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By Malcolm McColl
Having the law on your side includes a lot,
like legal jurisdiction over everything in lands, waters, and
resources. Legal jurisdiction falls within borders, and legally
speaking, jurisdiction includes adjudication over all aspects of law
derived from formulated policies, procedures, and regulations. These
are constructed to provide frameworks for actions to proceed
according to legal jurisdiction over criminal, civil, and commercial
courts.
When people break the laws they face
consequences forthcoming from legal jurisdictions, and these are
faced in hearings conducted in criminal, civil, or commercial courts.
The judges within these court systems are generally appointed after
years of working within the legal frameworks of their legal specialty
which will occur in one of the above three subsets of legal
jurisdiction: criminal, civil, and commercial law.
All these forms of jurisdiction are
gradually returning to First Nations people, and a prime example
occurs as the result of work done by David Garrick, Anthropologist,
working in the Namgis traditional territory of the Inside Passage on
islands, mainland, and Vancouver Island, B.C..
Because of his scientific research the
Yukusem Heritage Society of Alert Bay, B.C., has acquired legal
jurisdiction over Hanson Island, heretofore known as Yukusem. With
the science in their portfolio, the Namgis Nation has in recent years
recovered the rights to govern commercial activities in forests of
their traditional territory.
The study of Culturally Modified Trees is a defacto
study of human beings to organize themselves around their constructs
of rainforest resources. What David Garrick, anthropologist, has
uncovered is the amazing "transgenerational" management of
Hanson Island (Yukusem) by First Nations at the north end of the
Inside Passage.
This transgenerational management of First
Nation forest resources in coastal rainforests was comprised of a
complex arrangement of activities. Special preserves of rainforest
under carefully defined jurisdictions were ‘managed’ to create and
provide essential resources.
Social groups conducted large scale
horticulture within particular groves of cedar trees on Yukusem’s 16
square kilometres, doing so on a truly grand scale. Together they
made cedar trees do the most amazing things horticultural.
While other matters of criminal, legal,
commercial activity remain outside the purview of Namgis-generated
set of legal codes (including policies about fish farm activities and
commercial traffic, to name but two that are important), people like
Harry Alfred have taken legal measures from scientific evidence and
constructed inroads into jurisdiction.
“I am the land and resource officer of the
Namgis First Nation,” said Harry, one afternoon in a David Garrick
constructed garden grove on Yukusem. Harry described how the nation
has rebounded because of Garrick’s work in these groves surrounded by
other groves of ancient Culturally Modified Trees.
The Namgis Nation has devoted a lot of
nation-building energy to the CMT research, and the people have
regained their cultural balance. Life goes on, and a lot of life
contains the old secrets of majestic jurisdiction that are
empirically evident in scientific research on Yukusem (and elsewhere
across the province of B.C.).
Harry Alfred and Don Svanvik sit on the
Yukusem board of directors on behalf of the Namgis First Nation. Two
other Bands share jurisdiction here, names the Tlowitsis and
Muntagila. These two men have become CMT experts for their nation. “The
Namgis Nation,” said Harry, “comprised about 4,000 km,” and he described
a rectangular shaped territory that includes the Nimpish watershed on
northern Vancouver Island.
David uncovered cedar shaping on their behalf in CMTs during
his long and fruitful tenure of archaeology onsite at Yukusem, which
began as early as 1982. The island itself is, “a basaltic volcanic rock
much of the surface scraped off by glaciations,” leaving the, “rock
ridges with little valleys containing the bigger trees and thicker soils.”
A restoration of legal jurisdiction was
the salvation of the island's cedar groves, too, because the entire
islands was mapped out and ready for industrial logging. Everything
was going to be cut. Elsewhere in the jurisdiction, said Harry Alfred.
“The Nimpkish watershed was
formerly home of Canada’s tallest trees,” he noted, “the 300-plus
foot Sitka spruce.” Those all fell to the practices of industrial
logging under the jurisdiction of others. It not doubt could have been done differently under someone else's jurisdiction.
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