Terrace et al

Suzanne

4 min read

Three days in Terrace. We come to honour my mum and see, first hand, the town which has the Spirit Bear as it’s emblem.

The time has come and we are in Terrace.  It is pretty ‘north!’  up here.  On the way down from Hazelton we passed the turn off for Alaska, which is about 100 miles up that road.

I don’t believe we would ever have come to Terrace but for my mum, but that is for another day. We are here and in the home of the Kermode Bear.  The Kermode is a sub species of black bear and is very precious to the First Nations. According to legend, the Raven, when he turned the earth from snow white to forest green, wanted a reminder of how the world used to look.  To do this he made every tenth Bear a white bear. The scientific reason is that some Kermodes have a recessive gene which, when both mummy and daddy bear possess it, they produce a white bear.

It is believed there are around 400 of the white Kermodes (or Spirit Bears) living in and around the Great Bear Rainforest.  Terrace is a little outside the rainforest but has adopted the white Kermode as its symbol.  Indeed there have been sightings here and, a few years ago, one was transported back into the wilderness as it was in danger of becoming habituated.

In a huge expanse of rainforest you can imagine it is very difficult to find these bears. Wildlife tourism is on hand to help you find them but you can easily spend £5,000 per person trying to do that for a few days in a soaking rainforest and come away with nothing except for the glory of having used the forest as a toilet - yes that is true, I have enquired.

Back to Terrace and it is quite noticeable that a large proportion of the population are indigenous.  There is also homelessness with people using shopping trollies to carry all their belongings around with them - and the majority of the homeless appear to be indigenous.

Canada has a very troubled relationship with its indigenous people. Ever since Europeans came to Canada there has been a desire to subjugate indigenous people and get rid of its culture. The beacon of this hideous approach has been the use of residential schools whereby children were forcibly removed from their families and taken hundreds of miles away to be forcibly re-educated.  These schools were nothing but concentration camps of a kind.

Many children died and some have survived to tell their story and Canada is slowly coming to terms with its inglorious past.  But it is slow process. We won’t be here but September 30th is National Truth and Reconciliation Day, set up to honour the children who never came back and the survivors who did, with their scars. On the same day all Canadians are encouraged to wear orange to symbolise the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem.

We went for a visit to Kitselas Canyon, owned and operated by the Kitselas Band.  They were very welcoming and the ironic thing for me is that in rehabilitating indigenous people and communities Canada is finally recognising its own peoples culture which has existed for thousands of years before General Wolf beat up the French in 1759 at the Heights of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec.  Canada finally has a history courtesy of the people and culture it tried to wipe from the face of the earth.

So, as with any places we come across, Terrace is a mixture of beauty and the beast. Some of the landscape defies description; there is a hugely active cultural scene with multiple murals adorning the walls. But the homelessness is very apparent and the lives of indigenous people seem very mixed.



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Categories & Tags
Categories

British Columbia, Terrace

Tags

nature, First Nations, Spirit Bear

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