Natives take violation case to U.N.
Citing violations of international principles of human justice, the Lytton and Mt. Currie Indian bands have prepared a formal complaint to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights in response to the Vander Zalm government's intent to allow the blasting of a road into the Stein Valley wilderness.
"This wilderness watershed has been both our breadbasket and our cathedral for tens of thousands of years," stated Lytton Chief Ruby Dunstan. "It is the tradition of our people to follow Stein Valley pathways to physical and spiritual maturity. The forests of the Stein have sustained our cultures from our earliest memories and continue to make us strong today."
"B.C is violating fundamental human rights guaranteed under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada is a party. All peoples should have the right of self-determination and freedom of religion, but at the Stein you seem to have to be non-Indian first," continues Chief Dunstan.
The bands' complaint is based on the alleged violation of universal rights guaranteed in Articles 1 and 18 of Covenant that would be caused by building roads into and logging of the Stein. Article 1 of this UN document affirms, "In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence." Article 18 states, "No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice."
"The provincial blue-ribbon Wilderness Advisory Committee saw that any road up the Stein Canyon would bulldoze our spiritual and cultural values and that our dignity as a people would be trampled underfoot in the rush to log the Stein," asserts Chief Dunstan. "This Committee's recognition of the need for a formal agreement between the provincial government and the Lytton Indian Band prior to road building is consistent with international principles of human justice enshrined in the U.N. Convention. The Vander Zalm government has dismissed their own committee's recommendation, and with it our fundamental human rights."
When on Sept. 30, 1987, the provincial government announced its decision to build a road into the Stein wilderness, it insisted the move was consistent with the recommendations of the Wilderness Advisory Committee. Although that committee called for a formal agreement with the Lytton Indian Band prior to such a move, the B.C. government contended that the band had been unwilling to meet.
The facts show just the opposite. The Lytton and Mt. Currie bands had requested just such a meeting with Premier Vander Zalm more than a year previous. No meeting took place.
"It's not too surprising that the provincial government has again turned a blind eye to the 'invisible' Indians at the Stein," stated Mt. Currie Chief Leonard Andrew. "Mr. Vander Zalm made his view clear when on Oct. 4, 1987 he called the native peoples at the Stein a 'minority group' and stated we 'can't have the minority dictating to everybody else what will or will not happen.'"
"We're not a minority at the Stein Valley," Chief Andrew explained, "We're indigenous nations living within our traditional boundaries where we continue to exercise the responsibilities for homelands which have been handed down to us by our ancestors. If Mr. Vander Zalm cannot see us, it is because to him we are merely a minor obstacle in his pursuit of the almighty dollar. On the global scale it is situations like ours which have undersored the need for the International Covenant. We expect far more understanding from the United Nations than we have received thus far from the Vander Zalm government."
