Indigenous Guardians Of The Nuxalk

How one British Columbia First Nation is building its vision of the guardian conservation model being adopted by Indigenous Peoples across Canada.

- Julian Brave Noisecat

ON A MAY MORNING in British Columbia’s Bella Coola Valley, Clyde Tallio, a long limbed 31-year-old Nuxalk intellectual, and I walk a dirt road that gives way to a forest path up a bank from Thorsen Creek, swollen with spring melt. As we slip beneath the forest canopy, we move between worlds: from rural Western Canada to sacred Nuxalk territory. These are the lands of Tallio’s people, who are emerging as protagonists in an Indigenous epic unfolding on this unconquered expanse of Pacific coast.

Tallio calls out in his Nuxalk tongue, an endangered language with fewer than 10 fluent speakers that he spent years studying instead of attending university. He announces our presence to the animals, ancestors and spirits, clearing our path and asking for protection. We turn our bodies in a clockwise circle, the same way dancers spin before entering the dance floors of the big houses that are the spiritual hearts of Indigenous communities along the coast. Thorsen Creek, or Squmalh in Nuxalk, a tributary of the lower Bella Coola River cut into the valley by retreating Pleistocene glaciers, connects us to Nuxalk creation.

Ahead, watching us from the rainforest’s soggy verdant floor, are dozens of ancient petroglyphs etched into rocks lining the stepped trail. The glyphs, carved in stone thousands of years ago (estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000 years), date roughly to the Mid-Holocene, a period of significant ecological change that made resources like western red cedar — an essential material for building structures, wares and artworks — more abundant and accessible to coastal peoples. Tallio dates the glyphs to “the time of the fixing of the Earth.” In poetic, if not archeological terms, he might be right.