Promoting Aboriginal Territoriality Through Interethnic Alliances: The Case of the Cheslatta T'en in Northern British Columbia

Across rural North America, aboriginal and nonaboriginal people have formed strategic alliances to defend what are perceived to be common resources and attachments to place. Thus far, little is known about how these partnerships have factored into indigenous pursuits of territorial autonomy. This article describes how the Cheslatta T'en, a Dakelh (Carrier) community in north-central British Columbia, established a measure of control over their homeland after forming an alliance with local nonnative residents. Cheslatta leaders used cultural exchanges and social networks generated by the alliance to fashion territorial initiatives that, when taken together, channel popular environmentalism, provincial forestry policies, and ancestral ethnoecology into collective identity, action, and authority. As a result, the band has attained political influence over its traditional lands without participating in the province's treaty settlement process. Interethnic partnerships in rural areas are particularly relevant to political ecology because they reveal how the common experience of powerlessness can generate new forms of resource management that synthesize diverse constructions of nature. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing empirical work on such alliances and to emerging frameworks for a political ecology of social movements. It also adds to the ethnographic literature on the colonial encounter in British Columbia by highlighting the role of interethnic collaboration in contemporary rural resource management projects.