A little more than two-hundred years ago, Simon Fraser halted his descent of the river that now bears his name, a few kilometres from where I write. His diary entries for the several days spent near Lillooet were full of angst. There was a mighty lot of people living here for a mighty long time and they had wooden battle armour.
Fraser’s travel guide, an old man from another tribe far up-river, made a vociferous pitch for Simon’s safe passage in a language the explorer couldn't understand. When that Turtle Island advocate later disappeared, Simon looked at the large group camped on the bench above and feared the worst.
Many years later, an old St’at’imx man recounted what he had heard from his own grandfather, who had been a party to that event. According to oral tradition, it had been discussed among the canyon people whether or not to kill the interlopers. It had been finally decided (with the coercion of the guide) that more blankets and other useful manufactured goods could be gotten in future if the entourage was left intact and unmolested.
Let me say, now that I live in this canyon, that the wind sure can blow cold out here. Two epidemics and one gold-rush later, many of the sons and daughters of those old inhabitants and the subsequent newcomers buy their blankets at the Fields outlet.
History is history and people are people. This complicates things exponentially notwithstanding the predictability of the natures of both. The adjectives used in written accounts are mostly chosen for the leverage they afford the chronicler in shaping the outlook of the listener.
In my current view, there are no tragedies in the larger canvas, rather there are millions of individual choices. All the characters who people our history books and those who walk among us now, represent all types of human behaviour. Although humans are 99.9 % genetically identical; paradoxically, that .1 % (wherein lies our variety and accumulated mutations) likely forms the lion’s share of notable persons.
The study of history tends to make many students feel as if the ongoing process of history shudders to a stop as soon as they begin to examine it. It takes a long time to stop a train and even longer to stop a ship. We are daily creating tomorrows fossils. It is sometimes difficult to perceive that an event one may be reading from history has not yet resolved, even as it is being studied. In my opinion, we shall leave traces equally enigmatic to those of our predecessors. Our dwellings are increasingly out-fitted with flammable plastics and our implements of daily personal use are increasingly biodegradable by necessity.
In the infinitesimally short time that we have been a distinct species, we have arrived a plateau called civilization where we are constantly reminded by a necessity of our own manufacture that our continued existence is a problem. I imagine today’s aboriginals as future archaeologists, digging through middens of gyp-rock and granite counter-tops from the Open Concept House Flipping Epoch. Armed with smudge they are clearing the spiritual dust off the glyph-bearing Vinyl Siding Layer.
It is a blessedly interesting counter-point for me, that a few kilometres from where I sit are remnants of dwellings more ancient than the pyramids in Egypt. When they were being studied by scholars it was very likely that a local direct ancestor of the occupants of those pit houses was assisting at the dig site, studying the investigators. I can take a five minute walk and peruse many of those earlier people's tools and articles of daily use in a glass display case where they lie awaiting hands to once again put them to useful purpose. Jade, being harder than steel, has long patience.
New parties of entrepreneurs are coming up and down the world’s rivers today, just as they did in Simon Fraser’s time. They come by kayak, rubber raft, helicopter, motor-boat, ship, Land Rover, zip-line and mountain bike. Sometimes a woman in a pastel wind-breaker with a slight but indefinable European accent with a local advocate in tow, as was the case in the days of Simon Fraser. Usually a man. A young man.
He will have been educated away from home and be very full of his new power and prestige. He will translate for the lady as she intrudes upon people's homes and wrinkles her nose at the smell of their supper. She will give a speech or have the young man do it for her after she has had a chance to visit all the sights of interest. She will make sure that the locals know that everything around them is unique, precious and in great peril of disappearing forever, even though they have been aware of that for the ten thousand years or more that they have had stewardship.
Over time, with training, after generous outpourings of charity and the efforts of very well-meaning, disenchanted urban youth volunteers, the primitive village will find that their ancient domain has in effect become a B & B for the foreign woman's peers.
The local women have meanwhile been empowered to make baskets to sell in gift shops of new National Parks, airports and Global Heritage Sites that were once the hunting grounds of their men. Their daughters, after re-education, may later be offered good, low-paying jobs cleaning rooms, cooking food and minding the children of business owners. Many local men will sadly turn to chemical escape once they perceive their having become culturally redundant.
Visiting tourists will only be allowed access to marked kayak, mountain bike and wooden walkway routes. No one may fish, hunt nor smoke tobacco. Within a year, one will be able to buy illicit drugs on the premises. After the perimeter fence goes up and a private military-trained security force is in place, the detailed mapping and measuring of already known valuable resources will begin in earnest. The area will now under the new legal jurisdiction of treaties entered into between the Newly Empowered and Powerful Newbies.
A tragedy? Not at all. This is living human history. It is a Serial Drama. It is like a glacier that began melting before there were folks around to worry about it. Neither the plot nor the place-holder characters have changed in any fundamental way for thousands of performances of this play.
The fact that it repeats accounts for the costume changes necessary to work with different groups of humans. Social media now provides running updates on whatever tweaks are necessary for the script and cast of characters. Humans likely engaged in herding long before they practised farming, but prudence knows that hunting came first.
It is to be borne in mind that well-educated, fully domesticated humans pay much of the travel expenses of the wiser explorers, entrepreneurs and exploiters via their taxes, donations and stock purchases. Well-chosen words can bring them to tears, frighten them, cause them to cheer or to stampede. Those words have been well chosen through all of recorded history and in educational texts.
They are kept in a trance state by their own spiritual inertia. They adore baby animals yet would shoot one another over a parking spot at the mall. These are the consumers who bring their after-tax prosperity to the speculative village in this essay and enable the bold few to make a literal killing.
Somewhat beyond the gaze of visitors, behind the re-introduced carnivore habitat corridor that encircles the Park, coltan extraction has already begun. Coltan is a rock from which two metals are derived that are both used for constructing iPhone batteries and electronic components.
The guests are guided by a charming young woman named Niobia who reminds them to recycle their Tantalum Springs Mineral Water bottles. The kid who busses the tables makes a respectable supplementary income fishing the digital river. The river he used to fish is barren now. His younger siblings and their elders make some coin recycling smouldering heaps of old phones and laptops that are shipped in from overseas. The place where they used to garden is now again salted with large predators.
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