Vancouver Magazine

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Treaty Rights - continued

By Terry Glavin published Apr 1, 2009

Which brings us to an afternoon 20 years ago, when the archaeologist Geor­die Howe was busy with a “salvage” operation in the forest on the corner of the reserve that lies on the south side of Highway 17, just below the bluff. Howe was working at the edge of a vast burial-mound complex that had been disturbed by a road the band administration was punching through. Howe reckoned that the burial mounds were so extensive they could easily contain the remains of “as many as 10,000” people. From that one small corner of the complex, Howe and his team removed more than 100 skeletons, some of them 4,000 years old. There were tombs of what were believed to be some class of royalty, buried with lovely copper ornaments, scallop shell rattles, and in one tomb, more than 30,000 stone beads. Some of the graves gave up not human bones but, strangely, canine mandibles.

It was a heartbreaking time for the Tsawwassens for a couple of reasons. It brought back into the light a glimpse of their life before the onslaught of smallpox nearly obliterated the Coast Salish universe in the 1770s. It also opened memories of a time when they flourished in one of the planet’s most important migratory waterfowl staging areas, and just a short canoe run from some of North America’s richest salmon runs. As recently as the early years of the 20th century, at the lowest tides of the year, you could still see the stakes and pilings from the remains of the Tsawwassens’ ancient network of massive sturgeon traps, each trap the size of a football field. And that life, all of it, was gone.

The second reason it was such a hard time also involves the business of arriving. Around the time the road went through the edge of the burial mounds—a road that would give access to the band’s profitable Tsatsu Shores condominium development—dozens of people were being added to the Tsawwassen band’s membership rolls. These were people who had regained their “Indian status” following the passage of Bill C-31, a federal law aimed at undoing discriminatory Indian Act rules that had stripped Indian women of their Indian status if they had married non-Indians. Their children also lost their status.