On a May morning in British Columbia’s Bella Coola Valley, Clyde Tallio, a long-limbed 31-year-old Nuxalk intellectual, and I walk a dirt road that gives way to a forest path up a bank from Thorsen Creek, swollen with spring melt. As we slip beneath the forest canopy, we move between worlds: from rural Western Canada to sacred Nuxalk territory—the lands of Tallio’s people, who are emerging as the protagonists in an Indigenous epic unfolding on this unconquered expanse of Pacific coast.
Tallio calls out in his Nuxalk tongue, an endangered language with fewer than 10 fluent speakers that he spent years studying instead of attending university. He announces our presence to the animals, ancestors and spirits, clearing the path and asking for protection. We turn our bodies in a clockwise circle, the same way dancers spin before entering the dance floors of the big houses that are the spiritual heart of Indigenous communities along the coast. Thorsen Creek, or Squmalh in Nuxalk, a tributary of the lower Bella Coola River cut into the valley by retreating Pleistocene glaciers, connects us to Nuxalk creation.
Ahead, watching us from the soggy floor of the verdant rainforest, are dozens of ancient petroglyphs etched into rocks lining the stepped trail. The glyphs, carved in stone thousands of years ago (estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000 years), date roughly to the Mid-Holocene, a period of significant ecological change that made resources like western red cedar — an essential material for building structures, wares and artworks — more abundant and accessible to coastal peoples. Tallio dates the glyphs to “the time of the fixing of the Earth.” In poetic, if not archaeological terms, he might be right.
Tallio names the glyphs as we ascend the hill: the frog, a transformer who takes many forms in life; raven, the meddlesome trickster whose follies and transgressions animate many Nuxalk stories; the four ancestors representing the four generations who survived the four catastrophes: the falling of the sky, the burning of the world, the flooding of the land and the famine of the people. Like biblical plagues these calamities led to the creation of Nuxalk laws, or, as Tallio puts it: “the way of being, being at the place.”
The Nuxalk followed and enforced these ancient decrees in every aspect of their social life, from summer fisheries to winter ceremonies. The explorer Alexander Mackenzie learned just how serious the Nuxalk were about their laws when he travelled the Bella Coola River in 1793. Admiring a large fishing weir, Mackenzie asked for a closer look but was refused as a visitor unpractised in the Nuxalk way.
The village edict appears stern, but across the generations, laws like these, which controlled access and mandated fair distribution, fostered, in the summation of historian Lissa K. Wadewitz, “a world negotiated for the benefit of both salmon and people.”
Tallio and others are working to bring Nuxalk rights back to this place and many more throughout Nuxalk territory. In the coming years, many places in the Nuxalk homeland, roughly from Dean Channel in the north to South Bentinck Arm in the south and King Island in the west to the Bella Coola Valley in the east, may come under Nuxalk jurisdiction for the first time in more than a century.
“As a much older nation,” Tallio tells me in his professorial tone, “we have to show Canada how to manage these resources.”
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The night I arrive in Bella Coola, the Moody family hosts a potlatch, a Nuxalk celebration of singing, dancing and gift-giving, to pass their hereditary title, Nusmata — meaning “Heaven” — from Larry Moody Sr. to his son Larry Jr.
In 2015, the elder Moody hit the $1 million jackpot in Lotto 6/49. He used the winnings to buy cars for his brothers, furniture for his home and a Harley for his son. A year later, he suffered a brain aneurism. The 77-year-old’s health has been declining, so he’s decided to pass the mantle of leadership to his son.
In the Nuxalk Hall, a community gymnasium that doubles as a big house, the Moody family treats some 200 Nuxalk and visitors to a feast. From my seat atop the wooden bleachers, I watch elders visiting with old friends and kids chasing each other in endless games of tag. With guidance from Tallio and other Nuxalk culture keepers, the Moody family makes ready for the potlatch, hanging cedar boughs over the entrances to ward off spirits. Behind a screen painted with Nuxalk designs, Larry Jr. dons his father’s finest traditional regalia and prepares to take on his new name.
In the re-emergent Nuxalk ancestral governance system, this hereditary title will give Larry Jr. a role akin to a borough president in New York City. Nusmata can make land use decisions for Snut’li, his family’s traditional village site in the Bella Coola Valley, but like those big city borough presidents, Nusmata is more advisor than policy-maker in community-wide decisions (decision-making authority on reserve still rests with the elected band council). As the Nuxalk look to re-assert sovereignty over their territory, which encompasses dozens of ancient family seats abandoned during the colonization and settlement of this land, men like Larry Jr. will become increasingly powerful and important in the governance of the Nuxalk people and their places.
As we polish off our plates of beef stew with mashed potatoes, Noel Pootlass, who holds the title Nuximlayc, head hereditary chief representing the village of Q’umk’uts, site of the present-day reserve, takes the floor in a regal sea lion-whisker headdress plated with ermine pelts and a red-trimmed button-blanket embroidered with an eagle crest. All stand as he dances his song, right hand placed proudly on his hip, rattle shaking in his left. He presides over the dance floor, turning from left to right, chin high, taking in his people and domain.
The Nuximlayc name almost did not survive. In 1975, the last Nuxalk elders who still remembered the hereditary laws sent for Noel’s father Lawrence, who was working as a janitor in the Empress Hotel and the provincial legislature in Victoria at the time.
“You don’t belong here,” a Nuxalk elder shouted at Lawrence when he found him in the streets of the provincial capital. “Go home!”
But at first, Lawrence did not want to be chief and was reluctant to return. His parents were deceased. He was a residential school survivor sent far away to Port Alberni as a child, his language and culture beaten out of him by priests who believed them to be the devil’s work. As a young man, he struggled with alcoholism and attempted suicide.
By the time the elders found him, he had children, including Noel. The reserve is a hard place to raise a family. Lawrence was poor. He did not know that the abundance of the Bella Coola Valley—the huckleberries and medicines and treasured songs and dances—were his inheritance. He did not know that he was much more than a janitor; that he was descended from leaders. It took some convincing, but eventually he returned to dress and dance his name, Nuximlayc.