With certainty, the living proof of these people, the Sinixt, whose legacy with the salmon had prevailed over 3,500 years was again in court before us. Not only in the flesh, but in the spirit — as their ancestral-inherent purpose was focused on the preservation of Perry Ridge. Thus, owning no allegiance but to the relationship of the land, and ready at any moment to respond preventively to those who would procure exploitation to hurt her, are not these the first people who huddled themselves between the forest green of these three majestic mountain ranges and endeavored to sip from their lake’s reservoir the resplendent smile of the Creator?
In contradiction of this fact, as in the case of the Sinixt’s extinction, their long exile into a mock civilization that proclaimed them as such, inevitably exempted these people from the life in which the Creator had placed them; away from their authenticity of existence. Nonetheless, with ancestral forces within them, and a corruption of under-handed dealings around them, there they reside — not so far from the Ridge; and saw some of their brothers ready to out-strip the wilderness before them. Hence, they proclaimed their inherent rights as guardians of the land.
While most of the region’s population implore the force of their objection, there is for me and anyone of earthly communion a similar force of consciousness that gives intuitive support to their station: “Degradation of this home among the planets is mainly caused by ignorance of its harmonizing sacredness, not just by men’s greed and indifference. There lays the distinctive core of a resolution.”
In accordance with this train of thought, we must thoroughly grasp to the extent how destiny, with its unfathomable patience, is now with expediency bringing our region’s conscientious minds together, fully charged in a virtuous ideology of protecting Perry Ridge, and Jumbo Glacier. And thus, all languishing with the steadfast verdict of our conviction that: “We must embrace our earth mother’s sanctity now.”
Now in reexamining the Sinixt as guardians of Perry Ridge — from the perspective of the courtroom’s point of view, it appears again that no such ambition of these first people was to ripen in the shadowed proceedings of the bench; this was plan from the entire absence of acknowledging them as our region’s first people. Besides the concluding verdict of last Friday’s proceedings, which gave over-sufficient testimony of where the government stood on the Sinixt issue, were we actually to be in suspense to the nature of their old and recurring assault: “Are you not extinct? Then, I am not to regard you people; nor least, your petition.”
After all, this has always been the remark to which the government finds it convenient in almost all occasions to return.
Old has been this contemptuous acclamation, the on-going struggle to proclaim these people extinct, which seems meant to inhibit one’s mind not to reason and draw one’s own personal conclusion that these unburied corpses standing in this court room before us — are really alive.
We certainly now wonder: “What veil of conspiracy shall cover these people of a 15,000 year archeological distinction — when almost every courtroom’s mouth has rehearsed the same?”
Trinity De’ la Falcons, Nelson