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NWCC students visit northwest First Nations and make lasting connections

The Cultural Heritage of the Skeena and Bulkley Valley field school, led by Crossroads CRM director Rick Budhwa for Northwest Community College, incorporates First Nations history with cultural resource management over three weeks each spring. The course provides a history of First Nations and the influences upon them going back 10,000 years, through European contact up until present day. It discusses influences of colonialism and understanding First Nations’ role in the overall history of B.C. Australian journalist Alicia Bridges audited the course and describes her experience.

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Sacred Ground: In honour and in memory of our ancestors (VIDEO)

On Aug. 15, 2011, when we stepped onto the site in Hagwilget where BC Hydro had accidentally disturbed a centuries-old burial ground and unleashed years of upheaval for the community five years earlier, the Crossroads team didn’t know what we’d find. We knew that it would be sensitive and we knew that it would be profound. We knew that we needed to document the story as it unfolded. The community’s voice, and the turbulence it had experienced, needed to be shared so this situation would never happen again.

An anthropologist at rest (is never really at rest)

A recent family vacation to Costa Rica and Nicaragua re-affirmed why I travel internationally. While some people experience discomfort from not being within their cultural context, I actually draw a lot of security from it. Waking up early, the hectic nature of meeting schedules in a different country with a different language and different culture, at times feeling unsafe or threatened—these are things I went looking for and it’s what I got. It felt like a vacation.

Green Lake: An unprecedented collaboration in Shuswap territory

In July, Crossroads Cultural Resource Management participated in what was perhaps our most emotional, profound and unique reburial project to date.

Green Lake Burial Recovery Project

Crossroads CRM recently participated in a 12-day project to relocate a First Nations burial ground in Green Lake, B.C. (in collaboration with Archer CRM Partnership). Look for more about the project in a blog coming soon, but in the meantime Dana Evaschuk spoke to the CBC about this unique and fascinating recovery.