A Gentle Revolution

The audience was startled. Few were aware that so many large developments were underway. Many were disturbed to learn that the tcc, which was created to negotiate on their behalf with industry and government, was to receive funding from those with whom it was supposed to be bargaining. The elders took notice when Telegraph Creek chief Jerry Asp and Iskut chief Louis Louie returned from a private lunch with the NovaGold executives. Said Terri Brown, “It was very, very embarrassing for me as a Tahltan to see our leadership sit there like trained dogs.”

The Telegraph Creek elders returned home that weekend via one of the more spectacular two-hour drives in Canada. The route traces an ancient Tahltan path that was pummelled into a mule road during the Cassiar and Klondike gold rushes, then widened to a truck road during construction of the Alaska Highway.

Overlooking the scrubby boreal forest on the outskirts of Dease Lake is Mount Edziza, a 2,787-metre-high volcano that the Tahltan’s ancestors had routinely scaled to collect obsidian. They would chip the hardened black glass into knife blades and arrowheads for trade to neighbouring bands. As miners themselves, the elders had no cultural objection to a well-run dig. Some had worked at the long-shuttered Golden Bear mine, and many of their children held jobs at Barrick Gold’s soon-to-be-closed Eskay Creek mine. They were hoping the Galore Creek mine would replace the Tahltan-held jobs that would be lost because of the Eskay Creek closure. But five projects? That would create far more jobs than the few hundred working-age Tahltan in the region could fill, prompting an invasion of fortune-seeking labourers, whose presence would further complicate the already thorny issues of land claims and self-government.

Halfway to Telegraph Creek, the gravel road begins to parallel the Grand Canyon of the Stikine. In this 100-kilometre-long gorge, the river has carved a window into the past. The rocks on the river bottom were thrust into place by continental plates more than 180 million years ago, and the walls soaring hundreds of metres above the river are the stratified remains of a 90-million-year-old lake bed. This prehistoric layer cake has been preserved for the past five million years by a cap of hard rock formed when volcanoes rerouted the river. Below it all, the Stikine churns so violently that only a handful of expert kayakers have managed to paddle its length. BC Hydro wanted to build two seventy-storey dams here in the 1970s. The project would have flooded the canyon and much of the surrounding territory. The Tahltan opposed the dams—one elder publicly threatened to blow it up—and under the leadership of Tahltan chief Ivan Quock the plan was defeated.

Just downriver from the canyon, the clear blue Tahltan River swirls into the muddy Stikine. The Tahltan have been harvesting salmon along these banks since the last ice age ended thousands of years ago. The northern shore is speckled with fish-drying sheds and brightly painted summer cabins. A cliff soars to the south, rippled into two forty-metre arcs—a supernatural sculpture that evokes a massive eagle. This is the heart of Tahltan country.

Twenty kilometres west, the road crosses a one-lane bridge and winds into the first of two Telegraph Creeks. “Downtown” Telegraph Creek is a graveyard of broken dreams. Victorian frame houses sag inward, while lopsided log homes tilt out. Vintage pickup trucks and dogsleds lie abandoned among the cottonwoods. Telegraph Creek took its name from an audacious plan to build a telegraph line from New York to Paris via Siberia. The project was abandoned after the transatlantic cable was laid first. The river town blossomed briefly as a supply depot for the Klondike gold rush and again during the construction of the Alaska Highway. But for most of its long history, downtown Telegraph Creek has survived on a slow trickle of hunters (and, later, hippies) calling in at the inn that occupies the old Hudson’s Bay Company post.

“Uptown” Telegraph Creek is reminiscent of a Toronto suburb. Above the main drag sit several dozen split-level homes, their lower floors half-buried in Mississauga-sized yards, their upper floors sheathed in pastel shades of white, yellow, and baby-blue vinyl siding. A health centre and Catholic church flank the north side of the road below, while a community centre, general store, and fire hall line the south side. The two-storey band office stands at the far end. Inside, at the top of its broad, curved stairway, hangs a framed copy of the Declaration of the Tahltan Tribe, signed on October 18, 1910, by Chief Nannock and eighty-two other Tahltan. It reads: “We claim sovereign right to all the country of our tribe—this country of ours which we have held intact from the encroachments of other tribes, from time immemorial, at the cost of our own blood.”

Uptown was abuzz the week after the NovaGold assembly. A series of impromptu gripe sessions at the store led to an evening of tea and strategy at Pat Carlick’s house, which paved the way for a meeting of the Tahltan Elders Society. On Sunday night, January 16, Terri and Lucy Brown approached several elders and asked if they would support a sit-in. All said yes. “I thought they wouldn’t keep the secret,” said Terri Brown, whose experience as an activist (she’d been president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women) thrust her into an organizing role. “The office would be locked up and that would be it.”

But by sun-up the next morning, the elders were seated in the conference room. News of the sit-in spread quickly, and more elders arrived by the truckload. By suppertime, between forty and fifty people were jammed into the room, laughing and telling stories.

August Brown, a former ranch hand who still dresses like a cowboy, shared a tale about Chief Asp. They’d grown up together in Lower Post, a small town just south of the Yukon border. The future chief, he told the elders, used to shoot pine cones at the other boys with a slingshot. Brown reminded Asp about this shortly after he was elected. “I got a piece of pine cone,” he said. “I put it right in front of him, on his desk.” August paused to mimic Asp’s puzzled expression. “Finally he smiled. He picked it up. He looked at me. I said, ‘You remember that?’”