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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It’s a sweltering 35 degrees as I pull up to a trailer housing the W.A.C. Bennett Dam visitor centre just outside Hudson’s Hope, 100 kilometres west of Fort St. John.

I’m here to see B.C.’s largest hydro dam first-hand. Damming the Peace River is back in the news this fall as the provincial and federal governments make up their minds about the Site C dam, which would be the third dam on this river.

I’m handed a fluorescent safety vest and am ushered on to a bus along with about 10 others.

Completed in 1967, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam is one of the world's largest earthfill structures, stretching two kilometres across the head of the Peace Canyon and creating B.C.’s largest body of freshwater, the Williston Reservoir. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

Two peppy young women are our guides today. They inform us we’ll be heading more than 150 metres underground into the dam’s powerhouse and manifold.

At the front of our tour bus, pictures of wildlife — grizzlies, lynx, moose, elk — are taped above the driver’s seat. Our guides enthusiastically tell us how 11 of 19 of North America’s big game species live around the dam.

My mind can’t help but wander to a paragraph I read in the joint review panel’s report on the Site C dam, released in May. It appeared on page 307 in a section titled “Panel’s Reflections.”

“A few decades hence, when inflation has worked its eroding way on cost, Site C could appear as a wonderful gift from the ancestors of that future society, just as B.C. consumers today thank the dam-builders of the 1960s. Today’s distant beneficiaries do not remember the Finlay, Parsnip, and pristine Peace Rivers, or the wildlife that once filled the Rocky Mountain Trench. Site C would seem cheap, one day. But the project would be accompanied by significant environmental and social costs, and the costs would not be borne by those who benefit,” the report read.

It’s a poignant moment of pause in a report that doesn’t provide a clear yes or no on whether the 1,100-megawatt dam should be built due to a lack of clear demand for the power, concerns about costs and considerable environmental and social costs.

The panel found risks to fish and wildlife include harmful and irreversible effects on migratory birds and species such as the western toad and short-eared owl. Given the severe effects of dam-building on wildlife, I find the pictures at the front of our tour bus a tad incongruous.

Underground, we’re kitted out with hardhats before entering the powerhouse. It’s as long as three football fields and has the dimensions of the Titanic. This dam can produce up to 2,855 megawatts of power — more than double that of the proposed Site C dam.

Just downstream, another dam — the Peace Canyon dam — produces another 700 megawatts of power. Combined, these two dams provide B.C. with one-third of its power.

Aside from already being home to two megadams, the Peace Country’s landscape is dotted with 16,267 oil and gas well sites and 8,517 petroleum and natural gas facilities, according to a 2013 report, Passages from the Peace, by the David Suzuki Foundation and Global Forest Watch.

“The Peace River region has been and is currently undergoing enormous stress from resource development,” read the joint review panel’s report on Site C.

Rancher Leigh Summer knows that stress firsthand. He was just 14 years old when his family’s ranch was flooded by the W.A.C. Bennett dam. Now Summer has three young children and his life could be disrupted again, this time by the Site C dam that would flood the last intact part of the Peace River. 

“The Peace River in British Columbia has paid her price for prosperity,” Summer says. “Why can’t we leave a piece of the Peace intact for future generations? Let them have a choice. If we flood it, we take that choice away from them, from ever seeing what the Peace River was like.”

If built, the Site C dam would flood 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries. BC Hydro says the power is needed to meet growing energy demand, but the joint review panel found that the crown corporation hadn’t proven the need for the Site C dam in the immediate future and has not adequately explored alternatives, such as geothermal.

Although BC Hydro has predicted power demand will balloon 40 per cent over the next 20 years, its 2014 financial reports show demand for power has remained relatively static since 2007.

“Justification must rest on an unambiguous need for the power and analyses showing its financial costs being sufficiently attractive as to make tolerable the bearing of substantial environmental, social and other costs,” the joint review panel wrote.

The Site C dam “would result in significant cumulative effects on fish, vegetation and ecological communities, wildlife,” they added.

“This is one of the last intact mountain ecosystems on the planet,” says Sarah Cox, senior conservation program manager for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “Site C will make a major contribution toward severing that Rocky mountain chain that goes all the way from Yellowstone to Yukon.”

The Peace River is the only river to break the barrier of the Rocky Mountains between the Yukon south almost to Mexico.

“The science shows that vulnerable species like grizzly, wolverine and lynx will be greatly impacted to the extent that populations may not be recoverable,” Cox says.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has joined forces with Sierra Club BC and the Peace Valley Environment Association to launch StopSiteC.org, dedicated to collecting petition signatures against the dam.

Although this fall is a crucial moment in the battle against Site C, it’s just one of many high-stakes moments in what has been a decades-long battle for residents of the Peace Valley.

“I’ve been living with it for 40 years. My hair went grey the first time around,” jokes Gwen Johansson, mayor of the District of Hudson's Hope. “That shadow has hung over the valley for a very long time.”

Gwen Johansson, a retired school teacher, lives on the banks of the Peace River near Hudson's Hope. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

A flood impact sign on Gwen Johansson's gate shows how high the waters of the Site C reservoir would rise. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

Johansson has lived in her house on the banks of the Peace River since 1975. In 1982, the Site C dam was postponed indefinitely after a review by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

“They said that Hydro had not proven the need for it and, if there was need, they hadn’t proven that this was the best way to get the power,” Johansson says.

“This time they’re going to make sure that nobody gets to examine these questions,” she added, referring to the province's decision to exempt the project from review by the independent regulator (the B.C. Utilities Commission) this time around.

Johansson has been part of a chorus of voices calling on the province to listen to the joint review panel’s recommendation to refer the project to the B.C. Utilities Commission for more in-depth analysis of costs and alternatives.

“It’s almost as though they worry that if they don’t get it done right away they won’t be able to do it,” the retired teacher says.

This week, Johansson was at a press conference in Vancouver trying to get the attention of the media and British Columbians. She brought Peace Valley watermelon, cantaloupe and honey for the crowd.  

One of the biggest obstacles for those in the Peace Valley is that their area — a 14-hour drive from Vancouver — is out of sight, out of mind for the majority of British Columbians. 

“If the decision-makers have to look out the window at the consequences of their decisions, they have to think harder about their decisions,” Johansson says.

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.