Transcript: InTheField– NUSKMATA (Jacinda Mack) on the Gold Rush That Never Ended /160
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, InTheField edition. I'm Ayana Young. In The Field is a bio-regional, place-based storytelling series, inspired by my journeys to the temperate rainforest of Cascadia.
In this week's episode, we turned north to Secwépemc territory around T'exelc, so-called Williams Lake in south-central British Columbia, Canada. Nestled within the Cariboo Mountains and the Fraser River watershed, this area is known as one of the birthing waters for salmon.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) The colors and the textures, it’s so beautiful here. It's like a natural village, right? Yeah. It's not like a monocrop tree farm plantation. This is the juniper. So we've got this prickly one, little bush juniper. And these are so awesome. Just like grab a whole handful. Pull them right off.
Ayana Young They’re so gentle. Yeah, very easy.
The other voice you hear in this recording is my dear friend, Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) of the Secwépemc and Nuxalk Indigenous peoples of present-day British Columbia.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) My mother's line, my matrilineal homeland, is in the Secwépemc territory. And the most recognizable place close to there is Williams Lake. So this is kind of south-central British Columbia. You know, mostly pine forests, lots of lakes, the Fraser River runs centrally through there. So of course, we have names for all of these places in our own language. There are lots of different plants and medicines that we still continue to harvest.
Ayana Young For many years Nuskmata has worked with Indigenous communities as an active organizer, researcher, and advocate on environmental protection issues, and continues to consult on mining and Indigenous rights and title and Canada today. At the time of this interview, Nuskmata was leading First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, an organization monitoring proposed and existing mining operations in BC. It was 2018, four years after one of the most devastating mining disasters in world history struck her territory.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) In 2014, of course, was the Mount Polley Mine Disaster, where 26 billion liters of mine waste was released into the environment, including into the headwaters of the salmon of the Fraser River watershed. A lot of the work that I've been doing over the last few years has been focused on holding the mining industry to account, calling out Canada and the industry to clean up their practices and to enforce their own laws, and really focus more on community health and protection and prevention in a lot of this.
So the area where the disaster took place is the birthing water of the salmon, it's an interior rainforest in the mountains of the Cariboo Mountains. And it's this really special, sacred place. And it's really been a difficult task for us to know that this is going to be part of the landscape forever, and this is part of our children's inheritance. And it's this work for future generations that we do collectively that really brings us together.
Ayana Young The 26 billion liter spill of the toxic waste of copper and gold mining sparked a surge of activism among Nuskmata’s community and environmentalists across BC, who have long fought for reforms and strengthened protections within the mining industry. Their cries for justice, however, have not been heard.
It's been six years and Imperial Metals Mining Corporation has yet to pay a single cent in fines or charges. Shortly after the spill, the BC government allowed the mine to resume full operations. Not only this but Imperial Metals was issued a permit to discharge almost 60,000 cubic meters per day of tailings effluent directly into Quesnel Lake. Taxpayers have shouldered $40 million to subsidize cleanup costs. Meanwhile, heavy metals live on in the bodies of the creatures, the community, and the waters that continue to carry this toxic burden.
We begin here: the frontlines of a sacrifice zone to shed light on the mining industry's ruthless exploitation of communities and ecosystems, and the BC governments greenlight to do so. And as we will find out, what has happened to Mount Polley is not an exception. It is the lawful rule in a region where there is little to no accountability for the theft of land and lives.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) There definitely needs to be a shift in how the decision-making process happens. Right now there's only a permitting, which basically means an allowance, for mining to take place. There's been a lot of talk by Canada and British Columbia around upholding the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and what we've seen is more just cherry-picking projects to make it look like they're upholding that, whereas you know, there are so many different battles that are happening across the country and in British Columbia to protect sacred places to protect clean water… And this is for everybody. That's not just for Indigenous people, we all benefit from this work.
It's insane that we have to fight the government to protect clean water. It's insane that corporations call the shots around Indigenous rights and title. By pressuring governments, all of the closed-door meetings have happened that people don't even know about, how that impacts the future of everybody. There's a lot that can be done. And a lot of it comes down to local decision-making. It comes down to upholding human rights. It comes down to upholding Indigenous rights and title to make a radical shift away from the way things are which is so outdated. You know, mining laws in British Columbia largely from the 1850s and 60s, which is a completely different world of mining. There have been so many reports and studies and feedback and all of this has given direction on how this industry should be shaped but it has to be put into action.
Ayana Young To understand today's mining laws and BC, we need to turn back the clock to the mid-19th-century gold rush. At this time, early colonial legislation created a free entry mining system for the 1000s of prospectors traveling west. This allowed any person 16 years of age or over to obtain a free miner certificate, giving the holder the right to freely enter onto and stake a claim essentially anywhere, including private property and Indigenous territory. Once a claim was staked, the holder obtained exclusive right to conduct mineral exploration, begin development, and collect the profits. It's shocking that apart from miner regulatory and permitting changes, this system largely remains the same nearly 170 years later. Though instead of picks and pans, today's mining companies wield a toolbox of hydraulic shovels, and excavators nearly as tall as a football field is long.
Notably to acquire a mineral claim back then, free miners had to visit the proposed site and erect a physical claim post. Today, it's even less onerous. A prospector can simply go online and secure access to the subsurface rights in most parts of the province with a click of a button and a credit card. This and BCs tax subsidies help explain why the province is home to more exploration mining companies than anywhere else on Earth. Peel back the layers of Canada's green veneer to find that 1300 mining corporations, 75% of all mining companies in the world, are headquartered in Canada,
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) People don't see it - it's out of sight out of mind. But they're getting bigger and bigger because the ore concentrations are getting smaller and smaller, so you have to have a bigger mine to make money. And this lasts for 1000s of years. There are mines that are still polluting and creating waste acid rock drainage from Roman times, and that's 2000 years ago. So it just never goes away. And when you think about how much that compounds in the ecosystem, then you kind of start to get an idea of the scale of one of these mines and there are 1000s of mines, and many of them are abandoned because of the poor laws surrounding protection. Everybody assumes that there are health and safety laws that are being enforced when they're not. So it just keeps going and going and then when you add to that the complexities of the social and cultural and health impacts that aren't necessarily directly tied to these mines, you start to get an idea of the giants that this industry is.
Ayana Young Mining feels like this secret, untold story. It’s the biggest story you've never heard. It's so is and I can just say, I came up to this part of the world because I was mortified by old-growth logging. Once I started walking down that logging road, the metaphorical logging road, and then I started to see logging is buckets, logging is pennies, and logging is to make accessible for the mines.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Logging is just the brushing before the drills come in, it's just clearing a road to like, “well, let's make some money off of that so that we can get to the real money.” And, you know, you're talking about these nuclear facilities, mindsets are the same; people think that once the mines are closed and reclaimed that everything's okay. No, at these sites like Polley Mine, water isn't even being treated now and it needs to be treated forever. Who's going to take care of that? Imperial metal shares have dropped from over $11 a share to like 60 cents, because of the disaster. If you have a disaster, your whole company is going to go under.
It's such a predatory model: the impacts are forever, and you need perpetual water treatment with nobody who's gonna be responsible for that. The people who live there are the ones who are going to bear the cost, which is usually cancer, social breakdown… folks who are trying to sell their properties after the disaster couldn't get any, nobody wants to live in a contamination zone, right? So you have all of these other ripple effects that aren't gauged in an environmental assessment or a corporate model because they're just completely discounted.
Ayana Young And they don't even have to put money up beforehand, you know? It's like, “oh, we'll take care of it if something happens!”
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) “Trust us.” If you connect mining up with all of the other industries and how they're connected, the first way that they're all connected is it's all part of this extractive colonial system based on growth. You have mines that provide all of the raw materials to run these other industries for creating and building heavy equipment to do other big extractive processes. Mining depends on other extractive industries to operate like hydroelectric dams to run their big, super gigantic shovels, you know, that are as big as a building, to put them into these gigantic 220-ton dump trucks… think of a five-ton truck and then think of a 220-ton truck.
So everything's super scale, we've got these gigantic rubber tires, that rubber comes from tropical rainforests, the amount of diesel that goes through in a day on one mine site. So you've got fracking and you've got pipelines, that’s a connection with pipelines. You've got them in the headwaters so then you're also adding to the threat and the sickness that fish farms are also putting in the water on salmon. And so all of these things are intertwined into this super extractive industrial crazy-bringing gold fever. You know, mining is at all costs and underwrites almost every other law in British Columbia, especially because it was the reason that British Columbia was colonized was because of the gold rush.
Ayana Young Say that again!
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) British Columbia was founded because of the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush brought in the people, it brought in the roadbuilding, it brought in the infrastructure, it brought in… you have the miners, you have the saloons, there was so much organized crime that was brought in that became the basis for the Canadian government in British Columbia. So this relationship, this colonial relationship with mining, goes back to the very foundation of the colonization of our lands: introduced smallpox to devastate the complex trade networks that the Indigenous people because traders were coming in through to Indigenous territories and having to pay tariffs because of the Indigenous law. And it's documented by academics and others, using government logs, that smallpox was deliberately introduced and that this genocide was an act of biological warfare against Indigenous people, thinking that it would kill all of us to eradicate this Indian problem from the land.
But all it did is it took all the strongest people and became the new bloodlines for what is now rising up in this Indigenous Renaissance. These young people who are out there that haven't gone to residential schools, haven't been scooped up, are relearning their languages, are connecting with the land. And knowing that the land is still there, our land is still here, the land hasn't gone away. And what is in the colonial mindset is that Indigenous people have been displaced from our lands. And there were so many laws to keep us off of our lands to break that connection. The residential schools were to, “kill the Indian save the man.”
I think like within our very genetic code, it's just in us, our bodies are made of this land. That's where we're receiving our connection to this land. And you know, for people who have never felt that connection or have never had a spiritual connection to place simply can't understand that, and they have no idea of who they are or where they are. This is the system that we're having to deal with.
I'm speaking English. The other languages that I know before English is French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I’m saying I just need to learn Dutch and I'll have all of the five colonizing languages of the world covered, but I still cannot speak fluently my whole language - but I’m learning. And so the more and more I learn my language, the more beautiful it's revealed to me - the beauty of this world and the power - and so the more that I learn my language, the more I'm connected to the land that I'm from. So it's all these different fronts of what's going on and trying to navigate through it while trying to decolonize my own life and heal my own life because I'm still dealing with the impacts of the colonization that happens around me. My mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother all went to residential school. We're still dealing with that in our families. Our communities are still dealing with that and trying to heal from that, but we're aware of it now. We've named it.
Ayana Young One aspect I've savored most from the journey of recording InTheField has been sharing traditional food with people from their homelands, whether harvesting berries with Wanda or filleting a salmon with Dune on the banks of the copper. Each taste has been a conduit for tender, joyful connections that contain the marrow of deep traditions and foodways. These moments have also given me the opportunity to get into some, let's say passionate kitchen table chats over a very large cup of coffee. We've been rambling but I want to go back to the Gold Rush mentality because most people that read about the Gold Rush have some romantic idea, there are so many places, I've seen Gold Rush museum, and “look at the cute little town.”
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Old Sacramento.
Ayana Young Old Sacramento, the Sierras, the Sierra foothills. It's all really cutesy. It's sold as a tourist attraction.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Yeah, it's this totally skewed revisionist history. But insta-wealth, the American dream. It's that gold fever - and the gold fever is actually the sickness. I was writing something down the other night. I was flowing, it was late. I was like, way too tired. And I was putting a certain presentation together and it was about how gold fever, imagining a future [inaudible] gold fever, in the future that it becomes known as the human extinction virus. Gold fever, that insatiable greed, that's what gold fever really, truly is, and that all has been responsible for more war and destruction in the history of human existence than anything else. Look at the connections between organized religion and the pursuit of gold, the military might, the Catholic Church, the Crusades, the Rococo period, after you know, the discoveries of North and South America, all of the gold and silver that came out of South America and the Indigenous people that were sacrificed for it. It’s like blood diamonds. It's dirty gold, dirty gold. It's all tainted.
Ayana Young I think people are really unaware that is still happening. When you think “oh, well, what does gold mining look like in 2018?” Yeah. Huge, huge, huge machines. That's one thing that it looks like - it looks like ridiculously large mega…
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Oh yeah, it’s super scale, super, super scale extraction. And people who've never been on a mine site but they've seen lots of pictures of you know, placer mining, historic placer mining. So people really have no idea of the scale. They have no idea that most of it is place management. It's just the big lakes, you know decapitating mountains…
Ayana Young And the waste sites, these communities they can bankrupt up once they've extracted and it’s like “ok now we're gonna walk away from cleaning up the waste.” Okay. You have toxic bullshit in an open pit of plastic that doesn't last forever. It rains. Weather happens
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) …erosion, they’re not accounting for climate change in any of their plans. And now they're wanting to go into deeply shaded areas to mine.
Ayana Young And you know what was so frustrating as I've gone around to so many people [inaudible] and scientists are like “Yeah, we don't know. Yeah, we don't.” What do we know? We know mining, we know ocean acidification, we know oil spills, climate change, glacial melt…
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) …and human waste runoff…
Ayana Young How much data do we have to collect?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) That's yeah, that's totally the other piece is just like death by studying. Like, it's like, “well, we'll get another study.” It's like, you don't need another study. We don't need another study. Oh, my God, that just drives me crazy. Because I'm just like, you know what your answer is. We had all kinds of traditional use studies and all of the interviews around salmon just to document. It wasn't that people didn't know that it was just that it needed to be documented in this Western colonial, whatever, right? And so people were like, “we need data, we need scientifically proven…” whatever. It’s like, do you really? Or do you already know what the answer is but you're just afraid to actually take a position on it?
Ayana Young we missed getting baseline data a long time ago. So it's okay, fine. Let's get baseline data but we know already. There are multiple reasons why the salmon aren't coming back.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Yes. And we're going to wait until we can show a proven decline from this? Why are we not coming up with a precautionary approach to make sure that we're doing no harm, first of all, and then figure out what the impacts are? It drives me bonkers.
People don't want to be the bad guy. And they don't want to believe that what they're doing, or the industry or whatever is putting food on their table is harming anybody. Because I think people generally want the same things in life, we want to be safe and secure and be able to provide for their families. And when you put a lot of guilt on the table for destroying the watershed and our way of life, it becomes very, very defensive. And that's the fragility piece that comes from having such privilege forever. “You know how much that hurts our feelings?” It's like, do you know how much death and, like the whole thing is in collapse like you're saying, right? And it's just like, coming to terms with that reality is just too much, I think for some people, and they just don't want to believe that they're part of the problem. Because they can say, “Well, what we really believe in this science. We believe that the leadership at this company would never do that. They're good people.” It's not the people. It's not the individual worker. It's just the whole systemic piece that is just completely messed up.
Ayana Young I thought back on this conversation many times, meditating on the thorny question of our individual responsibility, and how we navigate and make choices within the lethal, anthropocentric logic of the system. At times, I imagined the beast of resource extraction as a swirling vortex, a spiraling, thrashing gyre so insurmountably large, that it might swallow the earth whole. And yet, I still want to ask, what would free us to be an act within the truth of this urgent time, to be unmoving in our politic, even in the eye of the storm? A small piece of this, for me at least, has been to invite the hard to hear truths into my head and heart, so that they begin to move and make home and my being.
Ayana Young These places are the last living libraries on Earth. Where I live, it's a miracle to see a salmon and I live on one of the most promising River in all of California for coho. Where I live I used to have salmon so that they could walk across on their back. Huge salmon that are the size of men holding them up. That was not long ago. There's less than 4% of all old-growth redwoods left there, hardly any salmon. I mean, we know this extinction crisis. We know this, but to see it and to see the insanity and to be with Dune, in the Copper River Delta. He said he hardly caught any silver's. And the Kings didn't come back. And to hear Ernestine talk about the abundance of south-east Alaska (because she's from the south-east), and to see how that abundance is literally being choked.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) What I saw, one of the things that I noticed when I went to Alaska, was that I feel like where they are now, they're just starting to feel the pinch of the impacts from you know where they are, is where we were here 30 years ago. So I tell them you have a buffer because you're so far North. But still, unless you make some radical changes or just call things, put things on pause for now, and that 30 years isn't gonna take you 30 years. After two years it’s gonna take probably five years.
Ayana Young Oh yeah, the way things are going with the extreme fluctuations in the weather and the glaciers - I give them 10 years. And also the drought, like people go, “oh, California is the wildfire state with the drought.” Okay, no, no, no, no. The fires through BC, there's drought in the north most rainforest in Alaska. The creeks are drying up, the salmon take up the creek because there is no water. This is not compartmentalized to one southern state. Wake up.
Ayana Young Despite the continued pollution of the Fraser River watershed, it still supports more salmon runs than any other system left on the planet, stretching 13,175 kilometers southwest from a dripping spring in the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. This river sustains seven species of salmon, rainbow trout, giant sturgeon, and more than 300 species of migratory and resident birds. The dynamic bountiful River Basin has sustained First Nations communities for 1000s of years. Some of its traditional names include Lhtakoh in the Dakelh language, and Sto:lo in the Halqemeylem language. When I visited Nuskmata’s home, we walked down to a particular spot along the river. Surrounded by native edible plants, this area, now frequented by tourists, had once been an ancient fishing ground for her people.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Now, the river is the thing that connects us all here, you know, within this whole watershed, this bioregion of all the tributaries, all of the salmon, all of the interconnected species. I think that's probably why I feel so grounded in my work to come here because it's back to that center for me.
Ayana Young I followed Nuskmata further out onto the rocks where her family used to catch salmon from the crystalline free-flowing waters. As I sat there, the water braiding with the rocks, Nuskmata’s stories reminded me that we are all vitally connected by the intricate lattice of water’s chosen path. Downstream people in Vancouver dine on fresh seafood, watching ships move across the wide mouth of the Fraser towards the ocean. While upstream a community wrestles with the risk of drinking, bathing, and eating from contaminated waters.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) And this is something that we had said 20 years ago here, like when I was a teenager in the late 80s, early 90s, we were told then “don't eat the eggs from the salmon that you catch.” This was over 20 years ago.
Ayana Young Why?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Because of the mercury contamination, it settles in the eggs. Okay, so we can't eat the eggs, but these are the eggs that are going to become the salmon. So should we even be eating the salmon if we can't be eating the eggs? And so you think of the amount of contamination in the bioaccumulation in not only the salmon, in everything. The salmon dies, goes back to the earth… What is the toxic load of the land? Nothing is assessed in a cumulative way. So you have on the Fraser River watershed you have mines dumping waste, you have pulp mills dumping waste, you have harshly treated sewage that's dumped into the river, and all the agricultural fertilizer runoff, and then you have all the runoff within the larger watershed from overlogging and clear cuts, which contributes to warmer waters, which is harder on the salmon. The Fraser River is just like one gigantic sewage pipe to the ocean. And how is that impacting other species? Like somebody had posted something online yesterday of all of these birds that just dropped dead on this beach. A whole bunch of birds fell out of the sky.
Ayana Young And they don't talk about how the exploration companies also pollute.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Oh yeah. They break down through groundwater. You know, you have all of your waters and your lubricants and whatever to run the drills that often gets down into the wells that are there self-monitoring (mining is all self-monitoring). So it's like the right conditions for corruption.
Ayana Young And what about all the wealthy people in Vancouver who want to catch their salmon on the weekends? Like, do they just not know? I think about all the white people in the towers of Vancouver in their glass buildings. The Fraser River goes through there, right?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) It does. I think part of it is that they don't know or they don't have an immediate connection to it. That's the storytelling piece to get people connected to how they're being impacted. So you're really passionate about Kinder Morgan? Well, you should hear about mining. Because there are 1000s of mining sites in BC, this is one pipeline, you need to learn about the next piece. When I was done at the Protecting Mother Earth Conference and listening to all of the conversations around getting off of fossil fuels and renewable energy I'm like, you have to clean up mining because there's more money that's gonna be required for ferrous materials and more copper. And I'll tell people, “you're being impacted whether you understand it or not.”
Ayana Young The amount of rhetoric spewed at conferences and beyond, and commercials, and the future, and techno-fixes, and renewable energies. Okay, that is literally - I see it - I'm like, “Oh my gosh, this is just the next wave of industry.” This is just the next wave of industry, of factories. It's not less energy-intensive. Now, people think, “Oh, it's a solar panel.” Somehow that's less energy-intensive to create, or there are no oppressed people that are having to make the things that have water all over the world being poisoned. But that's just a deeper level of this false resilient community being sold to even good activist people. I've interviewed so many amazing activists that talked about energy freedom…
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Yeah. And they talk about transition. That's right. When I gave my talk I had mentioned that and was saying, “you're missing a piece of the conversation if you're not talking about mining.” I mean, of course, forestry underpins it all because that's what clears the roads, but you've got your big hydroelectric dams, you got Sightsee, which a lot of people are saying they're just going to sell off the water or use it for fracking, which would make sense where it is because that's in the big fracking zone up there. And then you have your fish farms. And then you have your pipelines. Right? And then the mining. And then agriculture on top of that because you got to think about the runoff. So within just the Fraser watershed, you've got all of these super industrial practices that are just not being considered together in one conversation. Now people are wanting to just transition, where you're mining? Or is that even on your radar?
Ayana Young How is it a just transition if your land had been poisoned so that somebody else somewhere else can have a just transition?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) All of those huge tires, you know, $175,000 each - we don't have rubber in our territory. This is coming from the jungles. Where's the fuel coming from to run those big mega trucks? Probably been fracked from somewhere. What about all of the big jumbo hydroelectric shovels? Well, they're coming from big electric dams that of course, you cleared the roads to get them in there. And all the water from the watersheds, from all the headwaters, is where all the big gold mines are because of the way the geology works. So all of this is going into the river that impacts the salmon, that impacts the killer whales. So it's just a ripple effect constantly.
Ayana Young There is no way to continue getting out of it. I mean, unless you want to start eating like petri dish food, which is the direction we're going. Going down in Southern California where a lot of my family lives, there are million-dollar houses right next to an oil rig. People are breaking out with asthma and have all these issues, like, you have your million-dollar, fake-looking Tuscan mansion with this offshore drilling and then an oil patch that was wetland. Why would you have asthma?
What is meant by a clean energy future if it necessitates a permanently polluting, predatory industry, and moreover, requires that industry to expand many times over to meet consumer demands. We must be clear that this new industrial revolution painted green carries existential consequences for the millions of at-risk species of Earth, ourselves included. Replacing the world's 1.2 billion vehicles with those powered by batteries would in part require an 8,840% increase in current global lithium production. And by 2035, the current global demand for copper, an essential material in electric systems, is estimated to spike by 43%. It will be areas of rich natural resources from the high altitude lithium reserves in the Andes Mountains, to the deep sea mineral deposits in the waters of Papua New Guinea, they become tomorrow's sacrifice zones for a techno-utopian Green New Deal. My hope is that this conversation will challenge us all to broaden the scope of a just transition to include all communities of life on the frontlines of metal and mineral mining, and all those downstream. What could our purpose and identity become outside of the imperialist framework of consumption and domestication?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) It's been a conversation, this has been the battle of Indigenous peoples since contact. It is this completely different worldview around how to live in this world well. In Potlatch culture on the northwest coast, you would only ever acquire wealth in more than what you needed to redistribute it to the community. You would never acquire personal wealth for your own personal gain. That would be breaking the law. And like actual physical wealth, it was metaphorically held in the potlatches of how many times he fed the people. That's where your status came from, was how much you provided for your wider community. So that's written in our laws and within our language. So you've got these completely different worldviews and completely different spiritual connections.
Ayana Young There is no spiritual connection in the dominant culture.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) I was thinking about this the other day, and I was like “I gotta write this stuff down.” When I was pregnant with my son, I didn't do this consciously, but I was eating as much traditional food as I could. So his body is made up of salmon, deer meat, medicines, berries, and everything that is here while I was pregnant. I was drinking Soapberry juice every day. And so our bodies are physically made up of this land and it's the same genetic code as it always has been. So that our physical, vibrational, spiritual, whichever way you want to describe it, connection to this very land, this land actually built our bones and our blood and flesh. It always shocked me when I was younger that people could just grow up somewhere and then just move away forever and never move back. It's just not in my worldview to do that. It's like, this is home forever, and it always will be from my bloodline, we're not going to leave, we're not going to go anywhere.
And that's been the whole - that's what the Indian problem is. The Indian problem, they actually call it the Indian problem in Canada, is that we survived. We're still here and we still are maintaining this connection with the earth. And, you know, I was thinking about it last night, how to describe it. I was thinking of a play, you know, maybe something that kids could do. If you had this Indigenous woman that represents the earth mother, the mother, you know, in her basket is filled with everything that you would ever need, you know, with your food and clean water and all the ceremonies that keep it connected to the land. We still have a lot of that. A lot of it has been lost, but a lot of it still remains.
There are ways of regaining that knowledge through ceremony and through just being on the land itself and learning your language. It's all living there. So you talk about these living libraries and within Indigenous cultures, the language and the ceremonies and the knowledge of the land and the food that we eat gives us information and access to these libraries as well. So when we can't go out on the land because there's mining, and there are no trespassing signs everywhere, roads are gated, it becomes harder and harder to maintain that taste for the land.
I have a niece that came out from Ontario. Born and raised in Ontario her whole life, she's Nuxalk, came to Bella Coola for the first time. She doesn't like anything, there are like five things on Earth that she likes to eat, she doesn't like anything. She's super, super fussy. She tried deer meat for the first time and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. She couldn't get enough of it. And I was like, “that's your body recognizing what you are made up of.” It was just instant recognition.
You know, they want to learn how to hunt, they really want to learn how to hunt. You need to be here in fall, right? For harvesting certain things, it's like we can do that till fall time. It's that connection with the land because we know that we're still in place, our birthplace. We still have this connection because we have this close relationship with the land even though it's harder and harder to maintain. We know that on a very deep level, we as Indigenous people descend from the strongest of the strong of our ancestors. So that blood is running through us, and it's not even a choice. Their job was to survive, just make it through, to survive - get through smallpox, the genocide that happened.
So yeah, like, I think what happens is you just concentrate all the warrior survivor blood. You think of after in Europe, after the plagues went through, what the state of society was at that time, right? The sickness, the trauma. So that's what our communities have gone through. And then the residential schools, the boarding school in the United States, the 60’s scoop, and Canada, you know, forced sterilization and medical experimentation, all of these things. And now the big thing in Canada is the amount of children that are in care: there are more children that have been taken into foster care than were ever in residential schools.
Ayana Young Do you think that foster care is just like, you know, 2.0?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Yeah. Because it's still this patriarchal system where the underlying belief is that Indigenous people aren't truly human, aren't truly civilized, don't know how to be parents, and are totally messed up because we're just degenerate or criminals. This is totally systemic. It's really exciting when I see young people who are really stoked to learn their language and they're speaking out against colonization, and they're doing these amazing creative things. To say, “you know what? I don't buy that bullshit story anymore. And it stops with me: this trauma, this cycle, this, you know, sickness stops with me because I'm doing everything I can to learn.”
And so you see people organizing. That's really exciting because that's what needs to happen to get these young people fired up. Where they're raised, where it's just not even acceptable, they wouldn't even entertain the idea. Like I asked my son when he was going to school here in Williams Lake high school, William Lake was very, very racist when I went. And I asked him how the racism was. And he was just like, “oh, I don't know, if there was something directed directly at me I wasn't really aware of it.” I'm like, “well you’d be aware of it.”
My son is the first generation whose parents didn't go to residential school. I'm the first generation that didn’t go. He’s the first generation whose parents didn't go. The work that Indigenous Grandmothers are doing, they're coming from this intense place of love. That's why it's powerful, that's why they're powerful. You know, it's a love story. And when I was in Alaska saying, like every love story, there's heartache. It's this underlying love. People are like, “don't you ever want to quit?” I'm like, “yeah, like every day, like, every single day, I want to quit.” And I heard this one speaker and she was saying that people would ask her that she goes, “Oh, I do. But I do. I quit every single day at five o'clock, I quit. And then I'm with my family, and I'm doing anything to feed myself. And then I start again the next day, knowing that I can quit at five o'clock. Otherwise, I would burn out.”
Ayana Young You're fighting so many different levels. You're having to experientially live it. You can't get away from it. You drive down the road and oh, yeah, you know.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) I'm driving on the freeway and I'm like, “oh, there's a mine truck. There's a mine truck. Yeah, that one’s got the big rods for the rod mill that's going to crush up the rock. Oh, that one is hauling concentrate back to Vancouver. That's a big piece of mining equipment going up.” I see it everywhere. I see the word capitals N O W, I think “notice of work.” That's mining. You know, I see stuff everywhere and I'm just like, I can't unsee it once you know right.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) There are so many different parts of the work that needs to be done. You might not be out there at the front of that March getting arrested but you're going door to door in the community getting signatures for a petition, and you're like looking after the kids while there's a meeting going on. Or you're slogging through government meetings, or doing public events, like there are lots of different strategies. They're all threads of the same fabric. Within Indigenous communities, too, you have people who think that if you go to a government meeting, then you're a sellout. They're being played in this divide and conquer, and they're like, “Oh, we are so colonized.” And it's like, well, then maybe we need to address that. What solutions are you bringing? And getting over this whole internalized colonization, internalized divisions within the communities? That's a really key piece. And you know, we're talking about free prior informed consent, moving into his age of consent now away from consultation. What are we doing in our Indigenous nations to ensure true decision-making within the nations?
And I was asked the other day by CBC radio, “Well, isn't that going to put a halt to every single industrial project out there?” And I just said, that's really oversimplifying it, that's fear-mongering, and there's a lot of work that has never been done. And so now it's time to get down to work. And now Indigenous people have fought their way court after court battle, all of these things, getting our own agency to take care of our own children, to take care of our own health services, all of this stuff. That is all trench work.
We're in this position that we're in because it was bought and paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of every generation before that's had to deal with the trauma and ongoing colonization, with this gold rush that never ended. It just changed clothes, just changed appearances, got a new storefront, you know. They just keep such a low profile. You won't see Imperial Metals, not Polley Mine, on any social media platform, you won't see them doing anything other than working directly with the government, and directly within the industry itself. Yeah, they don't reply to anything. They don't need to engage with the public because they get all of their permissions and authorizations and permits from the government.
Ayana Young Fossil fuel companies, they have social media. They're hooking up with Coca-Cola. They're out there sponsoring events. BP, for instance, like I saw a commercial on YouTube for BP and they had all these famous musicians and they're like “BP” and they're like singing and they're like “BP the way of the future,” whatever. Go to Disneyland, an old gold mine, right? No, like, new gold mine? Mum is the word.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) After the Mount Holly disaster happened, the government of British Columbia wanted the First Nations to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The government on behalf of the mining company. And so like you have right now in British Columbia that people are going, “what, consent? Do you know how much time that's gonna take? Reconciliation? Do you know how much it’s cutting into our bottom line?” And so everything has to operate at the speed of money.
Ayana Young They want to do it in like a year, two years or less for these major, major projects that couldn't totally wipe out entire populations of human and nonhuman alike. Talk about no concept of deep time.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) And in British Columbia, one of the big things is this whole system called professional reliance. So rather than having a ministry that is responsible for maintaining the integrity and making decisions around environmental protection, like the Ministry of Environment, has turned over all monitoring of the water coming off the mine site, all monitoring of the impacts over to the mine. And then they're like, “Oh, well, yeah, we checked in with him and it looks legit. So we're gonna go with that.”
Ayana Young These 2000+ abandoned mines, many are the headwaters of rivers. What will it take for the BC government, the US government, what is it going to take to first get these companies or somebody… Somebody's got to be cleaning this up. What are we going to do about that?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Some of the things that are happening right now in the different channels of partners have ever is there are the Indigenous guardian's initiatives that are happening in different communities around doing all of that monitoring, being part of the compliance, being part of the land use planning, having areas that are designated as Indigenous Protected Areas where they're just No Go Zones. And so that's where I think it's really important for people to be engaged locally. And what I've seen from after the Mount Polley disaster was that local people became so discouraged and angered and silenced or just completely ridiculed or harassed. Everything that was happening on the land, in the community, in the public online… It just completely traumatized people, and people withdrew to protect themselves.
Ayana Young The aftermath of the Mount Polley Mine disaster reminds us of the toxic social and environmental legacy left behind on the mining industry's destructive path. An expert panel predicted that there will be two such tailing pond failures every 10 years in BC. Like ticking time bombs, threatening the heart of living breathing ecosystems. Nuskmata warns that constant vigilance and community oversight are required over not only active, abandoned, and decommissioned sites, but also new sites in the exploration phase on the frontier of mining expansion. While traveling in so-called Haines, Alaska, I witnessed the turning gears of this predatory model. As Constantine Metal Resources, a Canadian mining company, invaded the pristine headwaters of the Chilkat River to quantify the copper, zinc, gold, and silver content of a mountain. This new mine site in the unceded territory of the Chilkat Tlingit could begin operations shortly, despite a majority opposition from Native and non-Native.
Ayana Young … And the road into Haines, for the last two years, has been totally reconstructed. I mean, they are chopping down the mountains. And they're like, “oh, for the tourists.”
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Really? Not for the gigantic haul trucks? Not for the gigantic shipping out the ore?
Ayana Young It's the bald eagle sanctuary. Most bald eagles anywhere, most grizzly bears in the continent right there. I mean, this area is just unreal. And they're just chopping and chopping the mountains. The grinding grinding grinding for the road. Big excavator, boom, dunking these excavators in the effing river, creating new roads on the river… The Department of Fish and Wildlife whose supposed to be protecting the salmon allowed for this road construction during the peak months of salmon spawning, to make the road for “tourists?” I'm like, “this is bullshit.” And they have so many machines, a massive, massive project, you know, millions of dollars, obviously, I'm just like, oh my gosh, once the road is in…
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) It’s classic project planning, this is what they do in mines. They'll just incrementally get bigger and bigger and bigger beyond the original footprint of what they ever proposed to get the approval, but a 10-year life, 15-year life, is going to provide this many jobs or whatever, right? And then incrementally it gets bigger and bigger to the point that it's well beyond the capacity or the design like Mount Polley and then it bursts. Yeah, it's maddening. I've seen the road. I know what you're talking about.
Ayana Young If a mine had come into your town - maybe you want to look at all other communities that have had this and try to see what's happened to them to see if it's a good idea for your community. There's no way that your community will not go down the same path
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) Yeah, your community will not be the exception.
Ayana Young How far will we go to mind ourselves out of the climate crisis in order to maintain a luxury-driven consumerist culture? Are we willing to sacrifice more of the Earth's remaining intact ecosystems and watersheds still turning with the primordial hum of life in the name of modernity? Inhabiting these questions, in part, demands an honest investigation into the true cost of our individual material footprint. While I hold and acknowledge the larger systemic forces at play in contemporary waste regimes, it's also my sense that we shouldn't abandon the thoughtfulness of our material experiences wherever possible. When we fail to acknowledge our interconnectedness, we've cast not only the weight of our material burden but also the psychic burden onto the affected people and places and creatures. So I invite you to feel into your embodied experience of the metals, fossil fuels, papers, and plastics that pass through your hands on a day-to-day basis. Is there a way to remain effective in the world while drastically reducing or abstaining from such consumption? How can we reclaim the concept of abundance from the grip of mass resource extraction and return it to the arms of the Earth?
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) It’s facing this mythology, this romanticized gold. There's no reason to mine anymore gold. It's all for vanity. Most of it's for jewelry. If people can just stop buying gold, even if you have gold, just stop buying it. And be aware of your language around gold, like, “oh treat you like gold,” it’s the gold standard, where it's the highest value. And it's like, actually clean water is worth a heck of a lot more. Can you imagine how are we going to be transformed if everybody had access to clean water on the whole planet? If everybody had clean water, how that would change the world. It's the most fundamental thing, other than air.
So when we, as Indigenous people, are being criminalized for wanting to protect clean water that protects everybody, it's so outrageous. But it's the accepted norm in this industrial, military, capitalistic complex that we're in. So shifting these systems is huge, huge, huge work. But it's doable. We have to believe that we can do it. But be skeptical enough that it motivates us to take action in our own lives. We can't just wait for someone else to do it. Because everything that we don't do, the burden gets passed on to our children. So what path are we claiming for them? What work are we doing to prepare for them?
That's why telling the truth is so revolutionary. Not subscribing to this murder culture and actually working from a place of love is revolutionary. When people are like, “Love How corny is that?” And it's like, if you don't truly understand what I'm saying, that's the problem. And if you haven't found your love story with alignment, that's what we need to help you find because that's what's gonna shift. I think also just thinking about my unborn grandchildren is a huge motivator for me. What is my inheritance going to be that I'm building up now for them? It's life work and sometimes just go stop and go pick berries.
Ayana Young Go to the river.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) We all want to be healthy, we want to be happy, we want clean water and food, and to have an enjoyable life, and to have that available for future generations. And I think that if we can base our work around those values and those principles and be open to learning, to be open to new systems, to be open to sharing power, that's what's going to change the world. This love story, it's what we do every day. It's the decisions that we make. It's our intention, our awareness, and our commitment to action. And I think that it's really important for people to get out there and to have those experiences on the land, to put that time and commitment into learning where they're from, to upholding and protecting these beautiful wild places, or to restoring places that have been impacted.
We can't abandon these places that have been polluted or that have been harmed, just like we wouldn't abandon a family member who needs our support and who needs our attention. And so if we can have those values guide our work and to be creative and to try things, to really be bold. We don't have time to be careful and cautious. We have to be really bold in our actions. And I think people know deep down what they need to do and finding that bravery and that inspiration, all you have to do is spend a bit of time and out there in the wild, on the land, or even if you're in the city, to really see that the planet needs us, our children need us. So it's really an honor to be able to do this work and to come at it from that perspective, I think, shifts things a lot, and takes back that power. And that's an incredible thing.
Ayana Young I'd like to take a moment to extend my deepest gratitude to Nuskmata Jacinda Mack for generously opening her home to me, and offering her time, open spirit, and honest reflections for the making of this episode. It has been such an honor to learn from this wise woman, artist, musician, mother, and meet along the path as we weave ancient and new worlds into being. Since this interview, Nuskmata has left First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining and joined the team at Madii Lii in northern B.C., an Indigenous-led team that has regained control and occupation of their traditional lands in Gitxsan Territory on the Skeena River. To learn more about their work on Indigenous systems change, ancestral governance, and cultural revitalization programs, please visit MatiiLii.com.
We also request that you consider supporting local and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of metal and mineral mining. Those working to radically transform the mining industry to preserve the wildlands and watersheds of sacred lands everywhere. As a starting point, check out First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, Fair Mining Collaborative, Salmon Beyond Borders, BC Mining Law Reform, and Mining and Justice Solidarity Network.
Lastly, wherever this podcast reaches you, we encourage you to get more involved in local mining, resource extraction, and land defense issues. Here are a few pressing projects we've been following that we hope you'll take the time to learn more about. First, as mentioned earlier, the Palmer Project, a proposed copper, zinc, gold, and silver mine is sited at the headwaters of the Chilkat River on unseeded Chilkat Tlingit territory. Second, the proposed open-pit copper and gold Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Southwest Alaska threatens the world's greatest sockeye salmon run, and the lifeways of local residents and Indigenous communities. Third, Imperial Metals has recently applied for a five-year permit in the Skagit headwaters that if approved by the BC government will see the building of an access road, surface trenches, drill pads, and exploratory pits up to 2000 meters deep amid sensitive populations of grizzlies, bull trout, and bald eagles.
Finally, on February 23, Teck resources withdrew its application to build a $20 billion Teck frontier mined the largest ever open-pit tar sands mine sited on Dene and Cree territory in so-called Alberta. This win is a direct reflection of the tireless work spearheaded by Indigenous-led campaigns and frontline communities. We know all such victories are temporary while industries exist so we must be non-negotiable in our solidarity with these wild places and those who are most beholden to their defense. Please visit our website at ForTheWild.world for a full list of links, resources, and action points.
Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast, InTheField edition. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was “Jug in the Water” by Cary Morin, “Dirty Water” by Compassion Guerrilla, “Ghost” by Lynx & The Servants of Song, "Fauna Lingua" by The Melawmen Collective, “Golden Age” by The Mynabirds, and "This Machine" by The Honey Tongues. I'd like to thank our podcast production team, Aidan McCrae, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, March Young, and Melanie Younger.