Remembering Forward

For 2 years, I worked with the Cheslatta Carrier Nation for my MA thesis in Anthropology. For 10,000 years, the Nechako River Valley has been home to the Cheslatta T’en, a band within the Carrier First Nations. Carrier peoples call themselves Dakelh, meaning ‘people who travel by water’ but in a tragic twist of fate, the Cheslatta T’en were forcibly removed from their ancestral, unceded territory by the flooding from the dams built for Alcan’s Kemano aluminum smelter project in Kitimat

Through an ethnohistorical and ethnographic account of the Cheslatta’s removal from their ancestral territory in the Nechako River region in British Columbia, I investigate the following: How are acts of resistance to displacement and dispossession informed by cultural meanings and memories of the land? What does resilience look like on the ground, 66 years after dispossession and displacement? How is agency expressed within the ever-pervasive system of colonization? How do people come to grips with altered landscapes? In this thesis, I investigate these questions by analyzing the experiences of the Cheslatta’s displacement and the affective power of memory in the destructive aftermath of settler mega-projects through frameworks grounded in studies of social memory, space and place, and ruination coupled with scholarship on reconciliation, resilience and colonialism

66 years later

Timber from drowned forests crowds the shorelines.

One of the few homesteads that remained from the flood.

Pollen on the Nechako Reservoir waters.

All photos by Maia Wikler