About a dozen elders slept in the band office that night, nodding off around the conference table as if it were a campfire. In the morning, they talked about what to do about Chief Asp. Though Asp is Tahltan and an elder (he has seven grandchildren), he does not live in Telegraph Creek and had never been part of the community. After growing up in Lower Post, he had dropped out of high school to work as a miner, taking on a variety of jobs in British Columbia and the Yukon before founding Tahltan Nation Development Corporation, a construction and camp-services company that is now the largest employer in Dease Lake. As founding president of tndc and vice-president of the Canadian Aboriginal Minerals Association, Asp was one of British Columbia’s highest-profile native businessmen. He lives in a modest off-reserve home in Dease Lake.
Asp was elected chief of the Tahltan band in 2002 and again in 2004, promising to lure investment and lower unemployment. (He succeeded: the Tahltan enjoy a 6-percent unemployment rate, one of the lowest among First Nations.) His campaign strategy had focused outside the community, though, relying on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the case of John Corbiere et al. v. Her Majesty the Queen and the Batchewana Indian Band. In accordance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Corbiere decision required bands to allow all their members to vote in Indian Act elections—not just those who live on a reserve, as had previously been the practice.
There are an estimated 5,000 Tahltan living in Canada, but fewer than a thousand live on the Telegraph Creek and Dease Lake reserves. (Iskut elects its own chief.) Asp mailed flyers to off-reserve Tahltan, and by all accounts was the first Tahltan chief to win election without receiving much—if any—support in Telegraph Creek. “About 90 percent of my support comes from off-reserve,” Asp said in an interview. “The on-reserve people don’t [have] control anymore and they don’t like it.”
The elders showed Asp just how much they didn’t like it on Wednesday morning. Asp arrived at about 11. The snow-covered parking lot was overflowing with pickups; the lobby was a sea of shoes. Some sixty elders confronted Asp in the entryway to the band office, beneath dozens of 8 x 10-inch colour photographs of local kids posed giddily in graduation caps and gowns. Elder Bobby Quock read from a prepared statement, accusing Asp of overstepping his authority, alleging a conflict of interest between his roles as chief and president of tndc, and demanding his resignation. “Jerry Asp,” Quock said in a grave, raspy voice. “You are no longer chief of the Tahltan people.”
Asp did not resign. Nor did he return to the band office after that day. And despite various efforts to oust them, the elders did not leave. The sit-in entrenched itself, the months wore on, and life at the band office settled into a rhythm.
Lillian Moyer was usually the first one up in the morning, padding down the blue-green carpet in her slippers. Moyer grew up in Telegraph Creek, but developed tuberculosis when she was thirteen and was sent away to a Vancouver hospital. Though thrice married, she has spent most of her adult life as a single parent, working as a barmaid to support her children. She moved to Dease Lake in 1979, and eventually became a band councillor and head of the Tahltan Elders Society. Feisty and quick-witted, the sixty-six-year-old grandmother is known by both her friends and enemies as “Tiger Lil.”
Lucy Brown was Moyer’s most loyal companion. The two of them slept in the band office every night for the first four-and-a-half months. Brown has spent her entire life in Telegraph Creek. She and her husband, Orville, own one of the cookie-cutter houses that give the reserve its eerily suburban character, but spend much of the year in the nearby fishing or hunting camps. Brown is as quiet as Moyer is chatty, often reacting to her friend’s rants with a deadpan shrug, as if in a Laurel and Hardy routine.
Both women described the sit-in as something akin to a teach-in. Moyer was among the first generation of Tahltan to return to Telegraph Creek after living among mainstream Canadians. From her, Brown learned to expect more from government and gleaned a sense of activism. From Brown, Moyer relearned how to live as a Tahltan. For example, when Moyer harangued Brown about the time she was spending at her fish-drying camp, Brown responded with seven words: “Band office won’t feed us in winter.”
After the men dressed and put away their bedrolls, Brown and Moyer would serve coffee and eggs in the conference room. Another elder, Earl Jackson would roll up to the office each morning by 8:45, and the night watchmen—younger Tahltan backing the group—would leave for the day. In an unusual bit of protest symbiosis, the office workers would arrive. Though the staff had been sent home the first few weeks, the elders went out of their way to invite them to return. Support for the sit-in would dry up quickly if local assistance cheques stopped flowing to the rest of the community, so the elders confined their activities to the upstairs kitchen and the boardroom.
With Jackson on duty, Moyer was free to stroll around the village for an hour or two. Her rambles were part exercise, part civic politics. With no local newspaper or radio station serving Telegraph Creek, chit-chat is how news travels. In the evenings, the crowd would swell to two or three dozen as neighbours dropped in with platters of salmon and moose meat. Pat and Edith Carlick were regulars; Pat speaks more Tahltan than most, and he challenged his fellow elders to keep their language alive.
