Guardians of the Glacial Past

A spirit bear walks the intertidal zone of Princess Royal Island, occasionally stopping to flip rocks in search of food underneath.

The white bear, which has now become an eco-tourism opportunity for First Nations in the area, is an excellent link to the period the western world refers to as the last phase of the Pleistocene epoch. Roughly 30,000 years ago, the ocean levels began to drop significantly as the world started to change. The Gitxsan people describe this as the “time we lived under the ice” — it appeared that the ice grew from the sky down from the mountain tops, covering the world below. The gal’tsap (villages) and miin gal’tsap (cities) established through the mountain ranges now had to move westward to the coast or south to the remaining open lands. The flora and fauna also began to migrate, and this migration is what the people followed.