ZȺWIZUT (Carl Olsen) speaks to supporters in SELEt₭TEȽ, a former village site and river. Today they are encompassed within Goldstream Park. Photo by Julie Chadwick
This story is a collaboration between IndigiNews and The Narwhal.
The sound of cars passing is a constant hum, so constant it’s almost meditative. Every so often one bleats out a honk of support.
On the shoulder of the highway stands a 78-year-old man, holding a sign that reads: “Save the Salmon.”
Cheeks ruddy from the cold, he clutches it with gloved hands from behind a waist-high concrete highway barrier.
His dark eyes glitter warmly behind glasses, and over his knitted wool toque is a black baseball cap emblazoned with the image of a tree, water and paddles.
This is ZȺWIZUT, a Tsartlip First Nation Elder also known as Carl Olsen.
Carl Olsen protests beside the highway in his homelands late last year. Photo by Julie Chadwick
For the last three years, he’s been coming out here every Tuesday — through rain, snow and even sickness — to stand out on the shoulder of the Malahat highway and protest.
It’s Dec. 30. ZȺWIZUT grins, surrounded by supporters who wave at cars and shake their own homemade signs.
Carl Olsen speaks with supporters outside Goldstream Park. Organizer Christine Willes, right, holds a salmon cutout designed by renowned artist Roy Henry Vickers. She said the highway protests have been a ‘transformative’ experience. Photo by Julie Chadwick
But it wasn’t always this way. When he first started out, it was just him, his granddaughter and a supporter from the local book club ZȺWIZUT runs.
At his back is Goldstream Provincial Park, or as ZȺWIZUT knows it, SELEt₭TEȽ.
At 477 hectares, it’s bigger than “New York City’s” Central Park, a verdant gem on the southern tip of “Vancouver Island,” just a 20-minute drive from the province’s capital.
The park features waterfalls, Garry oak meadows, 600-year-old Douglas fir trees, flowering dogwood, western red cedar trees, Oregon grape and salmonberries.
READ MORE: ‘Like going back in time’: W̱SÁNEĆ people to regain rightful ownership of abundant remote island
In front of ZȺWIZUT is the Malahat, a busy two-lane highway that cuts through the park and sees an average of 25,000 vehicles a day pass by.
The park’s accessibility means more than 600,000 people visit each year to camp, hike and hang out.
Many come in the fall to watch the huge runs of chum, Chinook and coho salmon that return each year to spawn in SELE₭TEȽ‘s waters.
The park’s chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat runs the length of the Goldstream River, from the downstream hydro dam to the river delta at Finlayson Arm. Photo by Julie Chadwick
Highway versus habitat
What prompted ZȺWIZUT to go out there in the early months of 2023 was learning of a proposal put forward by the province to widen the Malahat.
Critics say it would catastrophically affect the adjacent Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat in SELE₭TEȽ.
According to the province, the highway expansion, estimated in 2024 to cost $162 million, was needed to improve safety and reliability along a 1.7-kilometre section that bisects the park.
One part that especially concerned ZȺWIZUT was the expected “permanent loss or alteration of aquatic salmonid and amphibian habitat” in SELE₭TEȽ.
This impact and others were detailed in a 139-page environmental assessment report commissioned by the province and completed in 2024 by consulting firm McElhanney.
The area’s chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat falls directly within the project’s footprint.
Within a half-kilometre of the project site, at-risk species were likely to be affected, including western screech owls, northern red-legged frogs, wandering salamanders and the endangered sharp-tailed snake.
Expand that to within five kilometres of the project site, and that list lengthens to at least 200 endangered and threatened species potentially impacted.
READ MORE: In W̱SÁNEĆ territories, Matriarchs raise funds to buy back their unceded lands
ZȺWIZUT was also horrified to learn that, among a host of other environmental issues, more than 700 trees would also be removed from an area along the highway during construction.
He thought about the owls and nesting birds, about the spe’uth (bears) that make their homes in SELE₭TEȽ and fed beside him while he and other nation members harvested fish for winter.
He thought of how the noise and vibration from excavation and rock blasting might affect the vulnerable salmon fry, hiding out in the darkness under fallen logs in river pools until they were big enough to head to the ocean.
“The canopy that creates the coolness of the water in the stream — if that disappears, those fish will disappear,” he says, “because then the water starts to get too hot. It’s about 12 degrees difference from the sun to the shade.
“So that’s what started me. I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can be the voice for the salmon.’”
ZȺWIZUT (Carl Olsen) protests expansion of the Malahat highway in SELE₭TEȽ, today the site of Goldstream Park. Photo by Julie Chadwick
Prayers, tea, and bearing witness
Every Tuesday for the last three years, ZȺWIZUT wakes up at about 5 a.m. in the house his grandfather built, on the W̱JOȽEȽP Tsartlip reserve.
He heads down to the beach right outside his door on the “Saanich Inlet” and starts his day with a prayer at the water’s edge.
“I meditate about what I would like to see in my day,” he says.
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After his prayer, ZȺWIZUT heads to a local cafe for some toast and tea.
That’s typically where a group of supporters show up to tag along with him to SELE₭TEȽ. Others meet him there.
Some are members of local churches and the Wilderness Committee, or participants in his Indigenous authors book club.
One of those book club members is Christine Willes, a settler from a group called Goldstream Protectors that helped organize a protest with ZȺWIZUT and others at the legislature last October.
“What he says to anybody who asked him is, ‘Well, I can go and stand by the side of the highway,’” she says.
“And that’s what he says to other people. ‘Do what you can.’ So I thought, well, I can go stand on the side of the highway too.”
Much more than a roadway
For ZȺWIZUT, this fight is now much broader than the highway project.
It’s a flashpoint in a larger and contentious discussion around Indigenous land rights, title and reconciliation that has consumed the province — and has repercussions for the entire country.
It’s also about the ability for Indigenous people to make land decisions in their own territory.
To the W̱SÁNEĆ people — of which Tsartlip are a part — SELE₭TEȽ is one of their oldest fishing villages.
It was arguably protected by a treaty put to paper 174 years ago which clearly states they retain the rights to their village sites, and to hunt and fish on those lands as they always have.
The original North Saanich treaty, shown here in a glass case, is kept in the B.C. Archives in Victoria. Photo by Julie Chadwick
It’s one of 14 treaties negotiated in the 1850s by James Douglas, then-Governor of “Vancouver Island,” with the local First Nations.
For many, the existence of these treaties may come as a surprise, as it’s well known that most of the province’s land mass was never ceded by its original inhabitants.
READ MORE: Treaty-protected sxwayxum village site returned to Snuneymuxw: ‘Where our people have lived for thousands of years’
Known collectively as the Douglas Treaties, multiple court cases since the 1960s have re-affirmed these treaty-protected rights, for both the W̱SÁNEĆ and the other nations on the island who signed them in the 1850s.
This fight to hold colonial governments to their word is what has kept ZȺWIZUT out on the highway for three years.
This is another Douglas Treaty in the B.C. Archives, known as the Snuneymuxw Sarlequun Treaty of 1854, from the Nanaimo area. Its ‘signature’ sheets are not accompanied by a Douglas form. It consists only of a six-page list, in ink, of 159 names under the heading ‘Sarlequin Tribe’ with a note at the top in pencil. Photo by Julie Chadwick
‘It rightfully belongs to us’
On its website, the province states “Goldstream Park” was “given to the people of British Columbia by the Greater Victoria Water Board in 1958.”
But the actual history is far more complicated.
“It rightfully belongs to us,” stated Jean Baptiste Paul, a Tsartlip First Nation member and son of then-chief Thomas Paul, in an article published in the Daily Colonist on March 27, 1956.
“We have never given it up, and never been offered anything for our fishing and hunting grounds there.”
Jean Baptiste recalled how he had hunted and fished at SELE₭TEȽ as a child.
He told the Daily Colonist that all of the inlet, from “Cherry Point” to the hills south of SELE₭TEȽ, was Indigenous territory. It had been identified as such by his grandfather, former Tsartlip Chief Ben Paul.
Tsartlip and Malahat members had built fish-smoking shacks near the river and his grandfather had also constructed a log cabin in the area.
But one day when no one was there, all the buildings were burned down, Paul told the paper.
READ MORE: Historic land agreement ‘will bring our people home,’ says SC’IA⁄NEW Chief
At the time, Paul’s resistance was reported as little more than a passing curiosity with headlines such as, “Prospect of city giving park to B.C. has West Saanich Indians on warpath.”
In 1958 the province went ahead and designated the area a park in celebration of the province’s centennial.
SELE₭TEȽ became a tourist attraction. Even though it was not yet officially open, the campground was quickly packed with vacationers.
Newspaper columnists sung the praises of its beauty and touted its quick accessibility from “Victoria.”
In the fall of 1960, thousands of onlookers crowded around the waterway to watch the salmon run, a practice that continues to this day.
WEC’KINEM (Eric Pelkey) is hereditary chief of the Tsawout First Nation. Photo by Julie Chadwick
A host of new problems
However, these thousands of new visitors brought with them a host of new problems, says WEC’KINEM (Eric Pelkey), hereditary chief of the Tsawout First Nation.
Sometimes when nation members are down at the river harvesting fish, visitors to the park will confront them.
“They start cussing us up and down, saying that we’re destroying the fishery,” WEC’KINEM says. “We tell them we have the right — we have the right to do this, to carry on our fishery and to just leave us alone.
“But there’s still a lot of racism that comes out at that time. People think we’re torturing the fish.”
The W̱SÁNEĆ carry on regardless. More recently, people have also been coming out there to support them, he adds.
WEC’KINEM sits at a picnic table in the park, the gentle rush of SELE₭TEȽ’s waters behind him.
Barrel-chested, his voice a deep, gentle baritone, he wears a ball cap-style hat woven from cedar bark and a wool and feather headband.
A cream-coloured traditional knitted blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.
These accusations are especially misplaced because, he explains, it’s the W̱SÁNEĆ who constantly steward the area and conduct their own assessments to monitor the health of the fish.
For example, in 2023 the numbers of chum in the SELE₭TEȽ were so low that nation members just went down to the river to observe.
“Nobody took a fish,” according to ZȺWIZUT, a long time volunteer at the Goldstream Hatchery.
READ MORE: Treaty-protected sxwayxum village site returned to Snuneymuxw: ‘Where our people have lived for thousands of years’
Most of the environmental problems in the area are due to settler activity in the first place, WEC’KINEM points out.
Commercial fishing boats that come down the “Johnstone Strait” along the coast of “Vancouver Island” and into the Salish Sea take most of the salmon before they can even reach SELE₭TEȽ, he says.
In 2011 a fuel tanker truck crashed in the area, leaking tens of thousands of litres of gasoline and diesel into the river caused further stress on the salmon.
Members from all W̱SÁNEĆ nations harvest chum, chinook and coho salmon from SELE₭TEȽ’s waters as a winter food supply, and have for generations.
When it’s smoked, the chum can last all winter, WEC’KINEM says.
“I remember growing up, and we always had that smell in our house,” he recalls, “because my parents would have sacks of smoked chum on top of our cupboards, burlap sacks.”
A village displaced
In 1877, the Indian Reserve Commission parceled out a fishing reserve along the south end of “Finlayson Arm,” an extension of the inlet where SELE₭TEȽ’s waters feed into the ocean.
However Goldstream Reserve no. 13, as it’s called, sits at the base of “Mt. Finlayson” instead of in the area of the river where the community still harvests fish.
“They carried out the survey of the old fishing village, but the surveyor is the one that took it from here and put it over there, off on the side of the mountain, instead of surveying where our village was,” says WEC’KINEM.
“This whole area here used to be filled with longhouses all along the river. Right over there, where that overhang is there, is actually where our family’s longhouse used to be.”
READ MORE: Mi’kmaq people mark 300 years of treaty — and broken promises
He turns and points over his shoulder, to a structure not far from Goldstream Park’s gravel parking lot.
“I was not aware of that until maybe I was in my 30s, when my grandfather asked me to bring him out here. We parked over there, walked down. And he said, ‘Oh, what is this building?’”
He told his grandfather, Marshall Pelkey, that it housed the washrooms and that this was now a public park. He became upset, WEC’KINEM recalls.
The saltwater people
Known as the “saltwater people,” the ocean is entwined within everything the W̱SÁNEĆ do, including their SENĆOŦEN place names, explains WEC’KINEM.
The W̱SÁNEĆ have maintained a wide and complex network of traditional reef net fishing sites throughout their territory, which encompasses what are currently known as the “San Juan Islands,” “Boundary Bay,” and the “Saanich” inlet and peninsula.
These reef net sites are not just places to harvest food, but are part of a wider spiritual and community practice.
READ MORE: W̱SÁNEĆ youth rise to the challenge of reef net fishing as they reclaim the formerly-outlawed practice
In and around SELE₭TEȽ, community members also use streams that feed into the area for ritual bathing, and host a first salmon ceremony each fall to greet their returning salmon relatives.
This is in an area right beside the province’s proposed road work site.
“Our people always fished here, no matter where the reserve was,” WEC’KINEM says.
“Every winter, our people came here to fish. Conservation officers always tried to stop us, but we always just kept on and dared them to take us to court.”
That’s exactly what happened one evening 30 years ago, when ZȺWIZUT and another Tsartlip member, Ivan Morris, were caught hunting by conservation officers on their territory and arrested.
The right to hunt and fish
Though it was early evening, it was already getting dark on Nov. 28, 1996 when two men, driving in the woods near Youbou, spotted what appeared to be the glow of deer eyes through the trees.
They were showing two boys — eight and twelve years old — how to hunt at night with the help of a light.
It was something their families had safely done for generations, but was previously done with burning pitch and bows and arrows.
Ivan Morris pulled the vehicle over. ZȺWIZUT took aim and fired a few shots. He then passed the rifle across the two boys to Morris, who got out of the vehicle and squeezed off two more.
They soon got a nasty surprise. The deer they shot at was, in fact, a decoy, complete with reflective eyes, set up by provincial conservation officers to trap illegal hunters.
Their vehicle was quickly swarmed by officers and the two men were arrested, ZȺWIZUT recalls.
“There were probably a dozen or more conservation that surrounded us and even manhandled the kids
