Nuxalk Dawn

By Charles Burnett

Stretching in the early morning light before a morning run last week in Bella Coola, I took this photo of a Nuxalk totem pole facing telephone lines. I was thinking about the privilege we have to be helping build data management capacity in this ancient, and at the same time, youthful community. Besides running and a little fly-fishing, my time in Nuxalk Territory was split between assisting with cultural data cataloging and review for the NX Indigenous Laws project, and working with the ‘Projects’ team on efficient tracking and analysis of development applications, including Crown referrals.

Iris, Clyde and Nicole, researchers in the NXIL project, diligently worked their way through a dozen documents on the day I worked with them, including: cataloging photographs from a collection at the Canadian Museum of History, a set of published stories, and a digitized audio tape interview from the 1980s.

On other days, Megan,  Angel and Andrea on the development/referrals side reviewed a draft internal projects protocol and procedures manual, practiced logging projects, and explored several applications (referrals and pre-referrals) spatially using the CedarBox Development App. We also explored the Live-Link between the DevelopmentApp and QGIS.

I couldn’t help but think CedarBox was playing a small part in the age-old governance cycle: gather, share and protect knowledge <-> record, understand and steward activities on the land/waters.

Technical note: While in Nuxalk we upgraded the Nuxalk CedarBox server to 16GB of memory and 4TB of hard drive space. We also helped set up their shared drive (running off a big network attached storage, NAS). All part of our current wise practices set-up for First Nations Stewardship offices.

Respect to:

• Megan Moody, Stewardship Manager, and all her staff
• Clyde and Iris for stories, placenames, and laughter
• Sue at the Bella Coola Motel
• Gwen for great coffee and grilled sandies at Little Nook Cafe
• Kopas Store for flies