The Shopping Cart Injustice

This poem was inspired by the interviews by Earl K. Pollon and S. S. Matheson conducted with native Sekanni peoples who were negatively effected by the flooding of their communal homelands by the building of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. “This Was Our Valley” tells that story of injustice. 640 square miles of riverfront and hunting territory would be flooded to form Williston Lake. The Sekanni peoples were driven from their ancestral homeland in northeastern British Columbia, Canada and dispersed. The Shopping Cart Injustice People, place and spirit All were our relations Biopeds, quadrupeds, winged or finned - River language told us so. Fishing rocks spoke the run Where the riffles and the rapids talked. Ancestors, dead and alive, told living stories where Running the river banks, the children played. The land was a book written in forms. We made our mark with love, community Fishing weirs, aspen dugout canoes, Hunting trails, camps and sacred sites. Always traders, we traded furs with White settlers when they arrived On the rivers Parsnip, Finlay and Peace at Finlay Forks, Fort Grahame, Fort McLeod. We added pack trains, teams of pack horses River freighters, flat bottom ‘longboats’ For supplies and for mail delivery. It seemed that we could live together. Then one day a government agent said That shopping carts were coming They would flood our world Water rising everywhere Shopping carts with electric can openers Full, fast to check out, Shopping carts with electric hair blowers, Full, faster to check out, Shopping carts with electric air conditioners, Full, fastest to check out Shopping carts with electric stoves. Check out, check out, check out. They would make our rivers into a lake We would move or drown. Our elders did not believe it. That was the only consultations! Soon Saskatoon berries all under water Next, the banks sloughed back to graveyards Next, cliffs crumbled, and banks fell into rising lake Houses of the villages slipped and floated Coffins, bones and bodies strewed the shore Where tangled trees, debris and more Eddied with flotsam in the wind. We wept for our ancestors! We weep for our children. We had to flee the destruction Caused by tree grinders, D-9 bull dozers The dam construction. Now they want to take more Another dam for more shopping carts. Please stop Site ‘C’.