“Hey Wayne, are those berries good to eat?” The young Indigenous woman pointed to clumps of red translucent berries.
It was a surprising question. On our horseback ride to the moose lick a couple of kilometers from our basecamp on the Gataga River, we had seen several different kinds of berries, and the woman on the ride was from Fort Nelson, where, if you chucked a rock out of your back door, there’s a pretty good chance it would land in a berry patch.
“Those are high-bush cranberries,” I replied. “They make great syrup for your pancakes. Don’t you know those berries?”
“No, we get our berries from the store. Our grandmas pick berries, but we don’t.”
“Really! Why is that?”
She paused for a long moment, “We’ve lost too many of our women and girls, it’s too dangerous.”
It was a gut punch that brought home yet one more harsh reality of living in a colonial landscape. I knew about the mad rush to exploit the natural gas of the north, but I wasn’t prepared for the woman’s reply.
“We’re scared. Too many man camps. It’s not safe.”
It was another pointy end of the colonialization process – this time the selling and exploitation of natural gas tenures, a process that cuts deep into the fabric of northern societies.
A few years later my work as a conservationist brought me to the lower mainland of BC for meetings, and on the way to an engagement, I happened to walk by the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Formerly this imposing marble and granite structure held the Provincial Court House, police, and other government offices. My walk south along Howe Street took me past the eastern side of the Gallery where I noticed a granite doorway, long disused. Above the lintel, carved deeply into the rock, were two words: Land Registry. The colonial clerks who’d stood behind the counter, only a couple of lifetimes ago, were in the business of selling land to settlers, a process was now immortalized in granite.
It was all legal of course, at least under the system of English law governing the colonialization process. Yes, there were people already living, using, and governing on these lands, but all were swept aside using, as a start, the Doctrine of Discovery. This was a papal bull issued in the fifteenth century that gave authority to European governments to subjugate and convert to Christianity all “savages,” and, by extension, to seize, occupy and exploit their lands. The Land Registry followed, the legal mechanism for transferring the ownership of lands to incoming European settlers.
The Doctrine of Discovery has recently been repudiated by the Catholic Church, but it has been in place for more than 500 years. It is one of the foundational underpinnings of the authority of the Crown in Canada. It’s a shaky foundation at best, given that even at the time critics such as Vitoria wrote that the Spanish discovery of the Americas provides “no support for possession of these lands, any more than it would if they had discovered us.”
The lands of North America have been ripped from Indigenous hands, whether by legal means or otherwise. And what has been the result of it?
As I continued my stroll on the streets of Vancouver, I rounded the corner of the Art Gallery, and there on the southern side I came face to face with at least one answer.
“No pride in Genocide,” read one banner. “Our home on Stolen Land,” was chalked on the bricks. And on the steps of the Gallery – hundreds of pairs of children’s shoes, many in bright shades of red. These were the scars of the colonialization process, exactly what the girls from Fort Nelson had feared, what kept them from the berry patches, the fear of being ground under the still grinding wheel of colonialization, a process that, like all Euro-Canadian settlers, I have benefited from. The inevitable consequence of those thousands of newly minted deeds that have been issued from the eastern door, including deeds bestowed to my ancestors, may seem to be a door with a completed task, but it is my hope that the Day of Truth and Reconciliation will open new doors to understanding and action.
