Bears and First People Enjoy Victory

It took three decades of advocacy and litigation by the Kutunaxa Nation to save 170,000 acres of the Qat'mak valley from a giant ski resort development proposed by Glacier Resorts Ltd.  The Jumbo Valley resort would have been the largest and highest such development in North America with 6,000 beds and year around human activity--literally building a small town on top of a mountain glacier.  The Ktunaxa achieved their goal of preserving their ancestral lands by enlisting a long time ally, the grizzly bear.  Ktunaxa revere the "grizzly spirit" that inhabits this valley of sheer cliffs, thick pine stands and glacier-clear water.

The resort would have intruded on the habitat of the Purcell-Selkirk grizzly population, about 600 strong that is fairing well according to ecologist Michael Proctor, who has studied the bears of the region for twenty-five years.  Grizzlies in North America now live in isolated pockets of habitat unlike their ancestors that freely roamed a vast, undisturbed wilderness. Today their range is just 2% of what it once was.  Conservationists have been attempting to connect these pockets of bear country to allow healthy gene flow and sufficient habitat to expand the total population.  Canada lists the grizzly as a species of special concern while the US lists it as threatened.  Conservationists say grizzlies need more help than  the law currently provides as their numbers decline in the face of human encroachment, especially below the border.  Building the Jumbo Valley resort in the middle of their Percell Mountain redoubt would have been disastrous for the population's survival.

Kathryn Teneese, Chair

The Ktunaxa Nation took the legal battles over the resort all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court in 2017, where they lost.  They did not give up the fight to protect land they have lived in for 10,000 years.  When the Canadian government pledged to protect 17% of its land mass, the tribe applied for money under the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas program.  Government granted the Ktunaxa $16.2 million.  The nation collected an additional $5 million from conservation groups, and used the money to buy out the resort's investors.  After six years of court battles, the company's environmental impact assessment had expired.  Non-indigenous residents of the valley supported the tribe's fortitude and perseverance in opposing another clearing of the land for profit. “I have lived in this valley since 1985,” says Proctor. “Even among the non-Indigenous population, this decision was applauded almost universally in the area where I live.” Qat'mak's grizzlies woke up this spring in their home undisturbed--the Grizzly Spirit is pleased.