The voice of B.C.'s organized fishing industry workers
LETTERS
The Fisherman welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should be brief.
Alaskans also question future of wild salmon
Thanks for your article in the October edition entitled Can Aquaculture Co-Exist with Wild Stock Enhancement ? You are right to ask if our children will thank us for degrading wild salmon stocks in our hurry to stop "hunting and gathering." They do deserve better.
Along with my duties as president of United Fishermen of Alaska and the Southeast Alaska Seiners, I am the vice-president of the Southern Southeast Alaska Regional Aquaculture Association.
I've wrestled with the wild stock/hatchery stock issue for some time.
I believe Alaska also needs to renew our dedication to intensive natural production of wild salmon based on research, habitat protection and sound stock management as you pointed out for your countrymen in your article.
I have long been concerned that our fishermen's effort to build large hatchery stocks will help to make our policymakers more inclined to allow habitat destruction as an acceptable alternative when considering mining, timber and other resource extraction industries.
As the price of oil falls, the pressure to compromise environmental safeguards in the name of economics increases. It gets very frustrating hammering legislatures with the economic importance of protecting our wild stock fishery.
The numbers are there, but the commitment needed to maintain these numbers weakens.
Why must we always act as if man can raise fish cheaper and better than nature with hatcheries and fish farms and then claim that the benefit of this is being able to destroy the habitat needed for wild fish? We're selling the resource to the highest bidder. Very frustrating.
Please send any available in formation from your wild salmon conference. We sure would appreciate it.
Jim Bacon,
KETCHIKAN
Help on a history book
For a dissertation on the early B.C. labour movement, I would appreciate information and documents on Robert Raglan Gosden, the Socialist Party of Canada, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
Robert Gosden was borth in the south of England circa 1881 and emigrated to Canada circa 1905. He was active in the IWW and municipal politics and may have married Lena Hassen in the 1950s.
I believe he lived in or around Horseshoe Bay at that time. Anyone with information or papers pertaining to the above subjects is asked to contact Mark Leier, History Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6.
Mark Leier, BURNABY
witnesses' opinions but the methodology they used during their research. The number of test pits dug or samples taken, the related scientific literature consulted or ignored — all come under scrutiny and question in court.
The research and opinions of Sylvia Albright came under particularly sharp attack during cross-examination by the province. She was questioned about the way information was collected and recorded in the field and about her interpretation of such features as roasting pits, cache pits and post molds.
A long series of questions focussed on Albright's assertion that the archaeological record supports the Gitksan and Wet'su-wet'en peoples' claim to have occupied the Bulkley and Skeena valleys for thousands of years.
The provincial government's lawyer suggested that because the artifacts found in the region can be identified merely as belonging to a coastal or interior culture, there is not enough evidence to prove their owners were specifically Gitksan or specifically Wet'su-wet'en.
Sites like that at Moricetown, the province said, may have been occupied by a series of different groups at different times and for varying periods.
During the initial phase of the trial, the boundaries and landmarks of traditional territories formed a key part of the testimony by hereditary chiefs and others. Many of these witnesses told the court that while they could not read "the white man's maps," they had their own, mental maps of their territories.
Those mental maps were the focus of evidence given by the first of the "expert translators" to be called, a witness who was himself a hereditary chief.
Neil J.Sterritt, former president of the Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council, was tendered as an expert at mapping Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en-named landmarks and features — a translator of mental maps.
He told the court he had spent more than 10 years working with the hereditary chiefs and others knowledgeable about the territories to gather the information that eventual ,   t-» ynr <    j ally appeared on the numerous maps that
At B. C. s longest land claims trial scientists *™ j«»     &. the
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Gitksan chief Fred Johnson is one the elders whose claim to his peoples' territory is under scrutiny in the marathon Gitksan Wet'suwef en court case.
Proof of title
are confirmirig GiiksanJVeVsuweVen claims
By DEBORAH BRAUER
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HOUSANDS of years before the Europeans arrived in North America, a hunter left his stone-tipped spear leaning against a house post in a settlement near what is now known as the Bulkley River.
In 1985, an archaeologist working in the Wet'suwet'en village of Moricetown discovered the abandoned spear point and carbon-dated the impression or post mold beside it. It was more than 4,000 years old.
These and other clues from northwestern British Columbia's past are being introduced in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver as evidence intended to support the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples' claim to 57,000 sq. kms. of land, land they say they have used, occupied, owned and exercised jurisdiction over since time immemorial.
In the 20 months that have passed since their landmark aboriginal title suit began, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en witnesses have testified about the culture, traditions and laws which underlie their claim. They have described the features and landmarks of their traditional territories and recited parts of oral histories which tell how those territories were acquired or defended.
Now the witness box has been given over to a battery of what the court calls expert witnesses and the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en themselves call expert translators — the anthropologists, geologists, archaeologists and others whose opinions place the evidence of native witnesses within a scientific context.
At least three of the six experts who have been heard thus far have given opinions which corroborate native oral histories, the Gitksan adaawk and the Wet'suwet'en kanga.
The most recent witness to testify, archaeologist Sylvia Albright, told the court she use information from oral histories in her hunt for ancestral village sites during her 1985 investigations in the Bulkley and Skeena valleys.
Albright, who began testimony Jan. 9 when the trial resumed here after a three-week adjournment, said she also referred to oral history accounts of migrations as she compared settlement patterns of both past and present to the archaeological record produced by her own research and that of other archaeologists.
Since she was successful at locating evidence of long-term occupation at four of the five ancestral sites sought, Albright told the court her findings confirmed the reliability of the oral histories.
Similarly, she said that artifacts and archaeological features such as the stone spear point and 4,000-year-old post mold point to long-term use and occupation of the area. In Moricetown, where a number of post molds were found and dated, that may be as long as 6,000 years.
Last fall, two experts gave evidence which suggest a link between a Gitksan adaawk about a supernatural grizzly bear and a landslide or other major disturbance which occurred near a lake in the Hazelton area more than 3,000 years ago.
Early on in the trial, Gitksan heredity chief Mary Johnson had told the court the Mediik adaawk, an account of the supernatural being which wreaked environmental havoc around Seeley Lake "thousands and thousands of years ago."
The adaawk describes the bear's trampling and destruction of trees and stream bed and his attack on warriors sent by their chiefs to slay him.
Testifying in October, Dr. Rolfe Mathewes, a Simon Fraser University paleo-botanist, told the court his research findings confirm that a major disturbance occurred near Seeley Lake more than 3,000 years ago.
Core samples taken from the lake bed showed a clay band that Mathewes said indicates a rapid rise in water level, as might be caused by the lake being suddenly dammed by a landslide. Radio-carbon tests on material in the band date the occurrence at between 3,300 and 3,500 years ago.
That date is similar to one arrived at by a geologist who also did research in the Seeley Lake area. Dr. Alan Gottesfeld said analysis of soil development in old landslide remains near the lake led him to conclude the lake had been dammed approximately 3,600 years ago.
Other experts have given evidence about the range and distribution of animals and plant species in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claim area as well as the effects created by the confluence of coastal, interior and northern climatic zones.
While this type of evidence has moved the trial into a new phase, it is a phase which promises to be as hard fought as was the one before it.
This is a trial in which none of the parties involved — neither the hereditary chiefs who are plaintiffs or the federal and provincial governments which are the defendants — has been willing to make many admissions.
In cross-examination, lawyers for the defendants have challenged not only the
between different drafts have sparked long and meticulous cross-examinations about territorial boundaries and locations.
The province's long cross-examination of Sterritt focussed on challenging his assertions about the integrity of mental maps and suggested that he had filled in the gaps in the chiefs' knowledge with his own assumptions.
That provincial lawyers are intent on pursuing this position was clearly evident when the trial moved to Smithers for two weeks in November.
The Smithers hearings were held in order to allow the federal and provincial defendants to cross-examine 24 of the 34 Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en chiefs and elders who have sworn affidavits describing traditional territories.
Witnesses were questioned about who was involved in the process, how information was verified, whether several drafts were involved. They were asked whether they had been presented with a finished affidavit and merely informed their territories were described.
"All my words were put on this paper," said 98-year-old Wet'suwet'en chief Johnny David speaking through an interpreter. "I spoke the truth when I instructed them on it. I did not he about it..."
The affidavit procedure was suggested by Chief Justice Allan McEachern in June of 1987 in an effort to balance his desire to speed up the trial.
Yet 20 months after it began, the trial's pace remains slow, with long examinations-in-chief followed by equally long cross-examinations, and sittings revolving around one- or two-week adjournments.
Chief Justice McEachern, who continued to hear the case despite his appointment last September as Chief Justice of the B.C. Court of Appeal, has warned lawyers that other pending aboriginal rights cases, like the Meares Island action, are moving closer to trial date.
He said that means issues raised in this action may be decided by decisions made in another suit and added, "I think that would be a tragic thing to have happen."
But the plaintiffs have more witnesses to call before the defendants open their cases. And lawyers for the federal and provincial governments have estimated the defense will take at least 18 court weeks.
Even the most optimistic of court observers now suggest that 1990 may be the most realistic estimate of when what has been called one of the most comprehensive, and controversial, land claims suits in Canada will end.
THE FISHERMAN / JANUARY 25,1989 • 5