards

“civility and moral rectitude” (2007, p. 4).

10. as per the tenets of Indigenous methodology as outlined by wilson

(2008), kovach (2009), and chilisa (2012).

109

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