While the road was ultimately built, the protest galvanized activists, including many who didn't live to see this year's victory. He traces the movement for Sinixt recognition back to 1989, when he and other members of the Colville Tribes traveled to Vallican to block a proposed highway whose construction displaced the remains of their ancestors. While the court decision could not have happened without his carefully planned hunt, Desautel is quick to acknowledge the other Sinixt people who fought for recognition. The court decision could also affect Indigenous people along Canada's border with Alaska.
that would increase shipping traffic through traditional Lummi territory. In far northwestern Washington, for example, the Lummi Nation is seeking to assert its rights to block a major new port development in B.C. "I think you will see these concepts of citizenship on both sides of the border fundamentally change over the next 10 years for those cross-border nations." "I think we'll look back on it as the beginning of the end of the border, at least as we currently know it, for Indigenous peoples on both sides," Underhill said. and Canadian governments to revisit how they deal with rights of tribal nations along the border.
#JANETTER DESSAUTEL AND JACQUES FULL#
In a phone call Thursday, Underhill said while the full impact of the decision isn't clear yet, he expects it will force both the U.S. An appeals court upheld that decision and in October 2020 it went to the country's highest court, where Desautel's attorney, Mark Underhill, argued Native people's rights should not be deprived by the forced displacement so many endured along the U.S.-Canada border. court acquitting him in 2017, ruling that Canada's constitution guaranteed his right to hunt on his ancestral land. When Desautel turned himself in to the authorities in 2010, it set off a long legal process that led to a B.C. Meanwhile, many Sinixt people still lived in Washington, separated from much of their traditional territory by an arbitrary border that had existed for a relative blink of an eye in comparison to the thousands of years they had spent on that land. But soon after the last Sinixt member known to the Canadian government died in 1953, the government declared them extinct. The border's arrival in the 19th century split that territory in two, leaving some Sinixt people in Canada and the rest in the United States, where they were pushed onto the Colville Reservation.Ĭanada's government recognized the Sinixt, known there as the Arrow Lakes Band, in the early 1900s. In 2010, Desautel and his wife Linda crossed the border into Canada with a plan they had settled on with other Colville tribal members: He would shoot an elk, they would pack it out in accordance with Canadian law - which guarantees hunting rights to members of First Nations recognized by the government - and then he would turn himself in to local authorities.īefore Europeans arrived and eventually drew a border along the 49th parallel, the Sinixt lived in what is now southeastern B.C. "It's great to go back into your ancestry and see where you came from," he said.
The first time he returned to the area after the ruling, Desautel said with a laugh, felt like "homecoming week."ĭesautel said he's been traveling to the ancestral lands on the Canadian side since the 1980s "when I first realized that the Sinixt people lived in that area and walked into those grounds, feeling my ancestral roots." In a landmark decision in April, Canada's Supreme Court overturned a 1956 declaration that the Sinixt, one of the 12 Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, were "extinct." On the surface, the 7-2 ruling simply found Desautel had the right to kill a cow elk in that part of what is now British Columbia, but it has far-reaching implications for other Indigenous people whose ancestral lands have been bisected by the U.S.-Canada borders. 31-This past summer, Rick Desautel stopped alongside a road near Vallican, British Columbia, and gave a prayer to all the members of his tribe who had fought for decades for the Canadian government to recognize a simple fact: They still exist.
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