In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,55

trip to Koeye about catching a boat ride from Heiltsuk territory to Wuikinuxv. The feedback from the Heiltsuk, usually friendly and helpful, ranged from shrugged shoulders to flat-out refusal. It became apparent that there is no regular traffic between the two communities. Similarly, when I reached out to contacts in Wuikinuxv to hire a boat pickup from nearby Koeye, no one responded.

At first I made little of this awkwardness. But then I started hearing murmurs of a falling-out between the two nations.

“You should be careful when you go there,” warned one Bella teenager at Koeye who learned I was leaving for Rivers Inlet in a few days.

“Be careful of what?” I asked, unable to imagine what would constitute a danger there.

“The Wuikinuxv. They’re still angry,” she said.

“Angry about what?” I pressed.

“Being conquered.”

I’m staying at Grizzly’s Den, a bed-and-breakfast located on the eastern end of the Wuikinuxv strip. It’s a comfortable two-story home. A flag showing the profile of an indigenous warrior on top of a Canadian maple leaf stands in the front yard. My host is Lena Collins, a petite, middle-aged woman of mixed Wuikinuxv and Heiltsuk ancestry. There is a youthful vigor about Lena, who loves to dialogue. From the moment she picks me up at the floatplane dock, I am flooded with information and trivia about the town: the lack of cell-phone service, the absence of a proper grocery store, the packs of rowdy street dogs that patrol the gravel road. When we reach her home, I finally manage to squeeze in a question, asking if she does anything else apart from running the seasonal B and B.

“Ha!” she snickers, unpacking a crate full of food that arrived on the plane. “You’ve obviously never been to a place this small before. Everybody’s got a million jobs here. You should be asking me: What don’t you do? Let’s see,” she says, before counting on her fingers. “I work at the band office. I’m a language and culture teacher at the school. I’m also the custodian there—that translates to glorified janitor. I pick up people and goods that come in on the plane. They call that position the ‘band van driver.’ And I happen to be the volunteer fire chief. That was a job I was tricked into doing. Oh, and I’m also a mom.”

Then our chat turns to politics. Lena complains that the people in power in the village aren’t doing enough to better the community. That segues into a long digression about the conflict I’d heard about earlier. The Wuikinuxv and the Heiltsuk, she tells me, are locked in a complicated dispute, part of it territorial, involving, among other places, Koeye, which was once populated by villages from both nations.

“I hope that’s resolved soon,” I say, deciding to steer the conversation away from the thorny subject of tribal politics. “Do you know why I’m here?”

Lena looks at me in shock. “Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t even asked about you yet. When you called you mentioned you were working on a book, right?”

I explain that I’m collecting stories related to Sasquatch and ask if she has seen or heard anything.

“No, not me,” she says. “I think it’s been quiet around here lately with regard to that. But I know people you could talk to.”

She fires off several names, which I scribble into my notebook.

“I’m really sorry for going off on that tirade just now,” she says. “I’m a bit worn down by everything. In spite of the difficulties, we really are a great nation. We just keep getting the short end of the stick. And not just politically.”

Like other parts of British Columbia, Rivers Inlet and Owikeno Lake used to be blessed with bountiful salmon runs. In years gone by, every salmon species returned in droves in the autumn to spawn in the area’s many connecting rivers, streams, and lakes. Foremost among them was the sockeye, in numbers up to three million strong. The homecoming of this keystone species, a grand gesture of nature’s benefaction, made the region’s waters crimson with hurtling bodies. The Rivers Inlet salmon run was once among the largest and most dramatic in the province.

But by the 1970s, after decades of unchecked commercial exploitation, the numbers of these fish, so crucial to the well-being of the ecosystem, began a dramatic decline. It was a trend seen across the Pacific Northwest coast. Overharvesting by commercial and sport fisheries, combined with damage to habitat caused by the introduction of clear-cut logging, was thought to have had a