Fragmented homelands

The Saulteaux (Anishinaabe), Nehiyaw (Cree) and mountain Dunne-Za people existed in the northeast of what is today known as British Columbia long before adhering to Treaty 8 in 1914.

Before settlers arrived, an agreement was made between the Saulteaux and the Dunne-Za people for coexistence, the Nehiyawak (Cree people) arriving later in phases. The groups are bound together by a collective history, worldviews, ancient laws and kinship, and they continue to uphold unique forms of governance, spiritual traditions and connections to the land.

But nothing is as it was before. Industrialization has pushed many species to the very limits of survival.

“It's no different for my people. We’re having a harder and harder time to find our culturally appropriate foods that define us as a unique race on the face of this planet,” Napoleon said.

Napoleon’s freezer is not unlike other freezers in the area, stuffed with wild game — buffalo, moose, elk, deer, lynx, lingcod, trout, jackfish, whitefish, grouse and rabbit, as well as huckleberry jam.

“We’re a food-based culture and those foods, to me, are the most significant part of who we are, and yet it’s harder and harder to get them. When we do get them, who’s to say whether they’re contaminated or if they’re even safe anymore?” he asked. “We’ve all been pushed to the absolute edge of survival.”

If one had a yearning to journey through hell, Napoleon told me, when about to leave his community, take a left at Hudson’s Hope and travel through what historically was hunting grounds for his people, a “darn good spot to get a moose." After a fat stretch of farm land, you'll hit "nothing but oil and gas development."

“It’s frack well after frack well on both sides of the road,” Napoleon said. Sometimes the frack wells are abandoned interspersed with gas processing plants that resemble “space stations,” sporting tubes and aluminum as apocalyptic plumes belligerently billow into the air, he explained. The last time Napoleon drove through the area, he nearly had a breakdown. The wounds on the land mirror the wounds embodied by his people, he said.

It is a burden they carry together.

“When I was a kid, that area was one of our main hunting grounds, but now everything's poisoned,” he said. “The ground water is poisoned with frack fluid, the air is poisoned with fugitive emissions, the surface of the earth is covered in settled toxic particulate and all the animals and plants are sick.”

“It’s heartbreaking.”

Julian Napoleon looks out on his territory on June 15. Everyone in his community "works their asses off" to do what they can to protect what land they have left, he said. Photo by Emilee Gilpin

The Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations have had heavy logging operating near their communities since the beginning of the 80s.

The closest town to Napoleon’s reserve, Chetwynd, has been a mill town for all 35 years of Napoleon’s life. With logging came the use of toxic chemicals used for vegetation management on new seedlings planted, Napoleon said, an issue his community has been dealing with using sheep.

Concerned with the onslaught of industrial development, coming from every direction, Saulteau Chief and Council teamed up with two shepherds and invested in a herd of sheep as a non-chemical solution to vegetation management. Rather than using toxic chemicals like Round-Up, the band uses sheep who eat the hungry vegetation that threatens to choke out little seedlings planted in reforestation efforts.

There are positive shifts, Napoleon recognized, but it’s hard to keep up with the impacts of industry.

“We’re on the Montney Shale gas plate and have well over 16,000 gas wells in our territory, and there’s talk of 40,000 more,” he said. “Mining is huge too. We’ve got a ton of coal up here.”

There are a number of coal mines operating in Napoleon’s territory - Conuma Coal Resources’ Wolverine Mine, Brule Mind, and Willow Creek mine.

The reality of these industries is that they release toxins, Napoleon said.

“We didn’t have cancer before the industrial revolution,” he said. “Cancers are a result of exposure to toxins - toxic chemicals, created by humans, that become lethal in the long run.”

It’s overwhelming and infinite to truly consider how much extractive industries have wrenched from the land, often causing more destruction than abundance.

Before oil and gas in the region, before mining and forestry, large scale commercial agriculture operations greatly contributed to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, as well as hydroelectric developments, like the ones along the Peace River, including the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.

The water created from the floodwaters of ten rivers and creeks were converged to fuel the hydroelectric power-generating unit, which spins the blades of a giant turbine and creates energy. When settlers built the W.A.C. dam, they didn't bother to inform local communities, like members of the Kwadacha First Nation whose riverboats were swamped.

The next project slated to start is the controversial $8.8 billion Site C dam, which the government approved in December, 2017. Currently under construction, once completed, the dam will flood 107 kilometres of the Peace River regions, land Napoleon and others grew up fishing, paddling, harvesting plants grown unique to the area.

The impact of all the development has severely fragmented those who call the land home.