Working up in Bella Coola

I’m up in Bella Coola this week working with the Nuxalk Nation.   I am running some facilitation training and then on Saturday, an Open Space meeting here in the community on the subject of reclaiming Nuxalk child and family services.

This place is out in the middle of virtually nowhere.   It’s 450 kms west of Williams Lake, but only an hour and a quarter by plane.   However, the Bella Coola valley is surrounded by the tallest mountains in the Coastal Range and man are they huge.   We flew PAST them this morning, over the Monarch Icefield, in what was one of the most breathtaking flights I have ever taken.

After landing, I went to lunch with the Elders and we ate the first spring salmon of the year.   The fish were half smoked and then finished on a barbeque, cooked over a fire right outside the church where we were eating.   Nuxalk fishers are pouring onto the river this week, catching fish by drifting in a boat with the current and setting nets.   The fish swim up and the nets are carried down and after an hour of drifting, you have yourself some fish.   Everyone’s excited at the prospect of fresh salmon again.   Much of the traditional fishery has disappeared these days including the essential eulachon fishery which once provided a massive staple to the community.   Eulachons are so healthy that they act as a virtually prevention medicine cabinet.   There has been an eulachon run on the Bella Coola river in 15 years.

After lunch my client, Liz Hall and I joined her sister Sylvia and her husband Mark and we hiked up to the incredibly impressive petroglyphs up Thorsen Creek.   These are old, some carved as long ago as 3500 years by Sylvia’s reckoning.   There are more modern ones as well, made with metal implements, and consisting of thinner lines.

It’s breathtaking up here, good spirits are with us and I’m keen to look get working tomorrow.