A race to save Indigenous trails may change the face of archaeology

Wind jostles the helicopter as we skim over dense forest and the snow-covered peaks of the Coast Mountains. We are flying over northwestern British Columbia, and from this aerial vantage point, it’s easy to see how mid-19th century European fur trappers called this land wild. But then, as now, that image is a mirage.

Snaking somewhere below us is the old Babine Trail network, a “grease trail” likely used for millennia by the Gitxsan people to carry goods such as eulachon, a type of smelt rich in oil, from the coast to inland communities. The crew I’m traveling with — which includes archaeologists, locals versed in this region’s ecology and culture, graduate students carrying soil-sampling equipment and bear spray, and members of the Indigenous house group, or wilp, whose ancestral lands we’re on — has come to mark part of that ancient path.

Beneath the chopper, a small patch of brown grass appears, and the pilot begins a steep descent. Once on the ground, boots squelch on mossy floor or sink into snow as we search for the overgrown Babine. Fierce brambles obscure the terrain. But we know the trail must be nearby.

That’s in part because the team is following hints in maps made with lidar. Short for light detection and ranging, this remote sensing method can map the Earth’s topography with aircraft or satellites that send pulses of laser light toward the ground and then measure the returning light. But not all snippets of trail show up clearly. Our crew is going in on foot to connect trail fragments visible in those lidar maps.

Eventually Brett Vidler, an archaeological field assistant, calls out, “I think we’re on it guys.” He’s pointing to a tree with a divot and sharp cuts in its trunk — a blaze. From a thick spool of pink ribbon, Vidler rips off a bit that reads “culturally modified tree” and hands it to a group member to tie around the trunk. Periodically, as we fight our way through the brush, someone also stops to tie trees with blue ribbon reading “cultural heritage resource” to signify the trail.

This trail network has become overgrown as Indigenous people’s connection to their land and culture has frayed. In the late 1800s, Canada established a federal residential school system that tore Indigenous children from their families, including those living here, and forbade students from speaking their native language.

Marking trails helps local communities reconnect with their heritage. The blue and pink ribbons also symbolize how Indigenous people here — and in many other parts of the world — are turning to the tools and language of Western science to fight ongoing threats to their communities. One big threat around here is oil and gas development. British Columbia’s Indigenous trails are now a test case for how, or if, cultural resource management practices can evolve as archaeological and Indigenous understandings of the landscape coalesce.

Developers already bulldozed through one ancient trail in the region a few years back. Now people here worry that the Babine Trail is next.

An endangered Indigenous trail

We are in Madii Lii, a 354-square-kilometer tract of land in Gitxsan territory that both the government of British Columbia and the Gitxsan people claim as their own.

“The pipeline is going right underneath here,” says Aspin’m nax’nox Ira Good. Good is a member of the Gitxsan Nation’s Flying Frog Clan. He’s referring to the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, which is slated to run along or over this Madii Lii trail segment.

This sliver of earth could soon be buried under access roads, temporary encampments and construction of the pipeline itself, which if completed would carry natural gas up to 780 kilometers from northeastern British Columbia to the coast, almost 300 kilometers west of here by car. Provincial authorities issued certificates for the project to proceed in 2014. After years of delays, developers broke ground on a portion of the pipeline near the coast in late August. They must make substantial headway on that construction by late November or those certificates will expire.

Good and others hope that marking the trail will put pressure on the government to block pipeline development or at least force a reroute. It’s a long shot. Generally speaking, Indigenous people see landscapes as interconnected and indivisible while Western people see the reverse. But the Western mind-set governs preservation practices on lands slated for development. Cultural resource management policies typically focus on discrete sites, not on landscapes. By extension, preservation most often centers on the tangible stuff found at excavated sites — old foundations for houses and buildings, pottery shards, arrowheads and the like — rather than the intangible memories and stories woven into the land.

For development projects in Canada and elsewhere, only land within the footprint of the project is subject to archaeological (and environmental) review. Vast or linear cultural features, such as trails, that intersect with that footprint might appear in these assessments but rarely as contiguous wholes.

Historically, Western archaeologists have not questioned this site-based approach, especially as mapping had to be done on foot, a time-consuming and laborious process that could only cover so much ground. But now, some archaeologists have begun using lidar and other remote sensing tools to probe how past peoples connected across gardens, courtyards, cities and even continents (SN: 1/11/24). As these archaeologists’ spatial lens has widened, they are increasingly seeing landscapes as interconnected places of movement (SN: 12/4/24).

The linkages between places, or sites, are just as important as the materials left in a given place, says Kisha Supernant, a Métis archaeologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “People don’t just live on a point.… I don’t just live in my house.”

But most of archaeology — and notably cultural resource management — hasn’t kept up. “We are stuck with this mind-set that the past is all about the hearth and the home,” says Jim Leary, an archaeologist at the University of York in England. “In reality, real life happens out in paths.”

When commercial archaeologists hired by the developers of the Prince Rupert pipeline mapped the proposed pipeline, the Babine Trail made only a scant appearance in their notes. The archaeologists stated that the pipeline would overlap some 200 meters, or about 3 percent, of the nearly 12-kilometer trail. In reality, the trail is roughly 80 kilometers long, and the pipeline will destroy half of it, says Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby in British Columbia and a project lead on the effort to mark the Babine. “The archaeologist who went in for the company recorded a trail but as a point … not a line.”

Here in this dense patch of brush, where the stories of Gitxsan ancestors live on, the archaeology report noted there was little likelihood of finding anything of cultural significance.

Archaeology’s site problem

Culturally modified trees don many guises. Deep slashes on a trunk denote blazes cut with an adze. Bent and plaited branches signal a trail or the intentional clearing of a path. Pines with missing rectangular patches of bark are “noodle” trees, where hungry passersby unfurled the bark and ate sweet ribbons of sap.

I am now in the Wet’suwet’en Nation, south of Gitxsan territory. Armstrong is leading a training session to help students learning about their heritage identify such trees. The students, many Indigenous, include middle-aged community members living elsewhere who’ve brought children ranging in age from tots to teens and a handful of twentysomethings who’ve been living off-grid in this area.

Surviving out here has never been easy. Even now in mid-May, temperatures often drop near freezing at night, and black bears, hungry from a long winter preceded by drought, frequently lumber out onto the gravel roads. Identifying modified trees is one way to understand how the ancestors navigated these harsh environs, Armstrong says. She belongs to the small but growing group of archaeologists trying to move past the Western concept of sites, frequently referred to as polygons.

“In the digital age, geospatial technologies give us the capacity to detect, record, index and analyze sites at scales impossible in the analog age when the notion of a site entered our lexicon,” archaeologist Mark D. McCoy of Florida State University in Tallahassee wrote in 2020 in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Armstrong and colleagues outlined what a non-site-based approach to archaeology could look like in 2023 in American Anthropologist. Her team sought to map both the Babine Trail in Gitxsan territory and the Kweese War Trail in the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The researchers combed through troves of documents dating back to 1980, including earlier land-use studies, cultural heritage reports, notes from interviews with elders and legal documents. Whenever possible, Armstrong and colleagues wrote down the geographic coordinates for references to trails.

The team used that info to decide what linear features to home in on in visual data, including historical aerial photos, helicopter surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, and lidar images. The researchers also noted previously recorded archaeological sites located within 200 meters of those likely trail sections.

With those clues in hand, the team began schlepping out on foot to mark the Babine and Kweese trails. Whenever a trail’s signature disappeared in the images, the team followed the most likely route on the ground until again spotting telltale signs of movement, such as packed earth and culturally modified trees.

Similar research is playing out in other parts of the world. In the Netherlands, archaeologist Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart of Leiden University has turned his lens on so-called hollow roads. They form when travelers, in this case people bearing carts laden with goods, trample the same route across long stretches of time. The earliest confirmed routes where Verschoof-van der Vaart was looking — the 2,200-square-kilometer Veluwe region in the central Netherlands — date back to the Middle Ages, from 1250 to 1500, though some researchers suspect people began using those paths thousands of years earlier.

Nobody had mapped that extensive road network, in part because those channels are now almost invisible to the naked eye. After beginning to stitch together the networks revealed in lidar maps, Verschoof-van der Vaart realized the tracks harbor secrets about how people once navigated the terrain.

Archaeologists interested in mapping movement must shift their attention from tangible artifacts to subtler alterations of the land. It’s rare to find an important artifact along hollow roads, Verschoof-van der Vaart says. “Maybe in some lucky case you find something that was lost along the road, maybe a coin or a belt buckle or … part of a wagon. But it’s not like excavating a settlement where you find lots of stuff. So these roads themselves are not that interesting, but the story they tell … is very interesting.”

And for Indigenous people who trace their roots to northwestern British Columbia, the routes and journeys are as valuable as any artifact. Twice during my visit, I listen to Mike Ridsdale, a member of the Wet’suwet’en Tsayu, or Beaver, Clan, tell a story about his ancestors’ journey along the Kweese War Trail.

Kweese was a hereditary chief when the Kitimat people killed his family centuries ago, says Ridsdale, who is also a retired biologist for the Wet’suwet’en Nation. So Kweese hosted a large feast, where he invited members across the Wet’suwet’en’s five clans to help fight the Kitimat. The warriors prepared for a year before heading out to the Kitimat people’s coastal village. They traveled along what would become the Kweese War Trail but was then a grease trail like the Babine.

The battle was fierce, but the Wet’suwet’en people prevailed and took the Kitimat people’s crests, including a killer whale, as spoils of war. On the return journey along the trail, though, many injured Wet’suwet’en soldiers died. With no way to carry them home, those soldiers were left where they fell. The old grease trail became sacred ground.

“This is why the Trail is so important to the Wet’suwet’en, the ancestors who fought for our freedom, the very Crests that we wear on our backs, the story’s linkage through the actual trail that you can see. This is what it means to be Wet’suwet’en,” Ridsdale recounts in the 2023 paper in American Anthropologist, which he coauthored. “If you destroy the trail, you will destroy our history.”

Legal weight

Thanks to a landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision known as Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, those stories should, in theory, hold as much weight as artifacts and colonial maps in the country’s judicial system. That legal battle began in 1984 when the plaintiffs, the hereditary chiefs of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations, claimed sovereignty over 58,000 square kilometers of land in British Columbia based on their oral histories.

Indigenous land rights have long been a point of contention in Canada. Since the 1600s, colonial and then national leaders sought to claim Indigenous lands through treaties and promises of payment. Such negotiations rarely occurred in British Columbia, and most First Nations have not ceded their land there. That makes the province the focal point for contemporary land-claim battles.

Oral stories passed down through generations often trace the people’s presence on the land back to time immemorial. The hereditary chiefs in the Delgamuukw case argued that those stories, coupled with the relative dearth of government treaties, proved their people’s sovereignty over the disputed lands.

But the courts repeatedly questioned that territorial claim, arguing instead that Indigenous stories constituted hearsay or myth. In 1997, the case wound up before Canada’s Supreme Court, where justices unanimously ruled that oral stories were, in fact, history. “Oral histories,” the judges ruled, “can be accommodated and placed on an equal footing with the other types of historical evidence that the courts are familiar with.”

But the judges stopped short of granting the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations title to that 58,000-square-kilometer expanse. Representatives for those nations walked away from settlement conversations when provincial authorities offered the title to a tiny percentage of the disputed land. With that process stalled, the British Columbia government can still claim ownership.

Since then, economic development has tended to trump Indigenous land claims. Such development began accelerating in Canada in the mid-2000s with the rise of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which liquids are injected underground at high pressure to crack the rock and extract otherwise inaccessible oil and natural gas (SN: 8/24/12). With the government’s backing, developers soon began exploring northwestern British Columbia.

The courts still do not give Indigenous stories equal footing with other forms of evidence, Armstrong and others say. So Indigenous people have turned to lidar and landscape-level mapping to prove to a Western audience that their stories are true and the lands they reference merit saving.

Armstrong’s training session in the Wet’suwet’en Nation teaches students not just how to recognize modified trees, but also how to speak the language of the courts. Document everything with geographic coordinates, she frequently notes. “Take a point, take a picture.”

Among the equipment Armstrong shows the students is a minimally invasive corer that can be inserted into a tree trunk and carefully removed to measure tree rings. On culturally modified trees, the trunk grows around old adze wounds like a pair of protuberant earlobes. The age of the cultural modification can thus be calculated by coring the entire trunk and an earlobe. “Courts can handle dates. They love them,” Armstrong explains. “The idea of validating is powerful in Western courts.”

But unless the provincial government changes cultural resource management policies, such landscape-level analyses are unlikely to become the norm, says Rick Budhwa, an applied anthropologist and founder of Crossroads Cultural Resource Management in Smithers, British Columbia. “Someone has to pay these archaeologists. Why would that developer … ever pay to go and do all of this work?”

Boots on the ground

On my second day in Wet’suwet’en territory, I meet Ridsdale and the students from the training session at Gidimt’en Checkpoint, an assemblage of log cabins, a fire pit and a makeshift kitchen that, when I arrive, is warm from a fire burning in a woodstove. Though quiet now, Gidimt’en served as the headquarters for protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a $14.5 billion project that has been on the books since 2012. When operational, the pipeline will carry natural gas 670 kilometers from northeastern British Columbia to a liquefaction facility in Kitimat.

On paper, it can appear as though Indigenous leaders in the area largely support fossil fuel development. Housed within Wet’suwet’en ancestral lands are six small parcels of land that the government reserved for Indigenous people with the Indian Act of 1876. British Columbia officials established band leaders to head each reserve, a leadership system that remains in place today. Five of the six band leaders OK’d the Coastal GasLink project.

But the Indian Act is a legacy of colonialism, and many Wet’suwet’en people still view hereditary chiefs, not band leaders, as the legitimate leaders of the land and its people, Ridsdale says. Coastal GasLink developers did not garner support from most chiefs, who argued that the pipeline and its construction would wreak havoc on the area’s waterways, thereby threatening salmon and steelhead populations, as well as displace land animals, including endangered caribou. The pipeline would also slice up the sacred Kweese War Trail.

Ridsdale had been informally mapping the Kweese trail for years. But as the threat of natural gas pipelines ramped up, he knew he needed to communicate his findings more broadly and began collaborating with Armstrong. “We realized that we have got to document a lot of trails, especially the Kweese War Trail,” he tells me. But Ridsdale, Armstrong and the rest of the team abandoned their efforts to mark the Kweese after pipeline construction began in 2019.

Coastal GasLink developers maintain that their assessment found “no evidence of this trail,” but, according to their website, they “nonetheless worked diligently to protect the areas identified on the maps provided, including the careful and planned avoidance of the specific areas of concern.” Coastal GasLink representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Protests against the pipeline began shortly before Coastal GasLink broke ground. In February 2020, protestors blockaded the tracks of a major transcontinental Canadian National Railway line, forcing its temporary closure. The fight against Coastal GasLink morphed into a battle for cultural and climate justice, with protestors questioning more oil and gas development in the face of catastrophic global warming. Some people here say protestors might have succeeded in halting the pipeline were it not for the onset of the pandemic, which prevented people from gathering in protest while construction proceeded.

From Gidimt’en, Ridsdale is leading the students to the Kweese trail — a pilgrimage to bear witness to what once was and what has now been lost. On the long drive to the trail’s access point, neon yellow Coastal GasLink signs caution that we are in the area of a “high pressure natural gas pipeline.” Logs left behind as the old logging road was widened and then extended to accommodate an influx of construction flank the roadside, along with culverts, water pooling where they have backed up. As we near a section of the trail, a sign warns against traveling in convoys greater than three vehicles. Our convoy is seven SUVs and pickups long.

“They can’t tell us what to do on our own territory,” Ridsdale mutters. After an hour or so, we leave the vehicles behind and continue on foot, scrambling over wide trenches dug into the now shuttered road. Ridsdale wanders around where he knows the trail ought to be. “When they built all of this, I lost my bearings,” he says. He finally locates the trail. The road has cleaved the Kweese in two.

Speaking the language of Western science

In his second century book Geography, Greek cartographer Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known today as Ptolemy, used latitude and longitude lines to partition the world into a grid. Ptolemy’s idea of gridded space might well have languished in obscurity were it not for a 15th century translation of the book from Greek to Latin.

That translation paved the way for the Western world’s separation of space from place, ethnobiologist Leslie Main Johnson wrote in her 2010 book, Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path. Land became an abstraction, a canvas that European rulers could carve up for exploration, development and settlement, and on which they could fight wars over arbitrary boundaries.

Today’s grid-based maps bear little resemblance to maps drawn by Indigenous people. For instance, in their maps, Northern Ontario’s Cree people marked rapids and portages, as well as secondary streams that allowed travelers to circumvent dangerous waters. Cree mappers omitted prominent landscape features that had no bearing on the designated travel route.

Yet Ptolemy’s grids underpin the field of archaeology. “Archaeology itself as a discipline is a Western concept,” says Aviva Rathbone, an archaeological consultant in Vancouver.

And that mind-set extends to the geospatial tools that commercial archaeologists use to estimate cultural value, says Supernant, the Métis archaeologist at the University of Alberta. The initial analysis is typically done using a Geographic Information System, or GIS, a computer system that captures, stores and displays data about a given geographic location. GIS software can help cultural resource managers identify various landforms and resources that correlate with past human activity to estimate a site’s archaeological potential.

When that software flags an area as moderate to high in potential value, archaeologists often investigate on foot to determine if mitigation is required. Where models predict low potential, development can typically proceed without boots on the ground — even when Indigenous community members challenge those findings.

In their computer assessment, archaeologists hired by the developers of the Prince Rupert pipeline labeled more than 85 percent of Gitxsan territory — including most of Madii Lii — as low in archaeological potential. Given that designation, it’s not clear if anyone representing the developers will walk the Babine to ground-truth those findings, Armstrong says. But she disputes that assessment, arguing that another appraisal of the region from the 1990s revealed rich potential. Stantec, the cultural resource management company hired by Prince Rupert developers, did not respond to requests for comment.

Johnson, now retired, notes that lidar maps’ more expansive view better reflects Indigenous world views and can empower Indigenous communities to dispute archaeological assessments conducted on their lands.

But such tools can also disempower Indigenous people by forcing them to converse in a foreign spatial language. “The widespread adoption of GIS and Western mapping conventions by Canadian Indigenous people can be seen as the result of a power imbalance and the people’s need to present their knowledges in a language and form that can be understood and accommodated by governments and industry,” Johnson wrote in her book.

Some of that imbalance might be playing out back in Madii Lii. After a kilometer or so of fighting through the brush, the crew marking the Babine Trail reaches the confluence of two streams, which run fast and cold this time of year. Soil samples taken from a depression in the earth come out deep and dark. Good suspects we might have found the site of an old cabin his grandmother, Tillie Sampare, used to talk about.

Sampare figures large in Good family lore. Family members recall how Sampare would reminisce about walking this trail as a little girl with her grandparents, her na’a and ba’a. Sampare knew where to find the best berries and how to hide them for later. She once walked the trail for seven days, stopping frequently so that her grandparents could wrap her aching feet in deer or moose leather. When government agents started sending kids to residential schools, Sampare’s family hid her at Madii Lii. That enabled the family to hold onto their connection to the land, language and culture a little bit longer.

Like many Indigenous people, Good now struggles to speak the language. And he must travel here from Prince George, some five hours away, where he works as a trucker. But he’s still bonded with this land. He has spent the last few years driving his all-terrain vehicle, chainsaw in hand, clearing the Babine. By this point, he figures he’s cleared about 10 kilometers. Good scrolls through pictures on his cell phone before pausing on one shot. A moose carcass lays across his lap, his shirt crimson with blood from the recent kill.

Connecting the trail where the chopper has deposited us to the part he’s cleared, a distance of some 15 kilometers, would take another three years, Good speculates, likely more. He almost certainly doesn’t have that much time; the Prince Rupert Gas pipeline would overlap roughly half of the 80-kilometer trail, including the part Good has been trying to clear.

The fight is not as simple as Indigenous people versus the province. Earlier this year, TC Energy, the umbrella company for both Coastal GasLink and the Prince Rupert pipeline, sold rights to the latter pipeline and its export gas facility, now known as Ksi Lisims LNG, to Western LNG and the Nisga’a Nation. “You’ve got an Indigenous group essentially pushing pipelines through other Indigenous groups’ territories,” says Budhwa, who is Indigenous and a formally adopted member of the Wet’suwet’en people’s Gitdumden, or Wolf/Bear, Clan.

Though Western LNG and Nisga’a Nation representatives could not be reached for comment, a joint August press release notes that construction on the portion of the project located on Nisga’a land has begun. To prevent the permits from expiring, the developers’ imminent construction plans include clearing land for roads and a right-of-way, installing bridges and building a facility to house several hundred workers.

Scorched earth

On my last day in British Columbia, I hike up an access road to a waterfall located between Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations, armed with a can of bear spray and a 130-decibel horn that purportedly can scare a bear almost a kilometer away. Per locals’ recommendations, I dutifully clap my hands around blind turns to announce my presence.

A sign up the road, where a nearby tree displays the gouge of an adze, cautions: “Mountain goats can be adversely affected by humans (e.g. hikers, loud noises, vehicles, etc.) … When mountain goats are present, please … move slowly and quietly.”

In this rugged landscape, it can be hard to ignore a sense of foreboding. As efforts ramp up to save the Babine Trail, the existing landscape is facing interconnected challenges. Last year, wildfires scorched a record-high area of land in British Columbia, nearly 3 million hectares. Climate change is the main culprit behind an uptick in wildfires here since 2005, research shows. But clearing land for mining and other extractive activities is also increasing the fire risk.

Curtailing global greenhouse gas emissions by ending our reliance on fossil fuels is one solution to curbing climate change’s threats, here and elsewhere. Current global energy needs can be met through existing pipelines, argued the authors of a policy paper published in May in Science. Committed groups of people can help block new projects by facilitating “mass social movements that pressure governments to ban them,” the authors wrote.

An outpouring of support, however slim the possibility, would buoy those working to save Madii Lii. Protesters failed to protect the Kweese trail, but they came closer to halting the pipeline than anyone expected. What if things play out differently for the Babine?

With construction in this area seemingly near, Good has come into the brush with a last-ditch plan. He has brought the modern and very Western tools of public relations: a drone equipped with a video camera. He’s also radioed members of his family to join us. By the time they chopper in and find our crew in the thicket, the small entourage is exhausted from hauling garbage bags bulging with drums and heavy regalia — cloaks embroidered with the clan crest, a flying frog. Three-year-old Ax K’ets Gianna Starr, whose dad carried her atop his shoulders, is in tears from her bevy of scratches.

Using the potential site of Sampare’s old cabin as a backdrop, Good gets everyone in position and launches the drone, which zooms in as a family member sings and drums. Good’s careful vision doesn’t quite materialize. The drone is too loud and drowns out the ceremony.

But Good remains optimistic the video can convince people this land is worth saving: “It will be pretty powerful to have this right here, right now.”