Editorial: Turning Point

February-March 2000

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Alan Wilson

COVER PHOTO: THE WEIWAIKUM CANOE, "LIGHTNING SPEED", BY DAVID NEEL

I'm at the window of a high-rise apartment, overlooking Victoria Harbour. Laurie and I are in town for a few days' holiday and plan to visit the Nuu-chah-nulth exhibit at the Royal BC Museum as part of the research for this issue.

As I gaze down at the entrance to the harbour, I try to see through the eyes of my grandmother's grandmother, arriving here in the early 1860s on a sailing ship from Newcastle-on-Tyne, England via Cape Horn-after a year at sea, including giving birth. She arrived in a very different world than the one now spreading over the landscape.

I often think of her arrival-it's part of how I locate myself in time and space, feel my roots on the west coast. But, for all its significance to me, I have to admit that 140 years is a pittance compared to those who trace their lineage here over thousands of years.

Like many school children in British Columbia, I grew up isolated from First Nations culture. I studied Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, marvelling at these glorious past cultures, little realizing the vast depth of history which lay in villages all around me.

I was raised in North Vancouver, not far from the Burrard Reserve-actor Chief Dan George's reserve. The main road passed right through it, as you could tell by the sudden change in housing standards.

Aside from dark-haired kids I saw playing, the only "Indians" I saw were those I glimpsed from the car window as we drove by Skid Row in Vancouver.I now understand how segregated we were.

Yet, as a child, whenever I saw totem poles, masks and native designs in museums, I felt an inexplicable connection to them, seeing in them natural shapes of wood and stone, the faces of the forest, the animals and seashore.

With a child's eyes I felt the impact of the art, but only later came to realize that these artforms, developed during a culture of some 10,000 years, represent some of the highest artistic achievements on this planet.

I have since paddled the waters where countless paddle strokes have proceeded mine over a hundred centuries, looking for this past, challenged by the same winds and currents as ancient paddlers experienced over the millennia.

I've been drawn by white shell beaches, decaying house timbers, lurching weathered totems, petroglyphs and pictographs. I've looked for evidence of the big villages, the great feasts, canoe runs, fish traps, stone or bone tools, arrowheads.

But to be honest, the predominant experience is the timeless forest and shore, trees and rocks and water-except now, of course, our growing industrial scars on the landscape. Little seems to remain of that 10,000 years except thousands of miles of the shell-banked shores and museum exhibits.

When I first began paddling in these waters, I was dismayed to see so few signs of the past. Then one day it dawned on me that the real tribute to this culture was precisely the fact these people had left so few traces of themselves. While their main medium-cedar-doesn't endure like stone, it also speaks to a respect for nature far deeper than that of our colonizing culture that the land was so little transformed over millennia.

This view was strengthened when I visited native communities during the Salmon Aquaculture Review, and listened to eloquent elders and passionate younger voices opposing fish farms, speaking from the heart on behalf of their families and villages, and the natural world that supports us all.

The experience of paddling Haida master Bill Reid's great cedar canoe Lootaas in Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) during a trip there roused in me even greater respect for the cedar culture.

But visiting Alert Bay this past summer finally brought the message home to me. I saw the continuity of culture, the vitality of the artforms, the resilience of the community.

It should be no surprise that a 10,000 year old culture is so resilient and resourceful, that it can recover from enormous hardships such as endured by First Nations in BC for the last 150 years.

We are at a historic turning point. First Nations are engaged in Treaty negotiations with the provincial and federal governments to settle claims on lands they neither sold or surrendered. Although land claims cover virtually the entire province, First Nations have agreed that no private lands are on the table, so settlements will inevitably be a mix of financial and territorial terms.

As we move toward this long-awaited justice, let us learn to "pull together"(First Nations refer to paddling as 'pulling') with mutual respect. Hopefully the result will lead us into more interaction between cultures, not entrench the separateness I grew up with.

In this issue we try to give you some of the sense of the cultural flowering underway, and the role that ecotourism can play instrengthening the economy of First Nations communities.