Above photo: Kasandra Turbide, Saik’uz First Nation’s resource manager, stands in front of one of the territory’s last intact, unlogged forests beside Sinkut Mountain near Vanderhoof, BC. Zoë Yunker/The Tyee.
BC turned a blind eye to the mounting harms of development.
The Saik’uz are acting before it’s too late.
Kasandra Turbide finds her footing on the dry, rocky exterior of Sinkut Mountain, one of the highest peaks in Saik’uz First Nation territory, an hour’s drive west of Prince George. The forest below looks mottled, as if it has been gouged by giant razor blades and painted in shades of yellow and green.
“This is what we’ve been up against historically,” says Turbide. “And it’s what we’re trying to save.”
Located in the saucer-plate indent of the Nechako Plateau, Saik’uz territory is home to one of B.C.’s few truly wide-open skies. Lumbering glaciers etched its sloping hills millions of years ago, forming fertile valleys threaded with rivers, lakes and wetlands.
More recently, the territory became an easy-access buffet for the farming, mining and logging that gripped the region. And now, after a century of persistent development, many of its ecosystems risk collapse.
The Saik’uz First Nation spent decades warning the provincial government that things on the land were going awry.
Finally, the wheels of change began to turn.
“We started getting really serious about the damage and devastation that was done in our territory,” says Saik’uz Chief Priscilla Mueller.
The nation began compiling information from their monitoring program on the ground and from the province’s inventories. The results confirmed members’ long-held fears: moose in the territory are disappearing, critical previously unlogged forests have been almost entirely logged, and lakes and water bodies are toxic.
“It’s very dire, the state of the territory,” says Mueller. “It’s actually devastated.”
The damage isn’t the result of any one impact or industry. Rather, it’s from cumulative impacts — the layered, compounding effects of development.
Throughout its history, B.C.’s successive provincial governments have managed the land in silos, doling out permits to forests, water and farming fields one by one. B.C. has found little reason to assess the big-picture effects of its development.
In the absence of adequate information about the state of the territory’s ecosystems, Saik’uz First Nation Coun. Jasmine Thomas has seen the finger of blame for the industry’s collapse pointed at her nation. “They’re not hearing about the state of the forest — the state of the territory,” she says. “It often seems that the onus is put on us.”
So the Saik’uz First Nation, like a growing number of nations across the province, is taking matters into its own hands, documenting the damage its territory has sustained and launching a plan to bring it back to life.
A liquid memory of the land’s changes
Quiet waves lap up against dead seagrass on the shore of Poison Bay, a box-shaped indent on the eastern side of Nulki Lake. Afternoon light shines through the soupy water, revealing a deep vegetal green.
“Decaying nutrients,” says Turbide. “You can smell it.”
Nulki and its neighbouring lake Tachick are among the territory’s biggest water bodies, linked together by a creek that runs through Saik’uz’s largest reserve.
Together, the two lakes keep a liquid memory of the land’s changes.
For millennia, Saik’uz’s ancestors lived on the land, managing and guiding its use.
Then, just over a century ago, settlers descended on the region, riding the newly minted railway to the town that would become Vanderhoof, at the northern end of the territory. The provincial government divided the territory into chunks and offered the land to any settler family committed to “improving” it by clearing it of trees and turning it into crops. The Saik’uz First Nation, meanwhile, was forced onto a few small reserves. Even those were occasionally encroached on when they overlapped settlers’ desires for more land.
Then, in a bid to jump-start a postwar economy in the 1950s, B.C. dammed the headwaters of the Nechako River to power an aluminum smelter west of the territory. Farmers dragged gravel from the newly parched riverbeds to nearby wetlands, turning them into farms. The surviving creeks and rivers began to siphon runoff from manure and chemical fertilizers into the lakes downstream.
The dam’s construction also triggered the building of Kenney Dam Road, which sliced through the middle of Saik’uz land and “really opened up the territory to forestry,” Turbide says.
B.C. issued replaceable licences that allowed companies to log, basically, in perpetuity, and that activity, too, found its way to the lakes, thanks to runoff from cutblocks freshly shaved of their once hardy stock of natural filters.
“Basically, the lake will become sort of a phosphorus battery,” says Ray Klingspohn, chair of the Nulki-Tachick Lakes Stewardship Society.
This “battery” — thick, nutrient-dense sludge that pools below Nulki and Tachick’s shallow lake bottoms — can trigger toxic plumes of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, and when that happens, Klingspohn says, it’s best to avoid touching the lakes with bare hands.
The nutrients also serve as fertilizer for long, underwater weeds that suck up oxygen, sometimes asphyxiating the fish that remain.
It wasn’t always this way. Turbide remembers the long days of her childhood, watching her cousin catch trout from the creek with his hands.
“The water was so clear you could see them,” she says.
B.C.’s archives document Saik’uz’s attempts to ring the alarm.
“The lake is now green,” noted a government official over two decades ago, recording the nation’s concerns raised during a consultation meeting on another issue. No followup was recorded.
Notes from these kinds of interactions were Turbide’s first up-close introduction to B.C.’s resource management approach and its newfound legal obligations to consult First Nations before permitting extraction on their territory.
One by one, the province consulted the nation on each incursion. Sometimes it allowed for slight modifications to its plans; other times, it ignored their asks altogether.
Meanwhile, the combined impacts of its development remained a mystery the province refused to address.
That is, until the pipelines came around.
For Turbide, it was the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have transported bitumen through Saik’uz territory, that spurred her to work with Saik’uz administration in the first place.
She watched former Saik’uz Chief Jackie Thomas and Coun. Jasmine Thomas help lead a coalition of nations and non-Indigenous people resisting the pipeline.
“I was inspired,” Turbide says of the movement that ultimately led to the pipeline’s cancellation. Shortly thereafter she enrolled in environmental studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. She took a co-op placement in the Saik’uz resource department in 2017.
By that time, new pipeline proposals were on the table — B.C.’s bid to pipe fossil fuels through the territory had returned as a slate of gas lines meant to supply the new LNG-fuelled economy promised by former premier Christy Clark. But legal troubles were on the horizon. Two Carrier Sekani nations, the Nadleh Whut’en and Nak’azdli, filed for a judicial review of the province’s speedy approval of one of the pipelines, the Coastal GasLink.
With the stinging defeat of the Northern Gateway pipeline in recent memory, B.C. made a deal: in exchange for their participation in environmental assessment processes for the gas pipelines, signatory nations along the route, including Saik’uz First Nation, would have a bigger say in the process, and B.C. would finally agree to look at the combined impacts of a century’s worth of development on their lands.
After decades of siloed land management, the province was hitting a legal wall: the Blueberry River First Nations had just filed a notice of civil claim alleging that the cumulative effects of development authorized by the province infringed on their treaty rights — a case they would go on to win six years later, the first such ruling in Canada.
In an effort to meet the sea change ahead, B.C. launched a new process called the cumulative effects framework to assess layered impacts. It would begin where the economic stakes were high: along the gas pipeline routes in northern B.C. The process would be called the Environmental Stewardship Initiative, or “LNG ESI” for short.
With the initiative launched in Carrier Sekani territories, the nations got to work. They contracted scientist Karen Price and forester Dave Daust to use provincial data to assess their territory’s ecological risk, and they launched a monitoring program to develop their own, on-the-ground information from the territories.
By the time Turbide took her role at the helm of the Saik’uz resource office in the summer of 2018, the results were coming in.
The land’s vital organs
To understand Saik’uz territory, imagine an earthworm.
Green thumbs may be familiar with the invertebrate’s tendency to survive after being cleaved apart by an inadvertently placed shovel. Worms pull this off by distributing vital organs throughout their segmented body, along with brain-like nerve centres enabling them to regenerate truncated parts.
Like worms, ecosystems can also resurrect themselves, stashing vital parts like rivers, old forests and diverse species across vast tracts of land — a complex natural insurance system should something somewhere go awry.
But even ecosystems and earthworms have their limits.
Because of the combined impacts of development, most of Saik’uz territory’s forested ecosystems, for example, have much less old forest than they would have had naturally, putting them at moderate and high risk of losing their core functions.
The province’s response to the pine beetle infestation only intensified the situation: while B.C. raised logging quotas with the goal of curbing the spread of the pine beetle, companies often targeted healthy old-growth spruce forests instead of diseased trees.
As a result, old forest in three spruce subzones have been left with less than a quarter of what they need to maintain a functioning ecosystem.
“It’s been really hammered,” says Daust.
Other disturbance types compounded the issues.
Around 90 per cent of Saik’uz’s territory is in old forest within 100 metres from a road. This is dangerous for animals like moose, whose predators use logging roads like superhighways to pick off their prey. Only two per cent of the territory provides secure, suitable moose habitat. Consequently, moose populations fell around 75 per cent between 2005 and 2015.
And moose are just one example. Less than 20 per cent of the territory still provides good habitat for grizzly bears.
The Carrier Sekani’s research has also tracked the cumulative impacts of development on watersheds, finding that many of Saik’uz’s fish and stream habitats are also at high risk.
Saik’uz guardian Erik Johnny-Martin struggled to cope with the grim diagnosis.
“I’d go to work and I’d sit there on the land and fucking cry,” Johnny-Martin says. “I’m like, ‘There’s nothing left. What are we fighting for?’”
Johnny-Martin took some time off, spending a few weeks camping and hunting in the unlogged forests that remained. Eventually, he returned to his job.
There was, after all, still work to do.
What’s left to fight for
On a warm Friday morning, Saik’uz Coun. Rodney Teed, Saik’uz’s inaugural monitor James Thomas and Johnny-Martin are standing on a logging road in the centre of the territory, looking into an uncommonly dark forest across the ditch.
Soon, after navigating through blowdown and across some parched yellow mosses, they’re standing in a tiny oasis of unlogged forest, surrounded by a desert of clearcuts and planted forests.
A few big spruce trees sport char-dusted bark. There was a fire here just over a century ago and the next generation of thinner trees have sprung up around it, resulting in a bright airy forest and an understorey bursting with life.
“Generations of burning and regenerating itself,” Johnny-Martin says of the forest that’s taken its setbacks in stride.
In this kitchen-sized patch of land, Johnny-Martin finds a grizzly skull, moose tracks and the hobbit-hole entrance of a wolverine’s den. The territory’s wildlife seems to be holed up here, waiting for their luck to improve.
For a territory as damaged as Saik’uz, these scattered tracts of unlogged forests act like a lifeline for biodiversity surviving through less-than-ideal times. They also act as a living record of the ecosystems replaced by crops and planted pine trees — handy for the restoration work ahead.
But there was a problem: while the Environmental Stewardship Initiative would identify critical areas, the province hadn’t committed to protect them. Nations pushed back, and the province eventually agreed to ask companies to voluntarily stay away.
In Saik’uz territory, some of those areas continued to get logged. Giants like Canfor, the biggest licensee in the area, simply refused to comply.
Canfor did not respond to The Tyee’s request for comment.
Saik’uz tried to negotiate, calling for companies to leave more critical areas and habitat trees out of their cutblocks, and to stop logging up to the edge of small streams.
“They didn’t do it,” says Thomas.
In October 2021, the nation announced that logging in their territory would proceed only with its consent.
The nation needed enough of the territory’s vital organs to carry out the next big step — helping the land begin to heal.
Returning to Saik’uz land management
Luckily, Saik’uz are no stranger to their territory’s needs.
For millennia, the nation practised a complex system of land management, shaped and organized along matrilineal family clan lines. Families moved across their keyoh — “home” in the Carrier language — throughout the seasons, ensuring a consistent watch over the territory.
The land’s resilience was a matter of survival, and leaders were tasked with the honoured role of observing the land and its changes. They would relay their findings during the Balhats, or potlatch, the nation’s central political, social and spiritual institution, and Saik’uz families would adapt their resource use accordingly.
“That’s how we managed the land,” says Saik’uz Coun. Rodney Teed.
B.C. did what it could to dismantle Saik’uz’s management. It criminalized the Balhats and sent Saik’uz children to residential schools where they were banned from speaking their Carrier language.
Damaged but not destroyed, Saik’uz’s management traditions persisted, kept alive through acts large and small.
When Teed spoke with The Tyee by phone this fall, for example, he’d just returned from his keyoh’s fish camp upriver from the winter village of Chinlac, where around 10,000 Carrier people used to gather before smallpox came.
“Sometimes it’s empty nets you pull out,” Teed says, but he comes anyway, often camping out for weeks. This year, he reinforced the outdoor kitchen, keeping it sturdy and stocked for the year to come. When he’s there, he visits with family that joins and he keeps watch.
This year, the river was the lowest he’s seen yet.
As Saik’uz territory heaves under the strain of decades of colonial government management, the nation is ready to bring its own management system, which takes the view from up high, back.
“For us the goal is to make a plan for our territory,” says Turbide. “Not looking at it cutblock by cutblock but looking at the whole system.”
That includes Saik’uz community members, says Turbide, whose well-being has long been linked to the health of the land.
“In order to heal ourselves and our community from all of the things that happened, we need a healthy land base to do it.”
Healing the territory
Turbide’s office sits in the corner of a bright, wide-open room with a big table in the middle. One wall is pinned with a series of colour-coded maps showing things like water licences, logging tenures and guide outfitter areas — a cacophony of clamouring demands acclimatized to the rewards of a long-bountiful landscape.
They’re a reminder of the magnitude of Saik’uz’s current task: to figure out how much more extraction the landscape can handle, and where, and to bring hemorrhaging vital organs back from the brink.
Sometimes that will mean identifying the last intact parts and making sure they stay that way. Sometimes it will require setting aside damaged areas to heal on their own.
And sometimes, their work will take a more interventionist approach.
In the southern reaches of the territory, a research project led by University of Northern British Columbia adjunct professor Jeff Werner is experimenting with different ways of breaking through the thick, lifeless planted forests to bring moose populations back. There, the deep scars of logging roads are softened and soothed by remedial efforts by excavators and fallen trees. If all goes well, the forest might be a welcoming home for animals again.
Elsewhere, the nation is investigating ways to revive wetlands, for example by creating beaver dam-esque pileups of debris.
Down at the lake, the nation has partnered with the Nulki-Tachick Lakes Stewardship Society to buy a giant, underwater weed whacker to bring nutrient buildup under control.
But these efforts have limits. A recent study in the journal Nature quantified the hefty toll of “recovery debt” — the concept that environmental degradation can exact withdrawals even after restoration efforts have begun.
“Nobody should be living under the misapprehension that we’re going to take a damaged ecosystem and return it to its former glory,” Werner says during a talk about the restoration project at the University of Northern British Columbia.
But Saik’uz First Nation is hopeful that these efforts, combined with a system to protect its territory’s still-intact organs, can give it a fighting chance.
“All of the cumulative effects,” says Turbide. “We’re trying to address them one by one.”
Realizing Saik’uz’s land-use plan is another question. There is currently no well-trodden path for Saik’uz to have its land jurisdiction recognized by the province outside of litigation.
So far, B.C. has launched a forest-specific planning process called forest landscape planning, but there, too, the process is limited by government-crafted silos: it addresses only forestry and isn’t equipped to address the overlapping impacts of development or to set areas aside from development long-term.
Turbide is interested in another option, a new legal tool legislated through B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, that would enable nations to co-develop their land management system and land-use plan with the province.
“That is really the crux of where Indigenous law and western law can meet and make decisions as to our rights,” says Turbide.
In the meantime, Saik’uz’s plan waits in a tenuous in-between state: Canfor still hold permits to cut many of the nation’s last unlogged forests, and the province has made only a verbal commitment to the nation to ensure they’re put aside.
Last fall, Canfor closed the region’s biggest mill, Plateau, causing economic shock waves throughout the local forestry sector. Saik’uz isn’t immune to such effects: its own logging company, Tin Toh Forest Products, struggles to make ends meet without logging the territory’s bigger, more lucrative trees. Saik’uz has tried to innovate by purchasing a harvester machine equipped to do more selective logging, and Turbide says they’d like to start thinning out their planted forests, but breaking even on such endeavours remains elusive.
“We’re not against forestry in our territory,” says Chief Mueller. “But let’s do it in a sustainable way and in a collaborative way.”
This year, B.C. tasked its new forests minister, Ravi Parmar, with a target logging rate that would raise B.C.’s logging this year by around 30 per cent. Unlogged, primary forests remain the diet of choice for B.C. logging companies, meaning that the final vital organs in Saik’uz territory may still be under threat.
Continuing the work
Turbide’s truck lumbers across the steep terrain of Sinkut Mountain as we descend.
Our bird’s-eye view is gone, replaced with a close-up montage of forests, farms and roads. Turbide parks her truck at the lakeside, and we walk along the shore pointing back towards town.
On the lakeshore, a cottony thistle plant catches the wind. It’s an invasive plant, Turbide tells me — another symptom of an ecosystem under strain.
Turbide pitched some ideas to tackle invasive species at the nation’s last annual general meeting.
“I was like, ‘I heard goats can manage invasive species. Do you guys want to get goats?’” she says. “They were just laughing at me.”
Turbide says Saik’uz’s long history of persistence makes the road ahead feel possible.
“Although things can always get better, they’re much better for me now in my generation than they were for them,” she says. “I get to benefit and continue the work they left us.”
“There’s hope and there’s a pathway for it.”