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

DRAFT REPORT: Rights and Title Interests in the Columbia Valley Transmission Project Area
Williams’s view, the settlement at Windermere was the last step in a gradual migration east that
took a number of years. It is also their view that the Kinpasket family was accepted by the
Ktunaxa and that they have lived peacefully together.
2.2.3 Ethnographic and Historical Data Relating to the Kinbasket Migration
Additional information on the Kinbasket migration can be found in available ethnographic and
historical literature, including information recorded directly from “Chief Kinbasket.” Some of
this information was provided by Kinbasket family members, including Moses Kinbasket, 164 a
son of Cassimir Kinbasket (brother of Chief Pierre) and uncle to Mrs. Dehart and Mrs. Williams.
His information from the Kinbasket family’s oral history can be found in a newspaper article
compiled by Revelstoke resident B.R. Atkins, likely around the 1920-1930s. 165 Moses Kinbasket
related how his grandfather, identified there as “Peter” Kinbasket—but seemingly the same man
identified by others as “Paul Ignatius Kinbasket”—had come “from near Kamloops” over to the
Columbia headwaters “by way of Canoe River,” an event said to have occurred just prior to the
birth of his first son around 1826. The old chief had died when Moses was about 4 years old (c.
1862). 166 In his account, “Peter” Kinbasket had first seen the upper Columbia country one
summer when he had crossed the mountains to hunt, travelling east to near the present town of
Golden. He thought it was a good winter hunting ground for his people. 167
Atkins includes also a summary of the historical literature in this article and it is sometimes
difficult to distinguish information that is based on recorded fact from the author’s own
conclusions. 168 Atkins writes that Peter Kinbasket claimed the salmon beds at Athalmer, and that
164 Moses Kinbasket was said to have been born in 1860 according to the 1911 Canada Census
http://data2.collectionscanada.ca/1911/pdf/e001937872.pdf. This date is likely rounded, for he gave his birth date to
B.R. Atkins as 1858.
165 Benjamin Richard Atkins (b.1866-d.1941) lived in Revelstoke for 45 years, during which time he was a
part-owner of The Kootenay Mail and compiled a local history entitled Columbia River Chronicles. Atkins n.d.
[newspaper article] How Shuswap Indians Came to Kootenay. On file with the Kamloops Museum and Archives.
File 31, Interior Salish – Miscellaneous.
166 The birth date was possibly rounded, and Moses may be off on how old he was at the time of his
grandfather’s death. The Chief Kinbasket who met Walter Moberly in 1866 was likely this was Moses’s
grandfather, “Peter,” elsewhere identified as Paul Ignatius Kinbasket.
167 Apparently in a 1928 article, Suzette Kinbasket, daughter of “Paul Nease” [Paul Ignatius Kinbasket]
said that the Kinbasket used to hunt in the Columbia Valley and that her father accompanied his own father on trips
here before they settled. The present authors have not seen this article which is cited in the April 2009 Fish Lake
Consulting study prepared for the Shuswap Indian Band .
168 On the other hand, Atkins’s statement that the Arrow Lakes people (Sinixt), who he calls the
“Senijextee,” “controlled Columbia from Colville to Big Bend” is confirmed by other sources. See Randy Bouchard
and Dorothy Kennedy (2005). First Nations’ Ethnography and Ethnohistory in British Columbia’s Lower
Bouchard & Kennedy Research Consultants Page 39
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