A week in paradise

Monday, July 3, 2000, in the Bella Coola Valley.

This valley is a flawless middle ground between sea and sky. It must have been this way all along the coast before these valleys were logged off or cheesed up for the tourists. I spend most of this first morning staring up at the mountains and out at the water, in slack-jawed awe of my surroundings.

My wife told me to go scout around for some food, because I'm the sociable one. So I went over to the Co-op Store. I bought some bread and meats, but couldn't find any fish (strange for a fishing town, I thought, in true city boy logic). Being the sociable one, I started talking with one of the ladies working at the Co-op. She asked me what I was doing in town, and I told her that my wife Rose was the new doctor at the hospital and that we'd be here for the summer.

"You'll recognise her when you go down there, she's the Native one who looks about 15 years old."

She smiled and said she thought it was real good that there was a Native doctor in town. So I asked my friend why, this being a grocery store, they didn't sell fish?

"You like fish?" she said. "I'll give you some."

I told her that I would buy some from her, but she just waved me off and asked me where I lived, and when I explained where the house was, she said that she would bring some fish around for me at about six o'clock.

Round about 10 o'clock, there was a knock on the door, and there was a guy standing there wanting to know if "this is where the doctor lives."

Funny, he didn't look like the Welcome Wagon . . . but after a second I realized that my friend had sent her husband to deliver a bucket filled with one giant spring salmon and two extra large tails fresh from the river. Later that night, after two hours of cutting and freezer-bagging, Rose and I agreed that even though I was, as she liked to put it, a Mohawk city boy, I still had some powerful hunter-gatherer skills. Hard to argue that with 40 lbs of spring salmon sitting in the fridge after only one day's "work."

Tuesday, July 4

Checked in at the Co-op for some tarter sauce. I'll be eating lots of "fiss" (which is the proper pronunciation) this summer.

Wednesday, July 5

I drove out to the Welcome Wagon couple's place to return the bucket. We got talking about politics, since my new friend is on the band council. He also works for Interfor, the logging company, but he doesn't depend on them, like some others do, so he's known as a bit of a troublemaker. Now he's got me interested.He told me about one time when he was falling trees and he found some CMTs (culturally modified trees), and how he told the boss about them and the boss told him to keep working. So he took his hard-hat off and said, now I'm talking to you as a band councillor and you need to go report these to the chief of the band. Good one.

Anyway, some racist loggers cut the trees down on purpose and tore them up doing it. So the band has taken legal action to shut down logging in this area for a while. They have started to negotiate a solution, he said, and it looks like maybe the company will donate the logs and some money for the band to build a new Bighouse on the reserve.

I said that if the company were really smart, they would just make him the boss and not have to worry about him being a troublemaker! He said that they already tried to get him to keep quiet once by offering him a salary position. He turned it down, but some other Native guy took the job. The white guys he works with don't like the whole idea of land claims; they're worried that the "Indians are going to get control of the valley" and that their jobs will disappear. My friend said he eases their minds by telling them that they're not going to lose their jobs, they're just going to have to start working for him! A few years from now, he'll be standing there

giving them orders. His favourite line is, "So where you moving to next?"

Some of the white guys don't find that too funny. But me and my new friends had a real good augh over that one. I dropped off the bucket, left with another fresh fish and one half-smoked.