April in Kispiox Valley, BC

April.

I tapped out those words three months ago – the good old days now suddenly behind us, the static before the storm. It’s always been easy to hold my own fragility in this place, to see in slow motion all that could unravel in a moment’s mistake. Easier still to marvel at the massive house of cards that is our global system as it ticks along busily just a little to the south and infinitely beyond; that extraordinary coordination of need and greed, beauty and horror and tiny plastic parts.

It was a hope for a more thorough, connected life – and a reasonable dose of anxious prepper energy – that, less than four years ago, brought my family to this humble homestead on the edge of Delgamuuxw House Territory, in the Kispiox Valley, in a north-western pocket of British Columbia. We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into (isn’t that always the case?) but at this moment my gratitude is bright enough to break my heart wide open for all we have been given. I am particularly grateful for the brief but crucial time we have had to get some measure of our shit together.

In January and February, at work and at home and on highways and police lines, we were consumed by the events and narratives unfolding as the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters were raided and removed from their camps and homes on the Yintah, for the second time in just over a year, by elaborate (and expensive) numbers of Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This, for the continued construction of the CGL pipeline meant to move fracked gas from the northeast to the ports, across the sea to a foundering market. Solidarity blockades across the country disrupted the movement of goods and people across traditional territories; colonial governments were forced to negotiate directly with hereditary chiefs; court cases were launched; countless pots of soup and boxes of donuts were consumed in good company on rail road tracks; land defender camps were built and dismantled and built again; LAND BACK banners fluttered in the wind and the world, to me, stood still. What could be bigger than this moment?

There are variations on a meme, in which, essentially, the Wet’suwet’en say, “shut down Canada!” and then SARS-coronavirus-2 says, “Hold my beer.”

Now we are navigating this second massive disruption of this still-young Roman calendrical year from our small and beautiful network of communities in the Skeena. The snow is melting under brilliant sunshine, but the nights can still dip below freezing. The pastures reveal themselves, a moonscape of yellow-brown. We can hear the river again.

On the family homestead, life ticks along as normal, our more-than-human kin indifferent to the sudden shift in the world beyond the fences: The horses and cows rotate between fields, eating round bale hay we roll out on drought-damaged soil to mulch it with the waste and fertilise it with their manure. The pigs alternate between sleeping in their family nests, ranging the woods and fields, arguing loudly, and wrestling for barnyard supremacy. The goats crawl over lumber piles and old wood stoves to get in with the bull and steal his food; one lady goat, in seemingly perpetual heat, daringly romances my large, predatory dog. The chickens hatch improbable chicks from eggs we’ve given up on, or work their way up the porch steps and into the kitchen to peck their crops full of cat kibble. The seedlings reach for light from their trays inside the log cabin windows, waiting for the moment we can chance a frost-free night and get them out to the greenhouse. The freezers are full of what we’ve lovingly dubbed Apocalypse Pork, something we’re grateful to be able to share with a few friends and neighbours – and bony roosters from a winter cull, and whole salmon from the summer before, and side of beef we sort of panic-bought (our beautiful Dexter steers won’t be ready til fall), then cut and wrapped outside to the sound of thundering horse hooves.

We’re isolated in a pod of three households (two off the farm but nearby in the valley); we gather a few days a week for meals and work bees. When we have to go to town, we consult with each other and follow public health protocol – we also drive through a checkpoint at Kispiox Village, where the Band Council has instated quarantine measures and is strongly discouraging non-locals from entering the community.

The Chicken Project, as it is mostly known, is an initiative I’ve been working on with Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition (my beloved source of employment) and a local Gitxsan farmer. On his land, Skeena Valley Farm, we’re building a Taj Ma-chicken-hal meant to house up to 1500 heritage meat birds at a time, when they aren’t ranging in the fenced wild bush beyond (1.5 acres of hazelnut, dogwood, alder, fern, rose and birch and spruce, oh my). This is a small-scale production model we’re being coached in by the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance out of Minnesota – it’s meant to feed our community high-quality, affordable, nutrient dense food, but also to demonstrate the potential of these systems and train other would-be farmers to replicate and adapt the model to their own situations. It’s a poignant effort at this time, but it always has been for us. Our towns are both dependent on and vulnerable to the fragile systems we’ve all grown accustomed to in a few short decades.

In the first few weeks of the pandemic, we weren’t sure how to continue. The urge to take shelter – not only from the virus, but from all the stresses and unknowns and tiresome everyday challenges – has been strong in all of us. Meanwhile, most of the Gitxsan villages are in some state of community isolation, local supply chains are challenged, and our team is stretched. If ever there was a year, however, to do our part for sustainable local food security, it is this year. We’ve divvied up tasks we can complete on our own or in pods and we’ve managed to secure our order of chicks for June. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it looks like community economic development, feels like indigenous food sovereignty and smells like slow-roasted chicken in every dang kitchen.

Our region is remote and sparsely populated, which is a huge boon against transmission of COVID-19- but that also equates to a lot of vulnerable people across a vast land base, with very limited resources. So, like everyone else on the planet right now, we wait and we watch and we hunker the frick down.

This thing we’re all facing together is amplifying everything to a deafening decibel. Everything that doesn’t work, and everything that does. Honest mistakes, bad timing, devastating inequalities, nefarious decisions, kindness, ingenuity, lucky guesses, compassionate policy, system failures, growth and transformation, all our collective grief – everything we need to change, and everything we cannot or should not.

Now, more than ever, I’m comforted by that strange assurance that came over me in Sitka, surrounded by many of you as we stumbled toward a joint purpose. I feel a kind of solidity under my feet knowing that each of you is alive in this moment, caring for your corners of Salmon Nation: dreaming your dreams, adapting your walk, shedding what is no longer of use, holding your hope and your fear with equal reverence, grieving as deeply as you need to, and weaving the network of energy that emits from each of our hearts and connects to every living thing. We knew this would happen; we just didn’t know what this was, and we didn’t know how soon it would come.

I think of you all as I muck around in the mud and dead grass, scratching furry chins and filling water buckets, reminding myself to breathe when I catch myself holding my breath. Hang on, sweet friends (and in equal measure, let go) – we are tipping over the edge together. I am sending you love and fresh, cold air. I am willing my heart to be big enough to hold all the grief and all the joy. I am waiting to see how each of us translates this blip on the geological timescale into our own small bit of poetry, prayer, communion, or alchemy. Stay well out there. We need you.

Kesia Nagata.