[IPSM] Dease Lake, Telegraph Creek caught in crossfire

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Yellow propaganda against traditionalists: fresh from the Vancouver Sun. 
This reporter goes overboard in providing caricatures of the position of 
those opposed to six industrial developments led by companies such as 
Shell all occurring simultaneously in one fell swoop.

A settler's frothing is seldom pretty.

Macdonald

Dease Lake, Telegraph Creek caught in crossfire
Tahltan Chief Gerry Asp has built an empire -- just ask residents
Don Cayo
Vancouver Sun

May 16, 2005
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=92867fa9-65f7-4054-a52b-75c02ae89e8f

DEASE LAKE - This is a tale of two psyches, and two villages. Or of the 
old ways versus the new in a huge swath of land that's strikingly 
beautiful and rich in resources, yet remains economically challenged.

One of the villages is Dease Lake, a scattering of a few dozen houses 
and a few hundred souls, two-thirds of the way up the Stewart-Cassiar 
Highway in B.C.'s far north. All the standard businesses -- a couple of 
motels, service stations, stores, and a restaurant -- line the highway. 
And just out of town, on native-owned land, stands the Tahltan Nation 
Development Corp. headquarters -- a sprawling office complex and 
equipment depot that testifies to the industry and initiative of what's 
often said to be one of Canada's most progressive bands.

The other is Telegraph Creek. It's smaller and more homey. It clings to 
a steep hillside at the end of a 112-km-long roller-coaster -- a narrow 
and rough road that twists and switches in directions as various as the 
winds, and can drop or soar 150 metres in just a minute or two, even 
when you crawl along it in your lowest gear. Framed by its mountains and 
underscored by the Stikine River, it could be a postcard -- sleepy, a 
bit shabby, and ever so redolent of yesteryear.

The trouble with using these villages as a metaphor, however, is that 
the people who live in them may not fit into the stereotype as neatly as 
a writer might like. Depending who you believe, almost all the people in 
both places support the business-minded chief, Gerry Asp, or else they 
all support the tradition-oriented elders who head what's becoming a 
very messy fight.

What each side says is sharply at odds, and it's hard for a stranger to 
know what to believe. But the issue, hot since January, is coming to a 
head this week.

And it's just as hard to imagine it can end well any time soon.

There are two agreed-upon facts: In two decades under Asp's business 
leadership, and for the last three years under his political leadership 
as well, the Tahltans have built an economic titan -- by the standards 
of this generally poor and sparsely populated neck of the woods. And the 
chief has plans to leverage much more of the same from the Tahltan claim 
to 252,505 square kilometres (97,500 square miles) of traditional territory.

Asp created what started as a little company building on-reserve houses 
into a construction-catering-trucking enterprise with $7 million in 
assets. It's owned by the band, which has a total of 1,650 members 
across Canada, but only 525 in its little reserves here and at Telegraph 
Creek.

"We're strong on training," Asp says with evident pride as he underlines 
that 95 per cent of the corporation's employees are Tahltan. "We have 
zero-per-cent unemployment in winter, and only about six per cent in 
summer. That's something no other band -- well, very few -- can claim."

Maybe so, says Lillian Moyer, a band councillor, elder and general fly 
in Asp's ointment.

But she sees two big problems.

Asp likes to talk about the skilled mechanics and other tradesmen who 
work in construction, but Moyer says many of the jobs the Tahltan 
corporation provides aren't very good ones. For example, it has a 
contract to provide services at the big Eskay gold mine near the 
southern fringe of the territory -- a mine that, not incidentally, is 
expected to close next year.

"What do we get at the mine?" she asks. "The lowest jobs -- the 
labourers, maids, cooks, scrubbing the toilets."

She's also deeply suspicious of Asp's plans for a raft of new projects 
to replace and greatly expand on the jobs that will vanish when Eskay 
closes. She sees this as too much, too fast.

Moyer lives in Dease Lake, but for four months she has been one of a 
handful of stalwarts in a come-and-go group of elders who are occupying 
Telegraph Creek's band office. Except for a few days she took off to 
have an operation, the 66-year-old grandmother has made herself at home 
in the big, modern building that Asp's construction workers built.

She and a varying group of others -- as many as 35 or 40, she says, but 
as few as three last Saturday -- eat, sleep and play countless hours of 
cards, while band staff find ways to work around them.

Asp crisply outlines six big projects that he hopes to see get off the 
ground: They are:

- Nova Gold's Galore Creek copper-gold-silver mine proposal near 
Telegraph Creek.

- A proposal from BC Metals for the Red Chris copper mine near Iskut, 
south of Dease Lake on the main highway.

- Fortune Minerals' coal-mining proposal in the Klappan area near the 
headwaters of the Skeena, the Nass and the Stikine.

- Shell's coal-based methane project in the same area.

- Coast Mountain Hydro's run-of-river project on the Iskut River.

- A proposal for a new high-voltage line from Terrace.

The hydro, coal and coal-based methane projects are freestanding, Asp 
says, but the mines both depend on the transmission line providing grid 
power.

Elder Gilbert Campbell condemns the Shell proposal out of hand, saying 
it will destroy two rivers, the Skeena and the Stikine. But he's vague 
when pressed to explain how and why.

The elders are just as vague in other criticisms.

In one breath, the only problem is that Asp is trying to bull these 
projects though without consulting either elders or elected councillors. 
In the next, they accuse him of trying to secretly bring in 12 mines, 
although they don't know where.

Then they start on the personal stuff -- none of it printable -- and 
complaints about intimidation, and questions about everything from how 
the last election was conducted to where money from Tahltan enterprises 
goes.

Elder Thomas Inkster says the chief's opponents no longer just want him 
to resign, they want him gone from the territory.

dcayo at png.canwest.com


-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://independentmedia.ca/survivingcanada
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
    --Bertholt Brecht.