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The site where the Pacheedaht people originated — their Garden of Eden — is stunning.

The Jordan River exits a 500-metre-deep canyon, then tumbles toward the sea through a jumble of immense boulders polished as smooth as beach pebbles.

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It was here, about 70 kilometres west of Victoria, in a past so ancient it predates legends of a great flood that inundated the world, that the Pacheedaht took their name from foam on the river.

Today, there’s still foam on the river. It signals not the birth of a people, but the death of their river.

Photo by Stephen Hume / PNG

Barely an hour’s drive from where the B.C. government we trust to protect the environment convenes in the capital that prides itself as the City of Gardens, the Pacheedaht’s Garden of Eden has been poisoned for more than 40 years by toxic residues leaching from an abandoned mine.

Salmon runs that supported the original Pacheedaht villages at the river mouth collapsed. Below the mine site with its eroding tailings dumps and litters of rusting debris, the junk-strewn river bottom appears devoid of life.