The morning sun glints off the blue glass towers of Vancouver’s skyline. It’s dawn in the Downtown Eastside, also known as Canada’s poorest postal code, and a group of people are gathering outside a crisis shelter. This is the starting lineup of the Vancouver Street Soccer League – “street” referring not to playing in the street, but to the fact that the players are, were or are at risk of being homeless. Many of the men gathered here today are aboriginal.

“I’ve never played in a real game before,” admits Cheynne White, laughing. “My cousin Johnny Bowes invited me, and here I am.”



White moved to Vancouver a few months ago, joining the ranks of indigenous Canadians who no longer live on “reserve land”. They are the fastest-growing segment of Canada’s urban population – and now represent more than half of all aboriginal people in the country, most clustered in Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver.

For many aboriginal people, moving to the city – indigenous land or no – is a difficult journey: they represent just 2.5% of Vancouver’s population but 38% of its homeless. Poverty rates are almost double those of non-aboriginal people in the same urban areas.

While this is often regarded as a cause for concern, it is also contributing to a debate about what, exactly, counts as “native land” today. Vancouver’s city council dropped a bombshell into mainstream public consciousness of the issue in 2014, when it acknowledged that it stands on territory “never ceded through treaty, war or surrender” – that the entire city of Vancouver was, in effect, indigenous land.



But life on the reserves is often not much better. Reserves were created by the Canadian government as a way to control aboriginal people, whose presence stood in the way of colonial expansion. It set aside tiny parcels of “Indian land,” then employed a variety of measures to force First Nations, Métis and Inuit people to move to – and stay on – their assigned reserves. This freed up vast, open spaces for unfettered resource extraction and development, effectively imprisoning indigenous people: until 1951, leaving a reserve, even for a day-trip, required a permission slip from the government’s local “Indian agent”.



Today, however, with poverty and suicide common on reserves, many aboriginal people are resuming their ancient habits of movement – and posing a threat to the government’s presumed authority over the land. The recent Idle No More protest movement in Canada has helped bring about a new era of indigenous-state relations, in which First Nations are increasingly asserting their nationhood and taking broad jurisdiction over their territories. In a fascinating turn of events, Canadian courts seem to agree.

I heard that there was some good work around in Vancouver. But I never did find it Cheynne White

For White and the Vancouver Street Soccer League, this newfound movement between city and reserve is not abstract: today we are making the 16-hour, two-ferry journey to the isolated community of Alert Bay, on the north end of Vancouver Island, where the team will compete in the 58th Annual June Sports – a mostly aboriginal, invite-only tournament on Kwakwaka’wakw traditional territory.

Piling into a car with the rest of the team – 25 players and volunteers in five cars, plus camping equipment – White describes moving from Bella Bella, BC, where he grew up. “I heard that there was some good work around” in Vancouver, he says. “But I never did find it.”



Like many urban aboriginal people, White depends on family and community support: he stays with relatives and gets by with work in construction. “I’m building those condos no one can afford,” he says. It’s a dark joke: most of these players rely on subsidised housing and shelters, often literally in the shadows of Vancouver’s increasingly unaffordable condominium apartment buildings.



Sarah Hunt, who was born in Alert Bay and is now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, says the shifting geographies of aboriginal people have always been treated as a threat.



“Indigenous peoples’ mobility has always been seen a problem,” says Hunt. “First we were too mobile to make any claim to the land, then we were seen as not mobile enough, and therefore backwards.”

Until the 1970s, the Canadian government had a very clear route for First Nations people to leave the reserve – and it was intended to be a one-way street. All children from the ages of seven to 15 were sent to live in residential schools, from which they were not free to leave. This child internment programme, rife with abuse, is now widely described as cultural genocide: it aimed to strip kids of any trace of indigenous knowledge and prepare them for life in white Canada.



The Salmon Pageant in Bighouse on Vancouver Island. Photograph: Amanda Laliberte

The goal was nothing less than “to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department,” as the Department of Indian Affairs minister Duncan Campbell Scott put it at the time. Or, more simply, “to kill the Indian in the child”.

The effects of this policy are still keenly felt. “I’m 38, and I don’t know any of my language,” White says. I ask if he knows anyone who attended residential school. “Yeah. My dad.” I don’t press for details.



As we approach Alert Bay, we drive past the grassy field where St Michael’s Residential School once stood: an imposing brick building that was demolished last year in a tearful ceremony. Then we turn toward the Bighouse, to attend a Salmon Pageant.

The Bighouse is the heart of the Namgis First Nation, and sits next to the soccer pitch where June Sports has been held since 1958. Throughout the year, it hosts the ceremonial practice of potlatches, a once-outlawed gathering now undergoing a revival across the coast. Tonight, it is packed, as many of this 1,500-strong community are here to watch teens compete for the titles of Salmon Prince and Salmon Princess. People watch from seating along the walls. A fire in the centre of the floor burns high with red cedar.

The Salmon Pageant is based on demonstrated knowledge of culture, rather than on looks or donations. Drummers accompany songs in the Kwak’wala language with a rhythm played out on a large, hollow log. Parents snap photos as the contestants dance, sing, and tell the stories of ʼNamxiyalegiyu, Dzunuk’wa and other figures from Kwakwaka’wakw mythology.

White is blown away. He says the cedar smoking is burning his eyes. “These kids are speaking their language, telling stories in their language. They’re dancing and describing the meaning of the dances,” he says. “It’s incredible.”



The team plays two hard-fought games the next day – White scores a crucial header against the favoured Twin Arrows, and they win Most Sportsmanlike Team. That night, the Namgis treat them to trays of salmon, halibut, crab and prawns, as well as eulachons, a small ocean fish that is eaten smoked or preferably processed into a thick, fragrant oil known as “grease”. It’s an acquired taste. White loves it all. “I came up here to play soccer,” he says, “I didn’t expect this. This is awesome.”

“Today, we’re travelling back and forth, on- and off-reserve, all the time,” says Hunt, as the audience joins in dances of welcome and thanks, praising the cooks, the fisherman and the sealife who provided the food. “There are Kwak’wala-language meetings in Victoria, even though it’s Songhees territory. Our fishermen distribute salmon to our people in the city, which is really important.”

She adds: “Reserves were imposed on us to restrict our movement and our claim to the land. But there was always movement – for potlatching or trading or intermarriage, or along waterways for fishing.

“The more we organise ourselves into those categories of on-reserve and off-reserve, the more we naturalise the idea that indigenous people only belong on reserves.”

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