EvErlasting - National Magazine Awards

On April 3, the first
modern urban treaty in Canada—
between the Tsawwassen First Nation
and the government of B.C.—comes into force.
It’s the life’s work
of the band’s young chief, Kim Baird,
and a brave step beyond the
hopelessly complex
and costly process of
adjudicating
aboriginal rights
now&
Everla s t i ng
By Terry Glavin
Photography by David Fierro
Kim Baird, five-term chief of the
Tsawwassen First Nation, on
her sovereign land. Behind her
rises Tsatsu Shores, and over the
horizon lies Roberts Bank
6 6 va n m a g . c o m a p r i l 2 0 0 9
“I am going to explain to you gentlemen how
our ancestors were created in this place, right over
at the high land here known as Scale-Up, or English
Bluff.” This is how Harry Joe opened his arguments
before the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission on
Indian Affairs during its hearings at the Tsawwassen
Indian reserve on April 28, 1914. He began with a story
about arriving, and that’s the important part. After all
these years, with Joe’s great-granddaughter, Kim Baird,
at the middle of it, the story is still about arriving.
English Bluff is a place name that comes from the
1910 Admiralty Chart. Scale-Up comes from S’tlalep,
a complex Hun’qum’i’num term that can be rendered
as I Want From Now and Everlasting. Harry Joe was
a prosperous fisherman and farmer who proudly displayed his vegetable varieties at the New Westminster agricultural exhibition every year. He was also
chief of the Tsawwassen Indian band.
The grievance that Chief Joe put before the royal
commission was this: back in the 1860s, the government had been disgracefully parsimonious in its
allocation of reserve land to the Tsawwassen people.
There was still good farmland around the village,
Chief Joe said, but it was going to waste. Indians had
been legally prohibited from pre-empting and developing land, so they had to settle for whatever the
government gave them. Chief Joe and his people once
owned all the land they could see for miles and miles
around, and they’d been left with almost nothing.
The Tsawwassen people needed more land.
The royal commission said no.
a p r i l 2 0 0 9 va n m a g . c o m 6 7
Now & Everlasting
Roberts Bank
port/terminal
Road
Map for a
Nation
1867
1914
Indian lands fall under federal
1960
Roberts Bank
port/terminal
1990s
2007
asks for more lands from the fed- causeway, displaces the Tsawwas-
the Canadian Charter of Rights
researcher for the Tsawwassen
of Georgia
three to one in favour of the first Straitallowing
the Tsawwassen
responsibility. In 1871, a newly
eral government. The McKenna-
sen First Nation’s traditional long-
and Freedoms, restoring status
First Nation, is elected to band
modern urban treaty in Canada. On
First Nation to own its own
formed B.C. establishes the
McBride Royal Commission on
house. A decade later, the Roberts
and band membership to Indian
council, and becomes the youngest
October 15, Baird is the first Native
land and become, in large
Tsawwassen colonial reserve
Indian Affairs rules against him
Bank coal port opens, to protest
women who married non-Indians
chief elected by the Tsawwassen
woman to address the legislature
measure, self-governing
6 8 va n m a g . c o m a p r i l 2 0 0 9
Tsawwassen chief Harry Joe
An extension of Highway 17, the ferry
Bill C-31 aligns the Indian Act with
Kim Baird signs on as a land-claims
Ri
ver
Ri
ver
Roberts Bank
port/terminal
1985
The B.N.A. Act forms Canada.
2009
BC Ferries
terminal
52nd St
Only a generation or so ago, Tsawwassen was a quiet village surrounded
by lush fields and woods and a glorious,
gently sloping, southwest-facing clam
beach. It’s now a strip of houses encased
by the roaring traffic of eight million
people a year on the Tsawwassen ferry
causeway on one side and the massive,
ever-expanding Roberts Bank coal port
52nd St
ty comes into force on April 3, and Baird’s
due with her third child in early May.
by the Tsawwassen First Nation. The
“But at the end of the day, I don’t think
Tsawwassen government will be mostly a that’s the kind of thing that will affect the
municipal-style affair, joining the Metro
lives of our members,” she says. “UltiVancouver board with some distinct
mately, you have to be pragmatic.”
jurisdictions in culture and social welfare.
Cash transfers of about $30 million will
This brings us back to the story Chief
play out over about 15 years as Indian Act Joe told the commissioners in 1914, about
tax exemptions are phased out. The treaty how the Tsawwassen people emerged on
guarantees access to fisheries for food,
that beautiful beach all those years before.
social, and ceremonial purposes, and also There was a man named Tsaatsen who
provides commercial-fishery access rights. came down from the clouds and found
The hullabaloo clause was the one that himself on top of Mount Cheam, the
allows the Tsawwassens to remove 207
Mountain of Dogs, at the eastern frontier of
hectares from the province’s shrinking
the Chilliwack tribe. Tsaatsen was looking
Agricultural Land Reserve. The plan is to for land to settle on, Chief Joe explained,
develop them in tandem with a $47-miland he saw on the western horizon an
lion economic development deal Baird
island in the sea. This was the land now
negotiated five years ago with Deltaport’s
known as the Point Roberts peninsula.
Roberts Bank container terminal, which
Geologists tell us that Point Roberts was
is quadrupling in size. Rarely mentioned
indeed an island around the time the
in all the shouting was that the disputed
record of human settlement at Tsawwasfarmland was destined to come out of the sen begins, nearly 50 centuries ago. It was
ALR anyway; besides, the amount of farm- below the bluff at its northwest corner,
land involved would support perhaps a
long known to the Tsawwassen people as
single economically viable farm. Plus, 227 S’tlalep, that Tsaatsen built his house. This
hectares of “new” Tsawwassen lands will
is the story that Kim Baird will tell you.
end up within the ALR, something that
But there is another story, every bit as
wasn’t possible before the treaty, because
old. You’ll hear it still from some of the
the ALR doesn’t apply to Indian reserves. old people at Tsawwassen. This one also
The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs
begins in the Chilliwack territory, except
opposed the treaty. The Tsawwassens’
in this account the first Tsawwassen is a
neighbours, the Semiahmoo,
were joined by three Sencot’en
tsawwassen
tribes from Vancouver
Island
ser
Fra
land map
ser
in a failed court
bid toasstop
the
a
er
r
F
Fr
treaty. The day Baird became
33A Avein
the first aboriginal woman
33A Ave
Deltaport Way
33A Ave
history to address the BritDeltaport Way
Way
Deltaport
ish Columbia legislature,
28 Ave
the Tsawwassen elders who
28 Ave
28 Ave
accompanied her had to walk
to the legislative precinct past
old land
demonstrators who shouted
new land*
that the treaty was a fraud and
7
y1
rights ofhrefusal
land† 7
wa
a sellout. And yes, there is a
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g
i
y1
ay
H
wa
hw
lot in the treaty that’s not to
h
g
water lots‡
i
g
H
Hi
like, Baird agrees, not least the
Tsawwassens’ concession to
give up their constitutionally
entrenched title to their lands.
52nd St
Kim Baird’s life’s work, and you could say
that it’s because of her determination and
single-mindedness that the Tsawwassens
have burst upon the scene as one of B.C.’s
most business-savvy aboriginal communities, with the first modern urban treaty
in Canada. Baird was pregnant with Amy,
now five, when she signed the treaty’s
agreement-in-principle, and she used to
breast-feed Amy during negotiations. She
gave birth to Sophia, now two, three days
after signing the final agreement. The trea-
and container terminal on the other.
You turn off Highway 17 just before
the ferry causeway, below English Bluff,
and drive north down a narrow road. You
mind the speed bumps. First you pass
Rick Jacobs’s little house—he’s 88—on the
right. Then you pass the cemetery, with
its shell mounds and the white crosses
that mark the graves from the Spanish
influenza, back in Harry Joe’s day, when
the people barely had time to bury their
dead. Then you pass Andrea Jacobs’s
house. Marvin Joe’s house is the big one
with the gillnet boat out front, and then
you pass the Westwind, an old Japanesestyle gillnetter. Then there’s David Joe’s
house, then another gillnet boat, and just
beyond Tina Koller’s house there’s another
gillnetter, the Tuff Stuff II. And then there’s
a row of pleasantly modest 1980s-style
suburban tract houses where most of the
Bairds live. There’s Kim’s place, her brothers’ houses, and her mother Edie’s house.
There are a few more houses, mostly
Joes, Eelys, and Jacobses, then you’re at
a cluster of Atco trailers and low-slung
wood-sided office buildings. There’s the
youth centre, the old community hall, the
elders’ centre, and the band administration, and inside that building, Baird is
curled up in an Indian blanket on a couch
in a cramped corner office that looks out
on the salt marsh fronting the reserve.
Although the treaty will more than
double the Tsawwassens’ land base, this
will still leave the roughly 360 Tsawwassen people with less land per person than
the original 1860s reserve allocation that
so animated Chief Harry Joe. Which is
kind of a paradox.
“I know,” says Baird. “It’s been painful.”
The treaty’s contents and most of the
means by which the pact was sealed are
matters of public record—and public
controversy. The federal Indian Act entity
known as the Tsawwassen Indian band
will cease to exist. Its 290-hectare Indian
reserve will disappear into 724 hectares
of settlement lands, some owned by
individual Tsawwassen members, some
Ri
ver
Kim Baird, 37, juggles politics,
kids, and studies at UBC.
Former mayor (now senator)
Larry Campbell calls her “the
best negotiator I’ve ever seen”
This page and previous: styling
by Krista Seller/Lizbellagency.com
Harry had a son, Simon, who married Philomena “Birdie” Adams from the
Katzie tribe. Simon and Philomena had
a daughter named Edith who moved to
Langley and married a white man named
Lorne Baird. Edith raised four sons and
a daughter, Kim. After Lorne died, Edith
and her children led something of a
vagrant life but eventually arrived back at
the Tsawwassen reserve and settled down.
Kim was 15 then. She was the one with
the leather goth-punk gear and the huge
hair and the six-foot white boyfriend with
a blond Mohawk. She ended up being the
first kid on the reserve to graduate from
high school in nearly two decades. She enrolled at Kwantlen College in Surrey and
drove there every morning in her beat-up
1976 Toyota Celica automatic, a puddle of
radiator fluid at her feet. It was at college
that she started to learn some things about
what Harry Joe was angry about. So she
took up his cause.
When Baird was 20, she signed on as
a Tsawwassen treaty researcher. She got
elected to band council two years later.
Seven years after that she was elected
chief, and the Tsawwassen First Nation
has now—after 17 years of talks in 50
sets of negotiations that have so far cost
about $1 billion—concluded the first and
only full treaty to result from the B.C.
Treaty Commission process.
Baird, a solid, hearty woman with a
big smile and a big laugh, is serving her
fifth term as chief. She plans to run again.
The transition out of the Indian Act is a
mammoth task, and it will go on for quite
some time. About a third of the Tsawwassen people are unemployed, the average
household income is about a third of that
in the surrounding community, and the
high-school-dropout rate hovers around
50 percent. There’s a lot of work to do.
Ultimately, the treaty was concluded
according to marching orders given and
ratification votes taken by the Tsawwassen people themselves, and the final deal
was approved by the Tsawwassen people,
by three to one. But the treaty has been
BC Ferries
terminal
BC Ferries
terminal
Strait of Georgia
On July 25, the Tsawwassens
vote
The treaty takes effect,
Strait of Georgia
* Not shown: 62 hectares on the Fraser and Boundary Bay, under Delta’s jurisdiction
†
For 80 years, the Tsawwassens have first right of refusal on these 278 hectares
of land, if those now leasing them vacate
‡
The Tsawwassens have authority to regulate these for public health and safety
a p r i l 2 0 0 9 va n m a g . c o m 6 9
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woman. In order to comprehend it, it is
necessary to know that the story unfolds
in the days before Khaals the Transformer brought order to the Coast Salish
world, which is to say it takes place at a
time when people and animals were not
yet confirmed in their forms, and could
change from one into another.
The story begins with a beautiful
young high-born woman who finds that
the handsome young man she has taken
as a lover is really a dog. She discovers she is pregnant. Filled with shame,
she resolves to flee her upriver village.
She steals away in a canoe and heads
down the Fraser River towards the sea.
At last she arrives at Tsawwassen, bears
a litter of pups, and begins a life there.
But one day, returning from fishing, she
finds her offspring singing around the
campfire: “Our mother thinks we are
puppies, but we are children, we are human, like she is.” And so they were.
Which brings us to an afternoon 20
years ago, when the archaeologist Geor­
die Howe was busy with a “salvage”
operation in the forest on the corner of
the reserve that lies on the south side
of Highway 17, just below the bluff.
Howe was working at the edge of a vast
burial-mound complex that had been
disturbed by a road the band administration was punching through. Howe
reckoned that the burial mounds were
so extensive they could easily contain
the remains of “as many as 10,000” people. From that one small corner of the
complex, Howe and his team removed
more than 100 skeletons, some of them
4,000 years old. There were tombs of
what were believed to be some class of
royalty, buried with lovely copper ornaments, scallop shell rattles, and in one
tomb, more than 30,000 stone beads.
Some of the graves gave up not human
bones but, strangely, canine mandibles.
It was a heartbreaking time for the
Tsawwassens for a couple of reasons. It
brought back into the light a glimpse of
their life before the onslaught of smallpox nearly obliterated the Coast Salish
universe in the 1770s. It also opened
memories of a time when they flourished in one of the planet’s most important migratory waterfowl staging areas,
and just a short canoe run from some
of North America’s richest salmon runs.
As recently as the early years of the 20th
century, at the lowest tides of the year,
you could still see the stakes and pilings
from the remains of the Tsawwassens’
ancient network of massive sturgeon
traps, each trap the size of a football
field. And that life, all of it, was gone.
The second reason it was such a
hard time also involves the business
of arriving. Around the time the road
went through the edge of the burial
mounds—a road that would give access
to the band’s profitable Tsatsu Shores
condominium development—dozens of
people were being added to the Tsawwassen band’s membership rolls. These
were people who had regained their “Indian status” following the passage of Bill
C-31, a federal law aimed at undoing
discriminatory Indian Act rules that had
stripped Indian women of their Indian
status if they had married non-Indians.
Their children also lost their status.
It was also around this time that the
Tsawwassen band was distributing benefits from the lucrative Stahaken leases,
which allowed for a posh subdivision
all along English Bluff, or S’tlalep, or I
Want From Now and Everlasting. The
reserve was flush with cash, and so with
intrigues and arguments, and there were
a lot of new people around—C-31s,
they were called. They were distant
cousins, in-laws, and the children of inlaws nobody had ever seen before.
By 1857, all that was left of the Tsawwassen community, according to the
Northwest Boundary Survey Commission, was “a small settlement consisting of a few Kanakas [Hawaiians] &
Indians.” The Tsawwassens limped into
the second half of the 20th century
with about 50 members. By the time the
Bairds arrived home in the 1980s, there
were about 150 people on the band list
but only a dozen houses on the reserve.
Now there are about 70 houses, and the
membership exceeds 400 people. Only
about half live in the community, but
all the adults get to vote. They vote for
chief and council. They vote on important decisions. They voted for the treaty.
It’s among the Tsawwassen families
who you could say “never left” you will
find the hard core of treaty opponents
and dissenters. “I think it stinks” is the
way Bertha Williams describes the treaty,
especially the way it was negotiated and
approved. She goes through the litany: the
elders were “bribed” with the promise of
a $15,000 signing bonus, the provincial
government paid the airfare for faraway
band members to attend meetings, and so
Now & Everlasting
on. But her main complaint is that the process was swamped by C-31s, who carried
the day. “What do these people know about
our reserve?” Bertha Williams asks. “We’re
losing the bloodline. Some of these people
have blond hair, blue eyes, the whole thing.”
To each of Williams’s complaints, Baird
has an answer. “I feel terrible for the community,” she says. “There’s just so much
change, so fast.” But she, too, remembers
the days when the burial mounds were
opened, and the self-styled environmentalists from South Delta who came out in
droves when the Tsatsu Shores deal was
approved. “Save the Herons,” their placards read. “No More Handouts.”
By the time Baird arrived at Tsawwassen
she’d lost her father—he died when she
was eight—and gone through a half-dozen
schools in Langley, Surrey, and Delta.
Always on the honour roll but always the
outsider, her mother says. Shy as a mouse.
Baird remembers, too, taking the bus from
the reserve to Delta Secondary School and
the friends she lost because their parents
wouldn’t let them hang around with kids
from the reserve. Her older brothers, Ken,
Terry, and Mike, lived in a vine-covered
house down on the beach. Kim lived with
her mother and her kid brother David in a
trailer at the north end of the reserve.
There were lots of women who came
back around that time, and some didn’t
make it. Kim’s aunt Lonni drank herself to
death. The hostility the women faced was
something incredible. “But man, those
women were warriors, let me tell you,”
says Baird, whose husband, the father of
her children, is a carpenter, a white man.
You would not want to tell Kim Baird
that her children are not Tsawwassen.
The story of Tsaatsen from Mount
Cheam can be reconciled with the Dog
People story. Tsawwassen was once so
populous its people could easily have
come from several ancestral lineages, with
several genesis stories. The reconciliation
of Crown sovereignty with aboriginal
rights, the point of treaty-making, is also
achievable, even in a heavily urbanized
and industrialized landscape. The Tsawwassen treaty proves that. The Tsawwassens will never again have to stoop to
begging for land the way Harry Joe did.
But reconciling the tensions among the
Tsawwassens, between those who never
left and those who have recently arrived,
is going to be harder still. “One thing
you’ll notice about people who oppose
the treaty is they tend to be the people
who have a hard time getting rid of their
anger. It’s not that people don’t have good
reason to be angry,” Baird adds quickly. “I
just don’t think people realize the kind of
stress that aboriginal people go through.”
As for the widespread interest the treaty
has drawn, Baird is resigned to the spotlight. “For me, it’s been like living under a
microscope,” she says. “I don’t particularly
like having to deal with the media. I don’t
exactly crave the attention, to be honest.”
The treaty’s real significance lies in the
brave step Baird has taken. It’s a bold
move out of the culturally and economically crippling conversation around questions of aboriginal rights, Crown sovereignty, and Native/settler relationships.
The Tsawwassen treaty says, quite simply,
goodbye to all that. It’s time to move on.
It’s a story about arriving. VM
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