A race to save Indigenous trails may change the face of archaeology

Wind jostles the helicopter as we skim over dense woodland and the snow-covered peaks of the Coast Mountains. We're flying over northwestern British Columbia, and from this aerial vantage point, it’s easy to see how mid-19th century European fur trappers normally is often referred to as this land wild. But then, as now, that image is a mirage.

Snaking somewhere less than us is the old Babine Trail network, a “grease trail” likely used for millennia by the Gitxsan people to carry goods similar to eulachon, a sort of smelt rich in oil, from the coast to inland communities. The crew I’m traveling with — which includes archaeologists, locals versed on this region’s ecology and culture, graduate students carrying soil-sampling equipment and bear spray, and members of the Indigenous house group, or wilp, whose ancestral lands we’re on — has come to mark component to that ancient path.

Beneath the chopper, a small patch of brown grass appears, and the pilot begins a steep descent. Once on the bottom, boots squelch on mossy floor or sink into snow as we're seeking for the overgrown Babine. Fierce brambles obscure the terrain. But we know the trail be nearby.

That’s partly since the team is following hints in maps made with lidar. Short for light detection and ranging, this far off sensing method can map the Earth’s topography with aircraft or satellites that send pulses of laser light toward the bottom and then measure the returning light. But now now not all snippets of trail show up clearly. Our crew goes in on foot to connect trail fragments visible in those lidar maps.

Finally Brett Vidler, an archaeological field assistant, calls out, “I suspect we’re on it guys.” He’s pointing to a tree with a divot and sharp cuts in its trunk — a blaze. From a thick spool of pink ribbon, Vidler rips off a bit bit that reads “culturally modified tree” and hands it to a group member to tie around the trunk. Periodically, as we fight our way through the comb, someone also stops to tie trees with blue ribbon reading “cultural heritage resource” to denote the trail.

This trail network has change into overgrown as Indigenous people’s connection to their land and culture has frayed. All through the late 1800s, Canada established a federal residential school system that tore Indigenous young people from their families, including those living here, and forbade students from speaking their native language.

Marking trails helps local communities reconnect with their heritage. The blue and pink ribbons also symbolize how Indigenous people here — and in many other parts of the area — are turning to the tools and language of Western science to fight ongoing threats to their communities. One big threat around here is oil and gas development. British Columbia’s Indigenous trails are now a test case for how, or if, cultural resource management practices can evolve as archaeological and Indigenous understandings of the landscape coalesce.

Developers already bulldozed through one ancient trail within the region some years back. Now people here agonize that the Babine Trail is next.

An endangered Indigenous trail

We're in Madii Lii, a 354-square-kilometer tract of land in Gitxsan territory that both the federal government of British Columbia and the Gitxsan people claim as their own.

“The pipeline goes right underneath here,” says Aspin’m nax’nox Ira Good. Good is a member of the Gitxsan Nation’s Flying Frog Clan. He’s as regards to the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, which is slated to run along or over this Madii Lii trail segment.

This sliver of earth may maybe soon be buried less than access roads, temporary encampments and construction of the pipeline itself, which if completed would carry natural gas up to 780 kilometers from northeastern British Columbia to the coast, almost 300 kilometers west of here by car. Provincial authorities issued certificates for the project to proceed in 2014. After years of delays, developers broke ground on a component to the pipeline near the coast in late August. They make substantial headway on that construction by late November or those certificates will expire.

Good and others hope that marking the trail will put pressure on the federal government to block pipeline development or now not lower than force a reroute. It’s a long shot. On the total speaking, Indigenous people see landscapes as interconnected and indivisible while Western people see the reverse. Alternatively the Western frame of mind governs preservation practices on lands slated for development. Cultural resource management policies normally focus on discrete sites, now now not on landscapes. By extension, preservation most usually centers on the tangible stuff found at excavated sites — old foundations for houses and buildings, pottery shards, arrowheads and the like — in preference to the intangible memories and stories woven into the land.

For development projects in Canada and someplace else, handiest land in the footprint of the project is subject to archaeological (and environmental) review. Vast or linear cultural features, similar to trails, that intersect with that footprint may maybe appear in these assessments but infrequently as contiguous wholes.

Historically, Western archaeologists have not any longer questioned this site-based approach, in particular as mapping needed to be done on foot, a time-consuming and laborious process that would handiest cover most ground. But now, some archaeologists have begun using lidar and other far off sensing tools to probe how past peoples connected across gardens, courtyards, cities and even continents (SN: 1/11/24). As these archaeologists’ spatial lens has widened, they're increasingly seeing landscapes as interconnected places of movement (SN: 12/four/24).

The linkages between places, or sites, are just as important as the materials left in a given place, says Kisha Supernant, a Métis archaeologist on the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “People don’t just reside on a level.… I don’t just reside in my house.”

But most of archaeology — and notably cultural resource management — hasn’t kept up. “We're stuck with this frame of mind that the past is all about the fire and the home,” says Jim Leary, an archaeologist on the University of York in England. “Genuinely, real life happens out in paths.”

When commercial archaeologists hired by the developers of the Prince Rupert pipeline mapped the proposed pipeline, the Babine Trail made handiest a scant appearance in their notes. The archaeologists stated that the pipeline would overlap some 200 meters, or about 3 percent, of the nearly 12-kilometer trail. Genuinely, the trail is roughly 80 kilometers long, and the pipeline will destroy half of it, says Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby in British Columbia and a project lead on the hassle to mark the Babine. “The archaeologist who went in for the corporate recorded a trail but as a level … now now not a line.”

Here on this dense patch of brush, where the stories of Gitxsan ancestors reside on, the archaeology report noted there became little likelihood of finding anything else of cultural significance.

Archaeology’s site problem

Culturally modified trees don many guises. Deep slashes on a trunk denote blazes cut with an adze. Bent and plaited branches signal a trail or the intentional clearing of a path. Pines with missing rectangular patches of bark are “noodle” trees, where hungry passersby unfurled the bark and ate sweet ribbons of sap.

I am now within the Wet’suwet’en Nation, south of Gitxsan territory. Armstrong is leading a training session to help students learning about their heritage change into responsive to such trees. The scholars, many Indigenous, consist of middle-aged community members living someplace else who’ve brought young people ranging in age from children to young people and a handful of twentysomethings who’ve been living off-grid on this area.

Surviving out here has never been easy. Even now in mid-May, temperatures often drop near freezing at night, and black bears, hungry from a long iciness preceded by drought, usually lumber out onto the gravel roads. Identifying modified trees is one due to remember how the ancestors navigated these harsh environs, Armstrong says. She belongs to the small but growing group of archaeologists seeking to move past the Western concept of sites, usually often normally is often referred to as polygons.

“All through the digital age, geospatial technologies give us the capacity to detect, record, index and analyze sites at scales very not going within the analog age when the notion of a site entered our lexicon,” archaeologist Mark D. McCoy of Florida State University in Tallahassee wrote in 2020 within the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Armstrong and colleagues outlined what a non-site-based approach to archaeology may maybe appear like in 2023 in American Anthropologist. Her team sought to map both the Babine Trail in Gitxsan territory and the Kweese War Trail within the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The researchers combed through troves of documents dating back to 1980, including earlier land-use studies, cultural heritage reports, notes from interviews with elders and legal documents. Whenever it is able to be easy to, Armstrong and colleagues wrote down the geographic coordinates for references to trails.

The team used that info to examine what linear features to home in on in visual data, including historical aerial photos, helicopter surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, and lidar images. The researchers also noted previously recorded archaeological sites located within 200 meters of those likely trail sections.

With those clues in hand, the team began schlepping out on foot to mark the Babine and Kweese trails. Whenever a trail’s signature disappeared within the photographs, the team followed the likely route on the bottom until again spotting telltale signs of movement, similar to packed earth and culturally modified trees.

Similar research is playing out in other parts of the area. All through the Netherlands, archaeologist Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart of Leiden University has turned his lens on so-normally is often referred to as hollow roads. They form when travelers, on this case people bearing carts laden with goods, trample the same route across long stretches of time. The earliest confirmed routes where Verschoof-van der Vaart became taking a look — the 2,200-square-kilometer Veluwe region within the central Netherlands — date back to the Middle Ages, from 1250 to 1500, though some researchers suspect people began using those paths thousands of years earlier.

No person had mapped that extensive road network, partly because those channels are now almost invisible to the naked eye. After starting place to stitch together the networks revealed in lidar maps, Verschoof-van der Vaart realized the tracks harbor secrets about how people once navigated the terrain.

Archaeologists thinking about mapping movement shift their attention from tangible artifacts to subtler alterations of the land. It’s rare to in finding a vitally important artifact along hollow roads, Verschoof-van der Vaart says. “Per chance in some lucky case you in finding something that became lost along the road, possibly a coin or a belt buckle or … component to a wagon. However it surely’s now now not like excavating a settlement where you detect reasonably tons of of stuff. So these roads themselves are now now not that interesting, but the story they tell … is extraordinarily interesting.”

And for Indigenous other folks that trace their roots to northwestern British Columbia, the routes and journeys are as valuable as any artifact. Twice for the duration of my talk to, I hearken to Mike Ridsdale, a member of the Wet’suwet’en Tsayu, or Beaver, Clan, tell a story about his ancestors’ journey along the Kweese War Trail.

Kweese became a hereditary chief when the Kitimat people killed his family centuries ago, says Ridsdale, who's also a retired biologist for the Wet’suwet’en Nation. So Kweese hosted a gigantic feast, where he invited members across the Wet’suwet’en’s 5 clans to help fight the Kitimat. The soldiers prepared for a year before heading out to the Kitimat people’s coastal village. They traveled along what would change into the Kweese War Trail but became then a grease trail similar to the Babine.

The battle became fierce, but the Wet’suwet’en people prevailed and took the Kitimat people’s crests, including a killer whale, as spoils of war. On the return journey along the trail, though, many injured Wet’suwet’en soldiers died. With no due to carry them home, those soldiers were left where they fell. The old grease trail became sacred ground.

“For that reason, the Trail is so important to the Wet’suwet’en, the ancestors who fought for our freedom, the very Crests that we wear on our backs, the story’s linkage through the actual trail which you are in a position to see. That's what it means to be Wet’suwet’en,” Ridsdale recounts within the 2023 paper in American Anthropologist, which he coauthored. “In the event you destroy the trail, that you simply may destroy our history.”

Legal weight

On account of a landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision often normally is often referred to as Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, those stories should, in theory, hold as a whole lot weight as artifacts and colonial maps within the U. S.’s judicial system. That legal battle began in 1984 when the plaintiffs, the hereditary chiefs of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations, claimed sovereignty over 58,000 square kilometers of land in British Columbia in keeping with their oral histories.

Indigenous land rights have long been a level of contention in Canada. Since the 1600s, colonial and then national leaders sought to say Indigenous lands through treaties and promises of payment. Such negotiations infrequently came about in British Columbia, and most First Nations have not any longer ceded their land there. That makes the province the heart of attention for most modern land-claim battles.

Oral stories passed down through generations often trace the people’s presence on the land back to time immemorial. The hereditary chiefs within the Delgamuukw case argued that those stories, coupled with the relative dearth of government treaties, proved their people’s sovereignty over the disputed lands.

Alternatively the courts again and again questioned that territorial claim, arguing as an alternative that Indigenous stories constituted hearsay or myth. In 1997, the case wound up before Canada’s Supreme Court, where justices unanimously ruled that oral stories were, really, history. “Oral histories,” the judges ruled, “may maybe possibly be accommodated and placed on an equal footing with the opposite different types of historical evidence that the courts are familiar with.”

Alternatively the judges stopped short of granting the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations title to that 58,000-square-kilometer expanse. Representatives for those nations walked faraway from settlement conversations when provincial authorities offered the title to a tiny percentage of the disputed land. With that process stalled, the British Columbia government can still claim ownership.

Since then, economic development has tended to trump Indigenous land claims. Such development began accelerating in Canada within the mid-2000s with the upward thrust of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wherein liquids are injected underground at high pressure to crack the rock and extract otherwise inaccessible oil and natural gas (SN: Eight/24/12). With the federal government’s backing, developers soon began exploring northwestern British Columbia.

The courts still do now now not give Indigenous stories equal footing with different different types of evidence, Armstrong and others say. So Indigenous people have turned to lidar and landscape-level mapping to prove to a Western target audience that their stories are true and the lands they reference merit saving.

Armstrong’s training session within the Wet’suwet’en Nation teaches students now now not only easy how to recognize modified trees, but additionally easy how to speak the language of the courts. Document the total lot with geographic coordinates, she usually notes. “Take a level, take a picture.”

Among the many equipment Armstrong shows the students is a minimally invasive corer which may possibly maybe possibly be inserted into a tree trunk and carefully removed to measure tree rings. On culturally modified trees, the trunk grows around old adze wounds like a pair of protuberant earlobes. The age of the cultural modification can thus be calculated by coring the total trunk and an earlobe. “Courts can focus on dates. They love them,” Armstrong explains. “The root of validating is powerful in Western courts.”

But unless the provincial government changes cultural resource management policies, such landscape-level analyses aren't going to change into the norm, says Rick Budhwa, an applied anthropologist and founding father of Crossroads Cultural Resource Management in Smithers, British Columbia. “Somebody has to pay these archaeologists. Why would that developer … ever pay to head and do all of this work?”

Boots on the bottom

On my 2d day in Wet’suwet’en territory, I meet Ridsdale and the students from the training session at Gidimt’en Checkpoint, an assemblage of log cabins, a fire pit and a makeshift kitchen that, when I arrive, is warm from a fire burning in a woodstove. Though quiet now, Gidimt’en served as the headquarters for protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a $14.5 billion project that has been on the books since 2012. When operational, the pipeline will carry natural gas 670 kilometers from northeastern British Columbia to a liquefaction facility in Kitimat.

On paper, that's miles in a position to search as if Indigenous leaders within the area largely support fossil fuel development. Housed within Wet’suwet’en ancestral lands are six small parcels of land that the federal government reserved for Indigenous people with the Indian Act of 1876. British Columbia officials established band leaders to move each and every reserve, a leadership system which is still in place this day. 5 of the six band leaders OK’d the Coastal GasLink project.

Alternatively the Indian Act is a legacy of colonialism, and an awful lot of Wet’suwet’en people still view hereditary chiefs, now now not band leaders, as the legitimate leaders of the land and its people, Ridsdale says. Coastal GasLink developers did now now not garner support from most chiefs, who argued that the pipeline and its construction would wreak havoc on the area’s waterways, thereby threatening salmon and steelhead populations, in addition to to displace land animals, including endangered caribou. The pipeline would also slice up the sacred Kweese War Trail.

Ridsdale had been informally mapping the Kweese trail for years. But as the specter of natural gas pipelines ramped up, he knew he needed to speak his findings more broadly and commenced collaborating with Armstrong. “We realized that we have got got to document reasonably tons of of trails, in particular the Kweese War Trail,” he tells me. But Ridsdale, Armstrong and the remainder of the team abandoned their efforts to mark the Kweese after pipeline construction began in 2019.

Coastal GasLink developers maintain that their assessment found “no evidence of this trail,” but, according to their web page, they “alternatively worked diligently to protect the areas identified on the maps provided, including the careful and planned avoidance of the express areas of concern.” Coastal GasLink representatives did now now not reply to requests for comment.

Protests against the pipeline began shortly before Coastal GasLink broke ground. In February 2020, protestors blockaded the tracks of a significant transcontinental Canadian National Railway line, forcing its temporary closure. The fight against Coastal GasLink morphed into a battle for cultural and climate justice, with protestors questioning more oil and gas development within the face of catastrophic global warming. Some people here say protestors may wish succeeded in halting the pipeline were it now now not for the onset of the pandemic, which prevented people from gathering in protest while construction proceeded.

From Gidimt’en, Ridsdale is leading the students to the Kweese trail — a pilgrimage to bear witness to what once became and what has now been lost. On the long drive to the trail’s access point, neon yellow Coastal GasLink signs caution that we're within the area of a “high pressure natural gas pipeline.” Logs left behind as the old logging road became widened and then extended to accommodate an influx of construction flank the roadside, together with culverts, water pooling where they've backed up. As we near a section of the trail, a sign warns against traveling in convoys greater than three vehicles. Our convoy is seven SUVs and pickups long.

“They are able to’t tell us what to do on our own territory,” Ridsdale mutters. After an hour or so, we leave the vehicles behind and continue on foot, scrambling over wide trenches dug into the now shuttered road. Ridsdale wanders around where he knows the trail be. “Once they built all of this, I lost my bearings,” he says. He finally locates the trail. The road has cleaved the Kweese in two.

Speaking the language of Western science

In his 2d century book Geography, Greek cartographer Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known this day as Ptolemy, used latitude and longitude lines to partition the area into a grid. Ptolemy’s idea of gridded space may maybe well have languished in obscurity were it now now not for a fifteenth century translation of the book from Greek to Latin.

That translation prepared the bottom for the Western world’s separation of space from place, ethnobiologist Leslie Main Johnson wrote in her 2010 book, Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path. Land became an abstraction, a canvas that European rulers may maybe carve up for exploration, development and settlement, and on which they'll maybe fight wars over arbitrary boundaries.

As of late’s grid-based maps bear little resemblance to maps drawn by Indigenous people. To demonstrate, in their maps, Northern Ontario’s Cree people marked rapids and portages, in addition to to secondary streams that allowed travelers to circumvent dangerous waters. Cree mappers neglected prominent landscape features that had no touching on the designated shuttle route.

Yet Ptolemy’s grids underpin the field of archaeology. “Archaeology itself as a discipline is a Western concept,” says Aviva Rathbone, an archaeological consultant in Vancouver.

And that frame of mind extends to the geospatial tools that commercial archaeologists use to estimate cultural value, says Supernant, the Métis archaeologist on the University of Alberta. The initial analysis is normally done using a Geographic Information System, or GIS, a working laptop or computer system that captures, stores and displays data a couple of given geographic location. GIS software also will help cultural resource managers change into responsive to reasonably tons of landforms and resources that correlate with past human activity to estimate a site’s archaeological potential.

When that software flags an area as moderate to high in potential value, archaeologists often look into on foot to examine if mitigation is required. Where models predict low potential, development can normally proceed without boots on the bottom — even when Indigenous community members challenge those findings.

In their computer assessment, archaeologists hired by the developers of the Prince Rupert pipeline labeled more than 85 percent of Gitxsan territory — including most of Madii Lii — as low in archaeological potential. On condition that designation, it’s now now not clear if anyone representing the developers will walk the Babine to ground-truth those findings, Armstrong says. But she disputes that assessment, arguing that the other appraisal of the region from the 1990s revealed rich potential. Stantec, the cultural resource management company hired by Prince Rupert developers, did now now not reply to requests for comment.

Johnson, now retired, notes that lidar maps’ more expansive view better reflects Indigenous world views and will maybe empower Indigenous communities to dispute archaeological assessments conducted on their lands.

But such tools may disempower Indigenous people by forcing them to converse in a foreign spatial language. “The widespread adoption of GIS and Western mapping conventions by Canadian Indigenous people may maybe possibly be seen as the tip results of an influence imbalance and the people’s should present their knowledges in a language and form which may possibly maybe possibly be understood and accommodated by governments and industry,” Johnson wrote in her book.

An out of this world deal of that imbalance may maybe possibly be playing out back in Madii Lii. After a kilometer or so of battling through the comb, the crew marking the Babine Trail reaches the confluence of two streams, which run fast and cold this time of year. Soil samples taken from a depression within the earth come out deep and dark. Good suspects we'd have found the location of an old cabin his grandmother, Tillie Sampare, used to talk about.

Sampare figures large in Good family lore. Members of the family recall how Sampare would reminisce about walking this trail as a bit bit girl with her grandparents, her na’a and ba’a. Sampare knew where to in finding probably essentially the most effective berries and straightforward how to cover them for later. She once walked the trail for seven days, stopping usually in order that her grandparents may maybe wrap her aching feet in deer or moose leather. When government agents started sending young people to residential schools, Sampare’s family hid her at Madii Lii. That enabled the family to hold onto their connection to the land, language and culture a bit bit bit longer.

Like many Indigenous people, Good now struggles to speak the language. And he shuttle here from Prince George, some 5 hours away, where he works as a trucker. But he’s still bonded with this land. He has spent the last few years driving his all-terrain vehicle, chainsaw in hand, clearing the Babine. By this point, he figures he’s cleared about 10 kilometers. Good scrolls through pictures on his cell phone before pausing on one shot. A moose carcass lays across his lap, his shirt crimson with blood from the new kill.

Connecting the trail where the chopper has deposited us to the part he’s cleared, a distance of some 15 kilometers, would take the other three years, Good speculates, likely more. He more than likely doesn’t have that a whole lot time; the Prince Rupert Gas pipeline would overlap roughly half of the 80-kilometer trail, including the part Good has been seeking to clear.

The fight won't ever be any longer as simple as Indigenous people versus the province. Earlier this year, TC Energy, the umbrella company for both Coastal GasLink and the Prince Rupert pipeline, sold rights to the latter pipeline and its export gas facility, now often normally is often referred to as Ksi Lisims LNG, to Western LNG and the Nisga’a Nation. “You’ve got an Indigenous group in actual fact pushing pipelines through other Indigenous groups’ territories,” says Budhwa, who's Indigenous and a formally adopted member of the Wet’suwet’en people’s Gitdumden, or Wolf/Bear, Clan.

Though Western LNG and Nisga’a Nation representatives may maybe now now not be reached for comment, a joint August press liberate notes that construction on the component to the project located on Nisga’a land has begun. To avoid the permits from expiring, the developers’ approaching construction plans consist of clearing land for roads and a right-of-way, installing bridges and building a facility to house a couple of hundred workers.

Scorched earth

On my last day in British Columbia, I hike up an access road to a waterfall located between Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations, armed with a can of bear spray and a 130-decibel horn that purportedly can scare a bear almost a kilometer away. Per locals’ recommendations, I dutifully clap my hands around blind turns to announce my presence.

A check in the road, where a nearby tree displays the gouge of an adze, cautions: “Mountain goats may maybe possibly be adversely tormented by humans (e.g. hikers, loud noises, vehicles, etc.) … When mountain goats are present, please … crawl and quietly.”

In this rugged landscape, that's miles in a position to be not easy to ignore a strategy of foreboding. As efforts ramp up to avoid wasting the Babine Trail, the prevailing landscape is facing interconnected challenges. Last year, wildfires scorched a record-high area of land in British Columbia, nearly 3 million hectares. Climate change is the foremost culprit behind an uptick in wildfires here since 2005, research shows. But clearing land for mining and other extractive activities is likewise increasing the fire risk.

Curtailing global greenhouse gas emissions by ending our reliance on fossil fuels is one technique to curbing climate change’s threats, here and someplace else. Current global energy needs may maybe possibly be met through existing pipelines, argued the authors of a policy paper published in May in Science. Committed groups of people also will help block new projects by facilitating “mass social movements that pressure governments to ban them,” the authors wrote.

An outpouring of support, alternatively slim the possibility, would buoy those working to avoid wasting Madii Lii. Protesters didn't offer protection to the Kweese trail, but they came closer to halting the pipeline than anyone expected. What if things play out differently for the Babine?

With construction on this area seemingly near, Good has come into the comb with a final-ditch plan. He has brought the up to date and really Western tools of public family members: a drone equipped with a video camera. He’s also radioed members of his family to check in for us. By the time they chopper in and in finding our crew within the thicket, the small entourage is exhausted from hauling garbage bags bulging with drums and heavy regalia — cloaks embroidered with the clan crest, a flying frog. Three-year-old Ax K’ets Gianna Starr, whose dad carried her atop his shoulders, is in tears from her bevy of scratches.

The use of the it is able to be easy to site of Sampare’s old cabin as a backdrop, Good gets each and every person in position and launches the drone, which zooms in as a friend sings and drums. Good’s careful vision doesn’t reasonably materialize. The drone is just too loud and drowns out the ceremony.

But Good is still optimistic the video can convince people this land is worth saving: “It'll be pretty powerful to have this right here, without delay.”