Buying out mineral tenures for a Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in northern B.C. could cost $24 million to $40 million, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal that throw cold water on a plan to protect a wildlife-rich area known as the “Serengeti of the North.”

The Narwhal obtained 20 pages of documents about the proposed protected area under freedom of information legislation. All but a four-page letter to the federal government — about the Kaska plan for a protected area in part of the nation’s territory — were redacted. In the letter, two assistant deputy ministers said there is “no cabinet mandate or commitment by the B.C. government to continue to add or designate new protected areas.”

“B.C. is currently unable to commit to establishing new protected areas,” said the November 2019 letter, signed by Jim Standen for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy and Tom Ethier for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.

But just two months later, then-B.C. Energy Minister Michelle Mungall announced the NDP government was “working towards” creating the Qat’muk Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) proposed by the Ktunaxa First Nation.

The Qat’muk protected area would sit in Mungall’s riding of Nelson-Creston in southeastern B.C., as well as in the adjacent riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke, held by the BC Liberals.

“That means at best the government has changed its mind about IPCAs or, at worst, it’s being inconsistent,” Dave Porter, a senior leader with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, told The Narwhal.

“When Qat’muk was announced in January, then-Cabinet Minister Mungall said the agreement was ‘reconciliation in action and it is the right thing to do,’ ” said Porter, a member of the Kaska Nation.

“It was the right thing to do then, and it’s the right thing to do now and in the future, to work with other First Nations that want to partner with the government to conserve lands,” he said.

Proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas are gaining recognition worldwide for their role in preserving biodiversity and securing a space where communities can actively practice Indigenous ways of life.

The Kaska Dena want to conserve a 40,000 square-kilometre area that would stretch roughly, tip to tail, from Lower Post to Fort Ware. The Kaska protected area would surround or connect to six existing protected areas, conserving watersheds and critical habitat for caribou and other species at risk of extinction while creating sustainable jobs.

‘Serengeti of the north’: the Kaska Dena’s visionary plan to protect a huge swath of B.C. wilderness

The Kaska say the protected area is necessary to protect nature and preserve their way of life at a time when Indigenous cultures across the globe are threatened with extinction and when, every two weeks, somewhere on the planet, another language winks out.

Last September, Kaska chiefs travelled to Victoria to meet with Environment Minister George Heyman, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Scott Fraser and Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.

Six of the eight Kaska land guardians pose by the Liard River. The aftermath of a 2018 forest fire is visible in the background. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The meeting came after the federal government confirmed it would provide $587,500 to advance the Kaska protected area, one of up to 27 Indigenous protected and conserved areas supported through the Pathway to Canada Target 1 Challenge.

The Target 1 Challenge is a federal investment in expanding Canada’s connected and protected areas to meet the Trudeau government’s commitment — reiterated in the Sept. 23 speech from the throne — to conserve 25 per cent of Canada’s land and waters by 2025.

The letter from Standen and Ethier, written after the September meeting with Kaska chiefs, described the area proposed for a Kaska protected area as “very important for mining and mineral activities which support both local and provincial economies.”

A preliminary assessment indicates the Kaska proposal “may impact mineral potential, active mineral title and operations at the Silver Tip mine,” near the Yukon border, Standen and Ethier said. Additionally, there are 355 mineral claims and 21 placer claims within the proposed protected area, they stated.

“Forestry activities would be impacted in this area and loss of revenues would not be insignificant,” Standen and Ethier said, adding there are more than 46,000 hectares in the timber harvest land base.

“No work under any work plan should assume eventual protection designation,” the assistant deputy ministers told Ottawa.

Good Hope Lake in Kaska Dena territory. Photo: Maureen Garrity

Corrine Porter, executive director of the Dena Keyah Institute, a Kaska Dena non-profit organization, said the Kaska continue to work towards creating an Indigenous protected and conserved area in their territory.

“The Kaska Dena believe they have more than answered concerns raised in the letter over the past year and have no further comments at this time,” she said.

The letter to the federal government also describes IPCAs as a concept that remains “largely undefined,” a depiction challenged by Dave Porter.

“Far from being ‘undefined,’ IPCAs are widely known as major, Indigenous-led contributions to conservation and are viewed as an international model,” Porter said.

Three large-scale IPCAs have been created in Canada since 2018, including Thaidene Nëné (pronounced THIGH-den-nay NEN-ay), The Land of the Ancestors, one of the largest territorial protected areas on the continent.

Thaidene Nëné heralds a new era of parks

In the Northwest Territories, the K’asho Got’ı̨nę people signed an agreement with the territorial government last November to establish and collaboratively manage the Ts’udé Nilįné Tuyeta (Ramparts) protected area to conserve wetlands, nesting grounds and lands of great cultural significance.

And in 2018, the Dehcho First Nations worked with the federal and territorial governments to create the Edéhzhíe Dehcho Protected Area and National Wildlife Area west of Yellowknife, in a region known as the nations’ breadbasket because its caribou, moose, fish and waterfowl have sustained people for millennia.

One of the earliest co-management arrangements with First Nations was crafted in B.C., where the Haida Nation and the B.C. and federal governments created Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, Porter also pointed out.

“Governments across Canada increasingly recognize that IPCAs and Indigenous Guardians are effective tools for working together with First Nations to protect lands and waters and which support reconciliation,” he said.

In response to questions from The Narwhal, the B.C. environment ministry said in an email that, “Unfortunately, during the election period, government of B.C. communications are limited to public health and safety information, or statutory requirements.”

The Horse Ranch area of Good Hope Lake in Kaska Dena territory in northern B.C. Photo: Maureen Garrity

At a Sept. 28 leaders’ forum on nature and people, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emphasized the importance of partnerships with Indigenous Peoples in meeting Canada’s conservation goals.

Trudeau’s comments followed the Sept. 15 publication of the United Nations Global Biodiversity Outlook, which says the international community has failed to meet 2020 commitments to reverse dangerous declines in animal and plant species. It calls for more emphasis on solutions, including expanding protected areas and augmenting the role of Indigenous Peoples in biodiversity strategies.

The letter from Standen and Ethier said B.C. had already achieved the Canada Target 1 goal of protecting 17 per cent of terrestrial lands and inland waters, estimating that 20.8 per cent of B.C.’s land base qualifies.

The letter also said there was “no cabinet mandate” for B.C.’s broad participation in the Canada Nature Fund program for new IPCAs “as B.C. has not only achieved but has surpassed the target” of 17 per cent.

“Notwithstanding this, B.C. recognizes that federal funding under this program does provide capacity and support that assists Indigenous Nations [to] explore their interests in land stewardship and management,” Standen and Ethier wrote.

Among the B.C. IPCA proposals supported by the Canada Target 1 Challenge is a plan by the Taku River Tlingit First Nation to create the Tlatsini “The Places That Make Us Strong” Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. The nation is exploring conservation opportunities in its traditional territory including in the Taku, Whiting and Yukon river watersheds, which encompass vast areas of boreal forest and wetlands.

The letter said B.C. appreciated federal funding to assist the Kaska and the Taku River Tlingit “in identifying and developing interests that could come to future land use planning processes,” noting the B.C. government was not involved in land use planning with either nation.

Jordan, a Kaska land guardian, conducts water sampling along the Kechika River in northern B.C. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The area identified by the Taku River Tlingit contains significant mining and mineral resources, but is “less important” for oil and natural gas resources, Standen and Ethier noted. A full assessment of mineral potential in the area should be funded by Ottawa, they said, also noting that forestry in the area will require further assessment and analysis.

“Similar to mining and mineral implications, forestry impacts would need compensation for existing tenures and future lost revenues.”

Any assumptions related to a proposed Taku River Tlingit IPCA are “premature,” the letter said.

All costs associated with the establishment of protected areas as an outcome of the Canada Nature Fund, “should they occur, must be borne by the federal government,” Standen and Ethier noted.

The Qat’muk IPCA envisioned by the Ktunaxa Nation also received Target 1 Challenge funding. The Qat’muk IPCA would tentatively span about 70,000 hectares immediately north of the Purcell Wilderness Conservancy, including the Jumbo Valley and parts of adjacent watersheds.

Plans for the Qat’muk IPCA advanced in January after development rights were extinguished in the Jumbo Valley, where Glacier Resorts Ltd. had long planned to build a highly controversial ski resort in an area the Ktunaxa hold sacred as the spiritual home of the grizzly bear.

Privately held interests and tenures in the Jumbo Valley were purchased through a $16.2 million contribution from the federal government and $5 million from the Wyss Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Patagonia, Donner Canadian Foundation and Columbia Basin Trust.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

First Nations leaders in southeastern Yukon know all too well what new mines can do to their people. They’ve been down this path before. Companies push into communities, prying open the land and taking what’s beneath. Then they bail, leaving behind “nothing but sorrow and suffering,” according to the executive director of a women’s organization.

This could happen again. And not only could the environment be harmed. So, too, could First Nations women — both physically and emotionally, says Anne Maje Raider, executive director of Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society.

Maje Raider and George Morgan, Chief of the Liard First Nation, are calling for more scrutiny of the Kudz Ze Kayah project, a proposed open-pit and underground mine roughly 115 kilometres south of Ross River. To ensure that happens, they asked the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board to extend the public comment period for the project, which the board agreed to earlier this year. Now, the public has until May 31 to have its say on the project.

“This mine is in the heart of Kaska territory.”

BMC Minerals, the company behind the project, wants to build a zinc, copper and lead mine. It’s eyeing a site that falls within the traditional territories of the Liard First Nation and the Ross River Dena Council. The plan is to operate it for 10 years, after which a 26-year closure and reclamation project will occur, according to the assessment board’s draft screening report. The mine’s workforce will number roughly 350 during the 10 years it’s active.

BMC president Scott Donaldson said the company has been working closely with the Ross River Dena Council, the lead Kaska community for the project, to address outstanding issues. He didn’t say, however, what those issues are.

Jack Caesar, Chief of the council, wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The Ross River Dena Council and BMC “have maintained a close relationship since we purchased the project in January 2015 and have jointly developed a number of programs to ensure that when the mine is finally approved, that there is a meaningful involvement by Kaska at all levels,” Donaldson said in an email.

Morgan told The Narwhal the proposed mine is slated to go in the vicinity of traditional villages, campsites and drying racks, noting that a new mine would bring in waves of workers, disrupting traditional ways of life. 

Caribou frequent this area. He’s worried about them. 

“This mine is in the heart of Kaska territory,” he said. “We’re talking about a breadbasket here for hunting, for our people harvesting in the fall. In fact, the name of the mine, Kudz Ze Kayah, is actually Kaska for land of the caribou.”

The Finlayson caribou herd, which has seen a steady decline over the past 20 years, is in the area, and many Kaska hunters rely on it, he said, noting there are rutting and calving areas next to the proposed site.

He also wants assurance that the mine, once closed, is adequately cleaned up and not foisted on taxpayers. There are already four abandoned mines in the surrounding area — Faro, Ketza, Wolverine and Cantung.

Yukon seeks $25 million in outstanding cleanup fees from owners of shuttered, contaminated Wolverine mine

“We are committed to making sure that our traditional territory is clean,” Morgan said. “Big projects like this are only going to be acceptable to the Kaska if we can avoid significant harmful impacts.”

“Of course, economic development is important for our members,” he continued. “Our communities need jobs desperately, so we’re just really concerned about doing our due diligence when it comes to the environment. We’re also concerned about capturing traditional knowledge in these areas of activity before that knowledge is lost.”

BMC has agreed to bankroll an independent environmental and traditional knowledge review led by the First Nation, Morgan said. The review is underway, but COVID-19 has thrown a wrench in the process and a completion date hasn’t been set, he added.

The assessment board’s executive committee, responsible for screening large projects like this one, determined the mine, as currently proposed, “will result in significant adverse effects to water resources, traditional land use and human health and safety.”

It outlines several mitigation measures for the company to make good on as a result, including sustained water quality monitoring, caribou and moose monitoring and ongoing geochemical studies.

The Faro Mine in south-central Yukon was abandoned in 1998, leaving behind 320 million tonnes of waste rock and 70 million tonnes of tailings. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

‘Women have been targeted, women have been harassed’

First Nations women could be placed in an even more vulnerable position. 

Part of the project includes building permanent camp facilities. The majority of the workforce is likely to be male.

The draft screening report says the project is likely to result in “significant adverse effects to personal safety” of women and LGBTQ and two-spirited people.

“Violence against women is persistently a major issue with large-scale natural resource development activities, with First Nations women being particularly vulnerable,” it says. “The potential effects are wide-ranging as this violence affects not only the individuals themselves, but also children and communities, sometimes resulting in intergenerational trauma.”

There could be an increase in sexual assault and domestic violence, the report says.

Maje Raider, who wrote a letter to the assessment board in December calling for an extension to the public comment period, told The Narwhal First Nations women could be in danger if issues aren’t addressed.

Her organization conducted a series of meetings with women in Watson Lake and Ross River in February. Their concerns will be encapsulated in a report and sent to the assessment board.

Canada’s northern ‘zombie mines’ are a lingering multi-billion dollar problem

It was during these meetings that a picture of the dangers posed to women started to develop. Concerns centre around women who work at mine sites and miners funnelling into surrounding communities, Maje Raider said.

“They have every right to work there,” she said, referring to First Nations women, “and they have every human right to be safe, to have an environment that’s safe, but that’s not always the case, because as we heard through our meetings, women have been targeted, women have been treated badly, women have been harassed, and so women end up quitting.”

The organization and others made a submission to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the final report of which was released last June. A section of it says extraction projects can exacerbate violence against Indigenous women and girls.

“We expressed concerns that the violence that happens, the racism that happens, the attacks that happen against Indigenous women who work in the mining industry,” Maje Raider said of the submission to the inquiry. “Really, the impacts that these mines have had on our communities dates back years, decades.”

The draft screening report says Kudz Ze Kayah doesn’t have “notable provisions to prevent the pattern of violence against women and sexual minorities, which occurs consistently as a result of other resource extraction projects in Canada’s North.”

BMC proposes no drug or alcohol use onsite, random drug testing and counselling services, among other things, according to the draft screening report.

The assessment board takes it a step further, recommending mitigation measures such as mandatory harassment prevention training, developing policies that promote a safe environment for women and LGBTQ and two-spirited people and clear procedures for assisting victims of domestic violence. 

One measure is aimed at the Yukon government. The executive committee recommends it earmark more funding for childcare, detox and counselling services and shelters for victims of abuse in Watson Lake and Ross River.

Work on a final screening report will begin when the public comment period ends next month.

Maje Raider has been here before. She’s seen projects just like this one make their way through assessment processes. She’s seen mines come and go, and, once they do, all that’s left is a gaping hole in the ground and toxins in the environment, she said.

“I’ve not seen a mine yet that’s come into our homeland that’s provided everything it’s promised to our people. There’s no wealth that comes into the community. It’s been nothing but sorrow and suffering, because it brings more addictions, more drugs. I’m sad to say, but that’s the reality of it.”

B.C. failed to consider links between ‘man camps,’ violence against Indigenous women, Wet’suwet’en argue

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This is part 2 of a two-part series on the Kaska Dena’s proposed Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area and the land guardians working to protect their culture and traditional territory. Read part 1 for an in-depth look at the proposal and what it means to those who have lived on the land for millennia.

Zigzagging through the Kechika River rapids in his motor boat, Robbie Porter spots a twist of smoke rising from the boreal forest of spruce and pine. Hands on the steering wheel, rifle in the stern, the Kaska Dena First Nations guide rises from his seat for a better look.

“Maybe a lightning strike,” he says over the din of the jet engine. “Or maybe a camp.” 

Porter, an Indigenous land guardian, knows the unbroken wild country around the Kechika River in northern B.C. as well as anyone. 

Robbie Porter, a Kaska guide, stands in front of smoke from a forest fire near the Kechika River. Porter teaches traditional knowledge to the Kaska land guardians, the community’s eyes and ears on the ground in their traditional territory. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Born in the nearby community of Lower Post, the youngest of nine, he spent his early childhood walking ancestral trails and family traplines along the Kechika River, eating smoked beaver and dried moose meat on family treks so long even the dogs carried packs. 

“It was quite the challenge,” Porter, a soft-spoken hunter, remembers.

He watches the smoke as it reaches for the blue sky one moment and bends sideways the next, stretching over a wilderness so vast you could walk for weeks and not cross a road. 

On a clear, windless day in August, Porter is zipping upstream on the Kechika River with anthropologist Gillian Staveley, a Kaska Dena member, and Tanya Ball, head of the Kaska land guardians program. 

Kaska land guardians, travelling upstream on the Kechika River in a small motorboat, spot a forest fire and go to investigate. The fire was smouldering at a vacant hunting camp. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The guardians are the Kaska’s eyes and ears on the ground, keeping an eye on land use in the ancestral territory of the Kaska Dena people and using traditional knowledge and science to monitor everything from wildlife health to water quality.

The plan for the day is to show me and photographer Taylor Roades the Kechika River, a key feature in the vast intact region proposed for a Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. 

But now the land guardians have to make an unexpected stop. 

Guardians find half-burned hunting camp

Porter pulls up his 18-foot aluminum boat on a rocky shore in front of the smoke. It’s just upstream from the banks of the Red River where his family used to arrive, laden with beaver pelts, in two 30-foot rafts his father had lashed together from freshly cut spruce. 

From the rivers’ confluence, the family would follow an ancestral trail back to Lower Post, a traditional riverside meeting place that is home to the Daylu Dena Council, representing one of B.C.’s three Kaska Dena communities.

Only steps away from the boat, hidden by a fringe of trees, is a half-burned hunting camp. 

The remains of a hunting camp near the Kechika River in the proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Kaska land guardians spotted a forest fire burning by the camp. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

“Holy shit,” says Ball, as she and Porter pick their way through a 150 by 50 metre area of slippery, steaming ash. 

Porter leaps into the air when the fire, simmering underground through squirrel tunnels, sears the soles of his black shoes.

A rusty wood stove lies on its side, next to a singed ladle and rusty tin cans. Melted tarps hang from a simple A-frame shelter made from cut trees. A blue plastic mug still dangles from a nail on one of the poles. 

In August 2018, Kaska land guardians discovered a forest fire burning at a hunting camp near the Kechika River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Pockets of flames pop up here and there. Spruce trees stand tall and surprisingly green above their scorched trucks, ready to topple in a wind without most of their roots. The warm air mists with grit and ash. 

Ball taps a cell phone app, used by the land guardians to monitor land use and flag environmental concerns, to mark the fire’s GPS coordinates. She takes photographs to send to BC Wildfire Services.

“It’s been smouldering for a while and all of these trees are danger trees now,” observes Ball, who grew up in Lower Post and went to college in Terrace, where she studied environmental science before working as a GIS technician.

Tanya Ball, head of the Kaska land guardians program, stands in smouldering ash from a forest fire the guardians found along the Kechika River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Kaska land guardian Robbie Porter uses a tote that held boat equipment to put out a forest fire the guardians spotted near the Kechika River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Porter, wearing jeans and a baseball cap that says “Born to Hunt,” empties a plastic tote of boat gear. He fills it with river water, carrying it up the bank again and again to douse the flames. 

“It might have started last fall and it might have burned underground,” he says, wiping sweat and ash from his face. “There’s not much fuel, dry stuff, around. It’s a little wet there. It shouldn’t go too far … I just wonder if it’s from the previous fire or from this tent.” 

Guardian program started after poaching and cabin break-ins

Porter, who works seasonally for a Yukon guide outfitter, has been running boats and imparting traditional knowledge to Kaska land guardians since the program launched in 2015 in response to concerns about the impacts of accelerated hunting in Kaska ancestral lands. 

The Kechika River, whose lower reaches are home to two woodland caribou herds and Stone’s sheep, was an area of particular concern. 

In the Kaska language, the Kechika is Tahdazeh’, meaning “long inclining river.” Its milky grey-green waters are a stark contrast to the Liard River, turquoise and crystalline, into which it flows an hour downstream by boat, not far from the Yukon border.

Kaska land guardian advisor Robbie Porter readies his boat for a trip up the Kechika River. Porter teaches young land guardians the Kaska language and traditional knowledge. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Close to the rivers’ confluence is Skooks Landing on the Liard River, which provides access for hunters, especially during the frenzied annual 10-day elk hunting season in September. Ball says cabins owned by First Nations members were getting broken into and moose and other species were being illegally targeted. 

“There was a lot of poaching,” Ball says. “We’d find a moose shot and the antlers taken off … Sometimes they’d be left on [and the moose] not even gutted, just shot and left.” 

In 2010, the Kaska Dena Council put up and locked gates on the Skooks Landing access road to restrict entry temporarily. 

The Kaska land guardians program would have a greatly expanded role in a proposed new Indigenous protected area. Currently, eight Kaska guardians are spread out among the three B.C. Kaska communities. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Today, the land guardians — eight in total, spread out among three Kaska communities in B.C. — patrol highways and access roads to their traditional territory. Trained in conflict management, they approach hunters to see if they will participate in a land use survey, asking questions such as the GPS location of their camp, how many people are in their party and what tags they have purchased. Hunters are also asked to call the guardian program if they plan to leave meat behind, so the guardians can come and pick it up. 

“A lot of people think First Nations are there to kick them out of the land or don’t want them there,” Ball says. “I just want them to see that we’re just there to help monitor land use and make sure things are taken care of.”

The guardians also broker relationships with guide outfitters, who would be grandfathered into the new Kaska protected area along with other current users such as commercial trapping. One outfitter donated moose, caribou and mountain goat meat to Lower Post last year, feeding 27 homes, Ball says.

Kaska Dena asked for temporary hunting ban after wildfires

In August 2018, as the Blue River and Lutz Creek wildfires threatened the Liard and Dease Lake valleys, the three B.C. Kaska chiefs — along with Danny Case, chair of the Kaska Dena Council, representing B.C.’s three Kaska nations — wrote a letter to Doug Donaldson, B.C.’s Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. The letter served notice of temporary hunting closures in some of Kaska territory, including around the Kechika River. 

The closures would be in effect, the chiefs told Donaldson, until they could assess the situation and make informed decisions on the impact of wildfires on wildlife, which had fled their normal ranges to escape the flames. 

Community members had been pulled away from their regular duties to deal with wildfire impacts and responses, the letter noted. Lower Post, the home of the Daylu Dena Council and land guardians program, had been evacuated. 

“Accordingly, our local governments and land guardians, who play a vital role in overseeing hunting activities in our territory, have been unable to carry out our regular monitoring activities,” the letter said. 

“Such monitoring activities are a vital element to our exercise of jurisdiction and authority over resources uses, including hunting activities, in our traditional territory,” the letter pointed out.

Jordan, a Kaska land guardian from Dease Lake First Nation, examines a water sample from the Liard River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Those monitoring activities include keeping an eye on morel mushroom pickers, who invade the land by the hundreds the year after a wildfire when the prized fungi typically appear. Ball says the guardians hauled out truckloads of garbage from one abandoned camp, including mattresses and signs advertising makeshift restaurants.

The proposed Kaska protected area would stretch roughly from Fort Ware, the home of the Kwadacha First Nation, to Lower Post near the Yukon border. At 40,000 square kilometres — larger than Vancouver Island — it would encompass snow-tipped mountains, boreal forest, lakes and wetlands. Scientists say the area would provide a refugia for wildlife as the climate warms, with rivers like the Kechika, which begins in the Cassiar Mountains, providing climate adaptation corridors. 

The massive roadless area — a rarity in the world — is still home to the full suite of wildlife that populated the area after the last Ice Age, including some of the country’s healthiest woodland caribou herds and many other at-risk species. 

A new conservation economy would create jobs in ecotourism and other ventures, while extractive industries like mining and logging would take place on the perimeter. 

Back on the Kechika River, Porter talks about some of the changes he’s seen on the land over the past decade: lower water levels in lakes and wetlands, less rain, fewer animals.

“You used to go up and down this river and see moose here, moose there,” he says. Now you’re lucky if you see moose.” 

The protected area would reduce pressures on the landscape before moose populations dwindle further and caribou herds become locally extirpated like they have elsewhere in B.C., Porter notes.

“I would say that’s a good idea.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is part 1 of a two-part series on the Kaska Dena’s proposed Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area and the land guardians working to protect their culture and traditional territory. Read part 2 to meet the Kaska land guardians.

On a rain-soaked evening in early August, Kwadacha First Nations chief Donny Van Somer walks from his home in Fort Ware to an airstrip in town and climbs into a plane. Every seat in the Beechcraft 1900 has a window.

He buckles up near the front, on the right, near two of his granddaughters and across the aisle from elder Emil McCook, the long-time former chief. A dozen community members squeeze in. Just after 7 p.m., propeller engines thundering, they are airborne. 

A Beachcraft 1900, emblazoned with the Kwadacha Nation crest, receives passengers for the 50-minute flight back to Fort Ware. The aircraft is a joint venture between the Kwadacha Nation and Caribou Air. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Flying north from Fort Ware, an isolated community in northern British Columbia at the terminus of a rough logging road, there’s something different about the landscape below. It becomes clearly visible, through parting cumulus clouds and glinting sun, about half-way into the 50-minute flight up the Rocky Mountain Trench, known locally as the “warm wind valley.” 

Unlike flights over most of B.C., Van Somer doesn’t see a single clear-cut. There are no mines, no oil and gas development, no hydro reservoirs, no settlements and not a single road. He could walk for weeks on the land below and not meet a soul in the tapestry of boreal forest, sapphire lakes, rivers and snow-crested mountains that stitch together one of North America’s last intact major landscapes. 

Donny Van Somer, chief of the Kwadacha Nation, at the Kaska annual general assembly in Lower Post, B.C. Van Somer, who lives in Fort Ware, is working to permanently protect part of his people’s traditional territory in a new conservancy. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

“We have an area that’s very pristine and very beautiful, one of the most beautiful places, I think, in the world,” Van Somer, a grandfather of 12, tells The Narwhal.

“We call it the Serengeti of the north. There’s an abundance of wild animals. It’s untouched, no roads, just the ancestral trails that we use for getting back and forth.” 

New conservancy would be larger than Vancouver Island

The Kaska Dena call this land Dene Kayeh, which translates as “the people’s country.” The Kaska, a nomadic people who followed the seasonal rounds, producing food, shelter, clothing and medicine from forested landscapes, have occupied this region continuously for at least 4,500 years.

The proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in Kaska Dena traditional territory. Scientists say species will more easily adapt to climate change in areas such as this, where they can move from valley bottom to mountain top. Photo: Maureen Garrity

In recent times, they have politely declined to put the proposed Eagle Spirit pipeline through their territory, insisted there be no logging north of Fort Ware, negotiated with a Vancouver company that wants to explore for zinc deposits and declined to use their guide outfitting licence because the area has been over-hunted and needs time to recover.

“Now we’ve decided we don’t want to see much development there,” says Van Somer, who is mustached and wears a leaf-patterned shirt in camouflage colours. 

“I think it’s very important for us, being First Nations stewards of the land, to protect a piece of the land we can enjoy in its natural state.”

Van Somer is on his way to the annual assembly of B.C.’s three Kaska Dena nations. Held in Lower Post, a picturesque riverside community of 150 near the Yukon border, the theme of this year’s gathering is “protecting our land.” 

Friends and family members reconnect at the Kaska annual general assembly in Lower Post, B.C., which brings together people from three far-flung B.C. Kaska Dena nations. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

To that end, the topic of much discussion is a proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area that would stretch roughly, tip to tail, from Lower Post to Fort Ware, tilted slightly sideways like a jigsaw puzzle piece.

At 40,000 square kilometres, the new conservancy would be larger than Vancouver Island. You could knit together Jasper, Yoho, Banff and Kootenay parks and still have only about one-half the area the Kaska propose for conservation.

The Kaska Dena say the plan is necessary to protect nature and preserve their way of life at a time when Indigenous cultures across the globe are threatened with extinction and when, every two weeks, somewhere on the planet, another language winks out. 

Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

‘Mother Earth is taking a beating’

The conservancy’s first priority, according to the Kaska’s conservation analysis, would be to maintain healthy functioning ecosystems in the boreal forest, a carbon sink known as the northern lungs of the world. 

Van Somer points to a report just released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which highlights a pressing need to restore and preserve forests amidst the worsening climate crisis.

“Mother Earth is taking a beating and there are certain areas that you have to look after,” he says.

As the world’s Sixth Mass Extinction shrinks plant and animal kingdoms, and scientists worldwide warn of a biodiversity crisis and potential ecological collapse, the full suite of wildlife that populated the proposed Kaska conservancy area after the last Ice Age is still found today in relative abundance.

That rich assemblage includes some of B.C.’s healthiest caribou herds, genetically distinct clusters of Stone’s sheep, mountain goats, moose, grizzly bears, orchestras of migratory songbirds, cranes, snowy owls and astonishingly large porcupines that frequent the banks of the Kechika River, known in Kaska as Tahdazeh’, meaning ‘long inclining river.’

A bend in the Kechika River, called Tahdazeh’ in the Kaska language, meaning ‘long inclining river.’ The area would be part of the proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A conservation-based economy would create new long-term jobs in land stewardship through an expanded Indigenous land guardians program and ecotourism ventures. 

Resource extraction, including logging and mining, would take place on the periphery of the conserved area, while current land uses such as guide outfitting and commercial trapping would be grandfathered in. 

“We want to demonstrate how you can have a conservation economy and an extractive economy side by side without losing the values,” says David Crampton, a forest ecologist who works for the Dena Keyeh Institute, a Kaska Dena non-profit agency. 

“The fact is, we’re adding jobs in areas where there were never any jobs before.”

David Crampton sits near the Liard River in Lower Post, B.C. Crampton, a forest ecologist, works for the Dena Keyeh Institute, a Kaska Dena non-profit agency. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Crampton, who previous worked for the B.C. forests ministry in the Nelson and Prince George regions, also has climate change high on his mind. 

“With such enormous biodiversity within it, it will protect and act as refugia for a large amount of plants and animals,” he says.

The Kaska Dena vision, announced in June, is quickly gaining political traction. In mid-August, the federal government confirmed it will provide $587,500 to advance the initiative, one of 67 conservation projects supported through the Canada Nature Fund, which aims to expand the country’s connected and protected areas as part of the Trudeau government’s pledge to double the amount of nature Canada protects.

Yet the proposal, backed by a number of organizations, including World Wildlife Fund and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, can only move forward with provincial government approval.

Next week, on September 10, Van Somer and two other Kaska Dena chiefs will fly to Victoria to meet with three key ministers: Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, Scott Fraser, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, and Environment Minister George Heyman. 

“We’re not taking anything away from industry or any other people,” explains Van Somer, who has lived in Fort Ware since he was 10, when his parents returned home from Prince George to run the local store.

“We’re trying to add something for the rest of the world to see. I’m hoping that they’ll listen. I’m hoping that they’ll see our goal.”  

‘A very huge impact on the way of life’

Van Somer’s plane skirts Lower Post, veering slightly to the west and crossing the Yukon border to land at the Watson Lake airport. The terminal, with displays of early northern air travel, is deserted. 

Half an hour later, travelling along the Alaska Highway in a shuttle bus, the Kwadacha contingent pulls into Lower Post, a traditional gathering place and former Hudson’s Bay post at the confluence of the clear-watered Dease and Liard rivers.

It’s also the site of a former residential school, widely regarded as one of the most abusive institutions in the system, where thousands of children from B.C. and Yukon First Nations were sent and stripped of their identities, including many Kaska Dena children.

The silty Kechika River flows into the crystalline Liard River, creating a colourful contrast near the northern boundary of the proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Tanya Ball’s mother was sent to the school at the age of six, where she was punished if she spoke Kaska. Today, Ball, a Lower Post resident who runs the Kaska land guardians program, is learning the Kaska names of trees, rivers, weather and wildlife from a traditional knowledge holder who advises the guardians. 

“My mum did speak it when she was little,” says Ball, who plans to take a course in Kaska at a Yukon community college. 

“My grandma spoke it fluently but she’s passed. After the generation of my parents it was really lost, and of the elders who speak it fluently there’s very few of them left.”

Now the guardians are incorporating Kaska into their land use surveys, so they “will start using the Kaska language and hopefully pass on that knowledge to other people,” Ball explains. 

The guardians, who monitor land use, build relationships with hunters and use traditional knowledge and science to keep tabs on everything from wildlife health to water quality, would be integral to the new conservancy.

Kaska traditional territory stretches into today’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, covering about one-tenth of what is now B.C. Decades ago, the federal government artificially separated the Kaska, a self-governing people with their own laws, into four Indian Act bands in three jurisdictions. They’ve lost big pieces of their territory ever since. 

In the late 1960s, with no consultation or warning, the W.A.C. Bennett dam on the Peace River inundated an area 15 times the size of the city of Vancouver. It eradicated traditional Kaska trails, meeting spots, burial places, spiritual and cultural sites and the rivers that tied people to family, friends and other communities. The water rose so quickly that some families lost everything they had, including tools like hide scrapers that had been passed down from generation to generation.

“Williston Lake cut off a lot of the river access,” explains Van Somer, whose father was a river freighter and, later, a tugboat captain.

“That was our highway … There was no way to cross that lake. The trails were gone because the trails were all by the waterways. It’s a huge body of water [that had] a very, very huge impact on the way of life.” 

With trails and rivers gone, Fort Ware, about 65 kilometres north of the Williston reservoir, was secluded from the rest of the world until a logging road arrived in the community in the late 1970s. 

Today the unpaved road remains the only land access to the community of close to 400 people, which Van Somer describes as “one of the most picturesque communities in North America.” To get to the general assembly, Kwadacha elders who don’t want to fly travel along the logging road for 10 hours in the nation’s distinctive white bus, the first leg in their three-day journey. 

Another flight on the Beech 1900, emblazoned with the Kwadacha crest in a partnership with Caribou Air, brings more Fort Ware residents of every age to the gathering, while Dease River First Nation members drive from Good Hope Lake, two hours to the south.

The general assembly, hosted by a different community each year, is an opportunity to renew friendships and visit with extended family members over meals that include traditional dishes such as moose stew and moose roasts cooked over a campfire, and to discuss pressing matters like the Kaska’s proposed protected area. 

“It will never be like back in the day of our ancestors,” says Van Somer, whose mother was born on a trapline south of Fort Ware. 

But keeping the cultural and spiritual core of Kaska traditional territory “as pristine as we can” is a top priority for the community, he says, to have “something we can be proud of, something that this generation kept at, without looting it.” 

Ancestral trails a key feature of proposed conservancy

Long ago, Van Somer’s relatives used to travel north by foot, along a 300-kilometre trail through the Rocky Mountain Trench known as Atse Dena Tunna, meaning path of the ancient ones. The path, thought to have been one of the great migration corridors southward thousands of years ago, links Lower Post to Fort Ware, and is popularly called the Davie Trail.

The new protected area would revitalize ancestral trails like the Atse Dena Tunna, the centrepiece in a network of trails that criss-cross Kaska traditional territory. Many follow rivers like the Kechika, a silty, 230-kilometre river that begins as a trickle in the Cassiar Mountains, weaving its way through forests of spruce and pine to join the Liard River near the northern boundary of the proposed conservancy. 

Anthropologist Gillian Staveley, a Kaska Dena member, pauses for a moment at a waterfall near the Kechika River. The peaceful spot, near a mineral lick that attracts big game, has been frequented by the Kaska Dena people for millennia. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Plans are already afoot to start clearing at each end of the Davie Trail, meeting in the middle, creating jobs based in Fort Ware and Lower Post.

Anthropologist Gillian Staveley, a Kaska Dena member, describes the Davie Trail as a historic connection among far-flung Kaska communities of the Northern Rockies.

“Coming on the trail from the Finlay River and over Sifton Pass, to the north, the landscape opens up to expose the beautiful and mystic Kechika River Valley — the heart of the Kaska Dena territory in British Columbia,” Staveley tells The Narwhal. “It’s a very special place.” 

The Davie trail branches west into the McDame Trail, in the direction of the Stikine watershed and the Tahltan First Nation, with whom the Kaska traded the coveted goat skin pants they stitched for salmon and obsidian from Mount Edziza.

“It’s a well-established trail, it’s not just a little way-finding wildlife trail through the forest,” Staveley says of Atse Dena Tunna. “It was used heavily. Even the Northwest Mounted Police used it at some point.”

The Kaska are also working with a consultant on an ecotourism business plan that would create opportunities for their members, “who are naturally outdoors people anyway,” Van Somer points out. Some will train as outfitters to “show people the land, tour them around, guide them.”  

‘One of the last best places on the planet’

Conservation scientist John Weaver calls the region that includes the proposed Kaska conservation area “one of the last best places on the planet.”

“The unrelenting expansion and development of industrial activities impacts more and more areas, so there are fewer and fewer intact areas — especially large intact areas — left,” Weaver says in an interview. 

A recent report Weaver authored examines the Greater Muskwa-Kechika area, which the scientist says is no less important ecologically than the renowned Great Bear Rainforest on the north coast, touted by the provincial government as B.C.’s “gift to the world.” 

Weaver’s report, for the Canada’s Wildlife Conservation Society, found more than 98 per cent of the Greater Muskwa-Kechika is still intact, “a very rare thing in today’s world,” he notes. 

That means predator-prey relationships — such as between wolves and caribou — are largely undisturbed.

As B.C. caribou herds to the south shrink and disappear — with two more herds becoming locally extinct this year — seven caribou herds in the proposed conservancy area are faring much better by comparison. 

Without roads and other linear disturbances creating de facto highways for wolves, caribou, which have evolved over millions of years to spread out on vast landscapes, still stand a chance.

A mineral lick along the Kechika River in part of the area proposed for a Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. The conservancy is home to the full suite of animals that populated the area after the last Ice Age, including healthy caribou herds. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Herds in the proposed Kaska protected area have suffered declines but not nearly to the same extent as caribou further to the south, avoiding costly multi-million dollar penning experiments where pregnant caribou cows are captured and fed lichen hand-picked by volunteers while wolves are shot from helicopters.

The Rabbit herd, whose range would be almost entirely preserved in the proposed Kaska conservancy, was estimated at 1,000 animals in 2018. That could be a wildlife spectacle in today’s industrialized B.C., which holds the dubious distinction of having more species vulnerable to extinction than anywhere else in Canada, and no provincial law to protect them.  

“Caribou from my perspective are almost sacred,” says Danny Case, a bespectacled former logger who chairs the Kaska Dena Council, a society formed in the early 1980s to promote and protect Kaska Dena Indigenous rights and title.

“They’re wanderers of the land, very much like our people.”

The Kaska conservancy would provide the roadless, unlogged and unmined areas that caribou need, from mountain slopes to valley bottoms. “That’s critical, that’s absolutely critical,” Case says.

Danny Case is a former logger who chairs the Kaska Dena Council, a society formed in the early 1980s to promote and protect Kaska Dena Indigenous rights. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

It would also provide connectivity to 14 adjacent provincial protected areas, including the Ne’āh’ Conservancy to the west, tucked between the Cassiar Mountains and the Liard Plains, and the Northern Rocky Mountains Park to the east. 

The Kaska envision a place where people interested in adventure tourism can see the world as it once was, before the juggernaut of industrial development advanced into the far reaches of the globe. 

“It’s critically important to Indigenous peoples, the Kaska in particular, but I think more so to the planet,” says Case, who believes the conservancy would become world-renowned. 

Large landscapes will help wildlife adapt to climate change

Weaver, a scientist for almost 50 years, says large intact landscapes like the Kaska proposal offer the best chance for maintaining resilient ecosystems in an age of global warming, heading into “this very uncertain future of climate upheaval.” 

The diverse topography in the proposed Kaska protected area, from the snowy Rocky and Cassiar Mountains to the surprisingly warm Kechika River valley, gives plants and animals “options for the future, for moving around and shifting and finding their new habitat conditions,” Weaver says. 

“If they can do that in a very connected landscape so much the better.” 

Rivers like the Kechika provide climate adaptation ramps, Weaver says, offering “natural pathways that animals will likely follow as they try to get away from the heat and find cooler conditions.”

As the Arctic warms at a rate far faster than the global average, Weaver says some of North America’s most likely refugia for plant and animal species will be found in the B.C. and Yukon mountains.

“From that big scale, the M-K [Muskwa-Kechika] is well-positioned to serve as a refuge.”

The Muskwa-Kechika is named after two of the unfettered rivers that flow through its valleys (in Kaska, Muskwa means bear). 

In 1998, the B.C. government designated the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, an area roughly the size of Nova Scotia, designed to protect key areas while allowing limited resource development in others. 

Protected areas — seven in all — cover just over one-quarter of the management area, while the rest is potentially open to resource development. Even an area called a “Special Wildlife Zone” allows potential mineral and oil and gas exploration, Weaver notes. 

He says the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area was visionary for its time. But that was before climate change became a global emergency and science showed that existing protected areas are not large enough or connected enough for wide-ranging species, like grizzly bears and caribou, or for the seasonal movements of species, either now or in response to what Weaver calls “climate heating.” 

The management area also does not protect the headwaters of rivers that flow through the greater Muskwa-Kechika and the proposed Kaska conservancy, Weaver says.

“Water is so critically important to all of us,” says Case, “and it’s critically important to us as a people.”

 “It’s our blood.”

A sign on the road leading to Lower Post, B.C., near the Yukon border. Lower Post is the home of the Daylu Dena Council, representing one of three Kaska First Nations in B.C. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Boundaries designed to minimize potential conflict 

According to Crampton, the boundaries of the proposed Kaska protected area have been strategically designed to avoid or minimize potential conflict with extractive industries such as mining, forestry and oil and gas. 

There are no active forestry tenures in the proposed protected area, and forestry tenures on its periphery are exclusively Kaska-controlled, he notes. 

Three First Nations woodlot licences will provide jobs in sustainable forestry, demonstrating “how you can have a conservation economy and an extractive economy side by side without losing the values,” says Crampton. He was first hired by the Kaska in 1993 to respond to proposed forestry activities around Fort Ware and kept working for them, drawn by their land stewardship ethic.

“We have areas where we can do some work, make some money, in a way that is actually looking after the environment,” Crampton says in a presentation at the outdoor assembly.

“There is an opportunity for work, and there’s also a core area where we can retain the spiritual and cultural integrity of the people.” 

Shale gas deposits in the Liard Basin are also outside the proposed protected area, as are active mineral tenures. 

Two active mine tenures, in the southern end of the proposed protected area, are a notable exception. The dominant tenure is held by ZincX Resources, a company that provides jobs for Kaska members in operations south of the proposed protected area, and the Kaska are meeting with ZincX executives to “find a negotiated agreement,” Crampton says. 

Mining giant Teck Resources holds the second active tenure, for lead-zinc development. Reached by The Narwhal, Teck’s public relations manager Chris Stannell said the company has not yet been contacted by the Kaska Dena about a conservation area “and would be open to discussions about their proposed plans.”

For Case, the area proposed for protection keeps him physically and spiritually alive, helping to maintain connections among Kaska families and community members. 

“It’s so critically important for our people in today’s world that we stick together, that we do our best to maintain our ability to grow together, and to take a lot of what’s happened in the past and allow for forgiveness to a degree, to be able to live in a certain amount of peace,” Case says.

“This particular opportunity provides something that has been the largest question for all our people — how are we going to protect our land? How are we going to protect what we hold dear, what our ancestors held dear? It really means a lot.”

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