https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJx5luCX7xc
Many close friends in Victoria love Goldstream Park with its majestic forest and river ecosystem. (Its original name is SELEKTEL in WSÁNEĆ.) Friends carry an understanding about this region as being part of the WSÁNEĆ speaking First Peoples’ traditional territory—their homeland where they have ongoing Treaty rights.
The Ministry of Transportation and Highways is aiming to begin a project in 2026 that is completely senseless and doesn’t improve or enhance anything for anyone. According to the Ministry and their contractors, along the 1.7km section where the highway becomes two lanes, the bright yellow poles currently installed as lane dividers do not provide enough safety for people in cars. They want to replace this with a thick concrete meridian, which will require widening each of the two lanes. They propose cutting 700 trees along the riverbed, quite a number of which have been identified as old growth. The government’s own environmental assessment process has declared this will cause irreversible damage to the ecosystem including the river’s already rapidly declining salmon populations. There is no alternative provided to improve safety at this highway bottleneck between the South Island and Mid-Island regions. (Slowing down could help? Public transit?)
I was deeply touched by the manner in which the Oct. 22nd event was coordinated, including WC Forest Campaigner Tobyn Neame’s way of threading the program together so graciously, the young WSÁNEĆ drummers and singers, the elders who offered their reflections and the speech of Adam Olsen, a former MLA who is now the lead treaty negotiator for the Tsartlip First Nation.
The filming was not planned… I had only heard about the event the day before and it all happened spontaneously! Putting it together as one video, I was again moved by the dignity and purity of the elders’ teachings in respect to the history of Goldstream/Selektel and the Douglas Treaty. Especially, these speakers offered an intimate view into the traditional relationships of their people with the land, the river and animals, as established over millennia by their presence within the ecosystem. I now feel much more informed and capable of participating humbly in matters of Truth and Reconciliation, right where I live, where so many big decisions are being made by politicians living in forgetfulness about human health being dependent upon and inseparable from the health of Mother Earth.
The proposed highway expansion/amendment represents a willing enactment of colonization, an abuse of treaty rights and a stripping of the ecosystem. And BC taxpayers will spend $162 million+ to make all of this possible.
I am away until next Sunday and will attempt to share the video on social media afterwards. It would be wonderful if some friends who have seen it already would be willing to share it and help this important information spread. I hope you each find it inspiring, uplifting and motivating, and I hope it leads to more voices arising to request honesty and integrity from elected officials. A group is steadily growing around Tsartlip Elder Carl Olsen’s weekly 10am Tuesday demonstrations at Goldstream along that section of the highway. He has been standing there every week for almost three years now!