Evidence on the Adequacy of First Nations Consultation - BC Hydro ...

DRAFT REPORT: Rights and Title Interests in the Columbia Valley Transmission Project Area
5.0 CONCLUSIONS
This report has reviewed and assessed an extensive literature of both ethnographic and
ethnohistoric documentation in an effort to examine the identity of First Nations who may assert
rights and title interests to the area of the Columbia Valley Transmission Project.
Non-aboriginal fur traders first entered the Upper Columbia River region in the early 1800s
expecting to find Ktunaxa people. Their journals, correspondence and maps indicate that they
observed very few aboriginal Aboriginal people in the region, although various parties undertook
several reconnaissance trips through the area at different times of the year. In the summer of
1807, David Thompson sent his men looking for the Ktunaxa. A few days later a band had been
found and Thompson called upon their assistance to help provide for his party and for the
company horses. Building his trade depot near Toby Creek, Thompson recognized explicitly that
he was in the territory of the Ktunaxa.
Both the historical and ethnographic evidence describe the Ktunaxa practice of a semi-nomadic
subsistence quest that took them annually to a number of locations within a defined area. The
ethnographic evidence indicates that this area included hunting grounds located as far north as
Golden. It was in these most northern hunting grounds where the Kinbasket family’s oral
histories report first encountering the Ktunaxa when they, the Kinbasket, moved south, sometime
after their initial move to the Columbia River. These same traditions indicate that it had not been
the former practice either of the Kinbasket family, or member bands of the Shuswap Lake
Division, to hunt as far south as Golden, although they formerly hunted as far east as the Big
Bend and Canoe River areas, where they encountered Secwepemc people belonging to the North
Thompson band. A single historical reference to a people known as the “Snare Indians” does not
explicitly place them as far south as the Project area. The ethnic affiliation of the “Snare” people
remains an open debate.
It is possible that the Kinbasket family’s encounter with the Ktunaxa resulted when the
Secwepemc moved south (upstream) on the Columbia and the Ktunaxa moved north, both filling
a vacuum left by earlier depopulation. In 1910-1913, ethnographer James Teit put forward this
opinion when he reviewed his notes on tribal territories. Ktunaxa people he interviewed
acknowledged an earlier occupation of the area which some believed to have been “in
mythological times,” an occupation that some regarded as either non-human or non-Ktunaxa. It
is the position of the Shuswap Indian band that these people were their own direct ancestors.
Subsequent ethnographic investigations reported that one of the Ktunaxa bands had a
headquarters at Toby Creek, near where David Thompson established Kootanae House in 1807,
but this Ktunaxa band had suffered greatly from the smallpox epidemic of the early 1780s. The
available evidence indicates that the Ktunaxa used the Columbia Valley for fishing and hunting
at this time and that their use of the Columbia Valley continued.
The evidence reviewed here suggests that the Ktunaxa did not object to the Kinbasket band
establishing a settlement among them. The evidence is clear that at least by 1845, Secwepemc
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