NO SURRENDER

IN 1952, THE INDIAN AFFAIRS ATTEMPTED TO NEGOTIATE A LAND SURRENDER WITH THE CHESLATTA BAND IN NORTHERN B.C.

FORTY YEARS LATER THEY ARE ACCUSED OF RAILROADING 70 PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HOMES THROUGH DECEIT AND FORGERY.

" I do not presume we should stand in the way of a development such as proposed by

the company even though it may mean the Indians will lose two or three small reserves."

D.J. Allen, Superintendent of Reserves and Trust. Dec. 1, 1951.

"They chased us out like a bunch of coyotes."

Pat Edmund, Cheslatta band member, 1980.

George Louis remembers the day when the Indian Affairs officials showed up at Cheslatta. He was a young man at the time, in his mid-20s. Today, he remember it as one of first times men from the department had ever come to the isolated reserves around the Cheslatta-Murray Lake system in British Columbia's northern interior.

It was early in the spring of 1952. The ground was deep in mud from the melting snow and the ice on the lake was rotting. The government men had come to Cheslatta to break the news.

It was big news. Big news that, according to modern band research, had been circulating in neighboring white communities for more than three years, where officials

had been making offers on white-owned properties standing in the way of the Aluminum Company of Canada and its plan to produce the "metal of the future" in the B.C. wilderness.

The Second World War was over. Alcan was building Kitimat, then billed as the largest aluminum smelter in Canada. The aluminum project was coupled with Kemano, a plant tapping the hydro-electric power potential of the region's rivers and lakes. It was a project of fantastic proportions, a celebrated engineering miracle that would turn B.C. rivers on their heels in the service of economic development.

But for the 70 people living around Cheslatta, whose quiet economy was based around centuries of fur-trapping and the moose hunt, the news would be as fresh as it was devastating.

It would be the day that marked the start of their decline into the poverty and social problems that plague so many modern reserves. It was also the first day of a history of government dealings, that looking back now appear fraught with deceit and perhaps outright fraud.

"I was out fishing through the ice," Louis says, recalling the day the Indian Affairs officials called a community meeting to tell the Cheslatta people they had to get out of the way - now.

"I heard a sleigh coming. One guy stopped and told me there was going to be a meeting. I asked him what was happening. He said 'They're going to chase us out' They were going to flood the area. I couldn't believe it."

It was true. On April 16, 1952, most of the members assembled at the Bel-ga-tse #5 reserve to meet Robert Howe, then B.C.'s Indian agent, and a Mr. E.A. Clark. The meeting was called on short notice and members who were out on their traplines couldn't be notified. Melting snow and muddy trails made travel to the site impossible for others.

The weather was indeed bad enough to keep the officials from reaching Bel-ga-tse for several days.

It was fish that ultimately tied the fate of the Cheslatta band to the fantastic dreams of the aluminum producers and their engineers.

In 1950, the B.C. government granted rights to all of the water that flowed into northern B.C.'s Nechako River. The river was being dammed, flooding three more rivers to turn to create the 250-mile Nechako Reservoir. The reservoir drove Kemano's gigantic turbines that fed the smelter's voracious power appetite.

But damming the Nechako threatened the lives of the millions of salmon that migrated up the river every year. The federal fisheries department wanted assurances these stocks would be protected.

At the end of March, 1952, it was decided damming Murray Lake would create a small reservoir with enough water to sustain the Nechako salmon run for five years while the river filled the reservoir.

Construction on the Kenney dam began immediately but thee was one small catch. The people of Cheslatta lived on Murray Lake. Building the reservoir would flood their homes.

And so it was that Howe and Clark, along with some assistants, helicoptered into Cheslatta on a rainy April 20. They carried bags of groceries for the Natives, who were running low on food after waiting four days, ready to hear the details of how they would be forced to relocate.

"My people were called to a meeting at Cheslatta Reserve, all on short notice," Marvin Charlie, the current chief, told researchers in a 1984 interview as the band was preparing a lawsuit against the government.

"Some of my people were out trapping and they didn't attend the meeting. Most of them didn't know what the meeting was about, immediately. Not next week, not next month or next year, they were to move out now. Some of the elders refused to move for the love of their homes and land. They were herded from their land and homes."

It is clear from department records the government and aluminum officials had a difficult time convincing the Cheslatta people to surrender their homes and move to a new community at Grassy Plains, 30 miles away, even though Alcan was ready to foot the bill.

Department records claim the band was not willing to negotiate unless they were guaranteed cash compensation on a per capita basis, a monthly pension for each band member, compensation for traplines as well as the purchase of land buildings at the new site before the band members arrived. Memorandums from the period called the band's demands fantastic and unrealistic."

Making little progress with the group, the officials decided instead to approach each band member individually and find out what they wanted for their property. Privately, band members with little understanding of money or current land values estimated their personal properties at anywhere from $50 to $15,000.

The talks went nowhere for two days. But then the band had a sudden change

of heart, if Indian Affairs records are t be believed. The band voted unanimously to surrender 2,600 acres "...(and for the Indian Affairs Department) to sell to the Aluminum, company of Canada, our Cheslatta Indian reserves...for the sum of $130,000, provided that this amount is sufficient to establish our band elsewhere to our satisfaction on a comparable basis."

With the so-called deal in hand, Howe and Clark left Cheslatta grasping documents they said gave them permission to flood Cheslatta.

But community members don't remember reaching any kind of agreement, other than one might have been imposed from top down.

"The last day...they told us we're going to get $129,000, all the band." Abel Peters, who acted as translator during the meeting, recalled in a 1991 interview. "And they told us that we were going to get another $129,000...No written paper or anything. That's the way they work it. Everything was crooked. Crooked all the way. The DIA and Alcan were together. The DIA never, never stuck with us. Against us all the way."

With the so-called surrender complete, the Cheslatta people began the difficult trek to new homes at Grassy Plains. The spring that had turned their trails into muddy ruts and families could only carry the barest necessities.

The picture did not brighten once they reached Grassy Plains. Money from the government compensation did not arrive until the summer of 1953. Many families were forced to spend the first year in shacks and tents. Even then, the cash had to be spent on buying the new land.

Fearful that the Natives might return, Indian Affairs hired contractors to burn the Cheslatta communities behind the exodus. And when the hired hands balked at setting

fire to a church erected by community members in 1860, the government men grabbed

the torches and gasoline and did the job themselves.

George Louis was tending his trapline during the surrender meeting and the relocation of the Cheslatta people. When he came out from the bush two months later,

he found a ghost town. But thogh the people were gone, Cheslatta was still his home, the site of his small stone house, and he stayed for awhile - at least long enough to see

his village burned.

"I seen the helicopter come down. I went to the store and I saw smoke coming up." The smoke was from burning houses and bonfires fed by leftover blankets, tools, furniture - whatever had been left behind in the rush to move the people.

Flood waters rose around the community that spring.

Several graveyards were washed under in what is perhaps the most vivid image of the destruction. For the next three years, bones and coffins washed up on the lakeshore. The damage to the tiny cemeteries continues where the simple white grave houses tip silently in the rotting shorelines of Murray and Cheslatta Lakes.

A stone cairn stands on a small rise above what used to be the graveyard at Cheslatta's main reserve. An aluminum plaque on the monument erected by Alcan reads: "Erected to the memory of the Indian men, women and children of the Cheslatta Band, laid to rest on Reservation five, now under water. May they rest in peace."

Today, the Cheslatta people live on scattered parcels of land around Prince George. It takes a 173-mile round trip to visit all the pieces of their jigsaw reserve. The once self-sufficient band now boasts unemployment rates s of 85 per cent. Drug and alcohol abuse is prevalent and over-crowded housing is the norm. Traplines, once a major source of income, have been decimated by flooding and clear-cut logging.

The band entered specific claims negotiations in 1987, after the federal government agreed they should be reimbursed for land purchased during the relocations. The talks have not gone smoothly and the community must hold bingos, raffles and bake sales to help cover negotiating costs.

There is one final twist in the Cheslatta story that comes with findings from an ex-RCMP forgeries expert who examined the original land surrender documents.

"The Cheslatta people were taken for a ride," say