"Our Economy Walks on the Land": Secwepemc Resistance and Resilience After the Imperial Metals Mt. Polley Tailings Storage Facility Breach

Gratitude, respect, and solidarity to Jacinda Mack of the Xat'sull First Nation, Bev Sellars of the Xat'sull First Nation, and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities of Williams Lake, Likely, and Quesnel. Thank you to Chris and Mikara Pettman from 100 Mile House.

It is just before dawn, at Quesnel Lake, on August 4, 2014. The small splash of a rainbow trout hunting flies echoes across the water at one of the world's deepest fjord lakes and the banshee call of loons ricochets through the surrounding forest. Every August, the sockeye salmon are readying for journeys through the Fraser and Quesnel River Watershed and the bright, cold waters that have been their home for a genetic eternity. In Quesnel Lake, clean gravel beds, deep cold water, and many shallow snag pools shelter colourful bull trout. Small boats slide into the water, humans preparing rods and hooks to catch, kill, gut, and eat the bull trout, rainbow trout, lake char, forked tail, and silver stomach. Black bears feed on deep purple huckleberries and soft overripe thimbleberries, sharing gathering space with a family of humans out filling baskets of blue-black Saskatoon berries. Hazeltine Creek flows into Quesnel Lake, though in August the creek barely wets the grey glacial boulders and moss-grown gravel beds. Lodgepole pine, trembling aspens, and paper birch lean almost right across the soft summer creek flow.

Then, upstream of Hazeltine Creek, the earthen walls of the Imperial Metals Tailings Storage Facility shift—as if a heavy hand pushed them aside—millions of litres of post-industrial fluids rush into Hazeltine Creek. The breach of the storage facility is so sudden and so violent that creekside trees are uprooted as the tailings swell over the sides of Hazeltine Creek.

The creek—no longer a creek but a raging effluent spill—muddies and thickens. It carries a heavy sludge of copper, arsenic, mercury, and selenium, and it overturns the bull trout's gravel beds. As the tailings tumble into Quesnel Lake, boats rise high, and bears, humans, and deer are alerted by the rip and tear of trees, bushes, and 25 million cubic metres of water and silt flowing from Hazeltine Creek into Quesnel Lake. From Quesnel Lake, the tailings will flow into the Fraser River and the Pacific Ocean.

This is Canada's, and one of the world's, largest and most impactful mining disasters of its kind, and it is early morning, August 4, 2014, on unceded Secwepemc territory, in colonial British Columbia. In total, approximately 25 million cubic metres of contaminated water and ground mining waste, or tailings, spilled into Edney Creek, Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek, and Quesnel Lake. A 10-metre swath of sedimentary material lies across the bottom of Quesnel Lake at the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Non-Indigenous responses from government and industry represent the spill as an aberration in an otherwise peaceable mining industry. Indigenous and Indigenous ally responses set the spill in the context of more than a century of colonial imposition on unceded territory. Ongoing resistance to the re-opening of the mine, to the nature of government and industry response to the mine, and to mining on unceded territory is both specific to the Quesnel Lake watershed and concomitant with resistance to neoliberal extractivism as a practice of colonial genocide.

I am not a Secwepemc woman. I am a settler colonial scholar and continue to benefit from settler colonialism in my role as an academic and an ally activist. I grew up close to the site of this spill, on unceded Secwepemc territory. Quesnel Lake, or Yuct Ne Senxiymetkwe, is on the territory of the Xat'sull First Nation (also called the Soda Creek band). The traditional Secwepemc name Yuct Ne Senxiymetkwe was shared with me by Jacinda Mack, and shared with her by T'exelc elder Jean William. Yuct Ne Senxiymetkwe is mapped in Secwepemc territory through stories, family memories, and family names; the spill interrupts these stories and families. The name refers to the birthing waters of the salmon...