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

DRAFT REPORT: Rights and Title Interests in the Columbia Valley Transmission Project Area
the 1999 report on the Salmon Beds site by Parks Canada archaeologist Rod Heitzmann. 76
In 1982, Claude Schaeffer also examined the then-contentious issue of an eastern origin
of the Ktunaxa. After reviewing ethnographic sources as well as fur trade records and his
own ethnographic data, Schaeffer concluded that only one band of Ktunaxa, the Michel
Prairie people from the Crowsnest Pass area, occupied the eastern foothills. He also
concluded that they suffered to the point of near extinction both at the hands of their
Blackfoot enemies and also from a 1781-1782 smallpox epidemic. It was Schaeffer’s
conclusion that:
David Thompson’s belief, apparently accepted by other and later
writers, 77 that the Kutenai were forcibly driven from the northern Plains
by the Blackfoot, seems entirely erroneous. 78
Schaeffer opined that these Michel Prairie people once occupied both sides of the
Crowsnest Pass region. Their occupation of the Plains-Plateau margins, Schaeffer noted,
preceded the appearance of the horse. The Blackfoot, according to Schaeffer’s Ktunaxa
consultants, were not resident in southwest Alberta at this time. The Michel Prairie band
wintered in the east and moved west in the spring to hunt and fish, often in company with
kinsmen from the Upper Kutenai band at Tobacco Plains. With this band, they hunted as
far north as Golden. 79
As will be reviewed in section 2.1.2 and 2.3.1, the available ethnographic data supports a
continual Ktunaxa presence in the general environs of the Columbia Valley at the time of
initial contact with Whites in the early 19 th century.
Alexander Henry the Younger, factor at the Rocky Mountain House site from 1810 to 1811,
provided information on the “Snare” people referred to by Chance and by others. These “Snare”
people are sometimes associated with a division of the Secwepemc, or Shuswap, and sometimes
associated with an Athabascan group, the Sekani. In the early 1800s, as reviewed in the present
study in more detail in section 4.2.2, these “Snare” people occupied the drainage of the North
Thompson River upstream from McLure to the headwaters of Fraser River from McBride to Tête
Jaune Cache, over to Jasper and south to the headwaters of the Athabasca River. According to
John McLeod, of the HBC, they occasionally went to the Canoe River. Alexander Henry said
76 Additional information on the regional archaeology is presented in the December 1999 archaeological
study, “Archaeological Investigations at the Salmon Beds,” prepared by Rod Heitzmann of Parks Canada. Available
online: http://www.livinglandscapes.bc.ca/cbasin/salmonbeds/index.htm
77 Alexander Henry. See Coues 1897, pp. 703-705.
78 Schaeffer 1982, page 9. His reference to Thompson is from the Glover edition of David Thompson’s
Narrative, pp. 327-328.
79 Schaeffer 1982, page 6.
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