Wouglas denied

Terrace\NEWS A10

A local youth charged with criminal
negligence will stand trial in:

Oring back music

A local Rotary club wants to raise
Money to reinstate school music
‘programs\COMMUNITY Bi

Terrace Minor Hockey sounds the
call for girls who want to play
hockey next year\SPORTS B5

_WEDNESDAY
‘May 17; 2000

$1.00 PLUS 7¢ GST
($1.20 plus 8¢ GST outside of the
: Tarrace area) 022: :

“VOL. 13 NO. 6 -

Locals scrambling for seats |

By SARAH GLEN
IT’S GETTING harder to find a seat on the Van-
couver-Terrace air carrier route.

Since AirBC pulled out in April, leaving Ca-
nadian Regional Airlines as the only airline, re-
ports have been growing of demand failing to
meet supply.

“We're very concerned about the fact that

there are fewer seats available to people,” said
Frank Hamilton, president of the Terrace-Kitimal
Airport Society, which operates the airport, last
weck.

While the single traveler might find it harder

to secure a seat on a flight out of Terrace, bigger’

groups are finding it nearly impossible.
“Organizing the travel plans was horrendous,”
said Susan Brouwer, Skeena junior band teacher
and conductor, who needed almost 100 seats for
her students on a flight to Vancouver,
The students were part of Skeena Junior Sec-

ondary School’s concert and jazz bands and left
Sunday for a national music competition in Tor-
onto,

“They [Canadian Regional airlines] originally
had us on five separate flights down to Vancou-
ver. We would have had to leave a whole ‘day
earlier,” said Brouwer.

Brouwer’s band experienced the full effects of
seating capacity cuts dating back to November
1998,

That’s when Canadian Airlines pulted its 120-
seal Boeing 737s from Terrace in favour of the
smaller, 55-seat F-28s flown by subsidiary Cana-
dian Regional Airlines.

At the same time, AifBC sent its 80-passenger
Bae 146 jets elsewhere and brought in smaller
37-seat Dash 8-100s.

The result was a reduction by more than half
of the number of available seats.

tained three direct flights a day to Vancouver but
AirBC began trimming its schedule last year,
pulling out altogether last month,

Fishing lodges, who rely on the business of
tourists traveling up to the northwest, are the lat-
est to feel the first signs of the seat crunch.

“It’s not prime tourist season yet, but I’m ter-
rorized of the idea that my clients might not be
able to get up here because of the lack of seats
[on flights},” said Noel Gypet, owner of North-
west Fishing Guides and chair of the Terrace and
District Angling Association.

Gyger is already warning his clients to book
their flights up to Terrace months in advance.

Hamilton acknowledges thal groups leaving or

coming to Terrace have a harder time securing -

seats when the flights are close to being full.
“When you’re operating at 85 per cent capa-

city many flights are poing to be full or near: :

full,” he said. “So many block groups are going
to have major problems getling on the same
flight.”

Hamilton said he complained to Canadian
Regional Airlines’ corporate vice-president and
to its marketing vice-president but his concerns
did not, “fall on very sympathetic ears.”

He was told Canadian was not a “leisure air-
line” and that all the decisions had been made

“about placement of its aircraft for the summer

schedule.

Canadian Regional Airlines official Dean
Brawn says there just isn't enough customer de-
mand in the region to run a bigger plane on the
Terrace-Vancouver flight.

He says groups requiring more then the 55
seats available on an F-28 can charter flights or
take a bus.

Canadian Regional did bring in and has main-

Nisga’a dancer, Dennis Nyce, calls on the spirits of his ancestors to help him
celebrate the newly formed Nisga'a Lisims government. Nyce was just one of
ihe many dancers, singers, and drummers who preformed for hundreds of

people in Gitwinksihlkw, May 12.

Nisga’a elders who travelled to Gitwinksihlkw May 12 to celebrate as the
Nisga’a treaty finally took affect.

. marketing tool for anti-logging cain- .

Nisqa’a free from Indian Act

Cont'd Page A2

Nisga’a nation celebrates

B.C.’s first modern treaty

By JEFF NAGEL
THE NISGA’A drummed
in a new era in Gitwink-
sihlkw Friday, May 12 as
they celebrated the birth of
their own government and
day one of their newly
minted treaty.

Under rafters festooned
with Canadian and B.C,
flags, leader Joe Gosnell
stood before hundreds of

. Nisga’a and supporters
from Terrace and around
the province and declared
it “an absolutely glorious
day.”

“We are no longer
wards of the state, no
longer wards of the gov-
emment,” he said to thun-
derous applause and drum-
ming. “We are no longer
beggars in our own land.”

“We are now free to
make our own mistakes,
savour our own victories,
and stand on our own
feet,” Gosnell said.

The provisional Nisga‘a
Lisims Government sat for
the first time Thursday,
May 11, the treaty’s effec-

tive date, and passed key
enabling legislation.

It now has ownership.
and jurisdiction over the,

nearly 2,000 square kilo-

metres of Nisga’a treaty

Jands in the lower Nass.
“Nisga’a Lisims gov-

“We are now free to
make our awn mistakes,
savour our own victor-
ies, and stand on our
own feet,” ~ Joe Gosnell.

emment is now excerling
its authority over Nisga’a
territory on behalf of its ci-
tizens,” Gosnell said.

The Indian Act, he said,
is “gone forever" from the
lives of Nisga'a people,

Money also began to
flow.

The province released:

$1.67 million — the first in-
Stallment of the $190 mil-
lion cash settlement that's
to flow over 15 years — as
well as just under $6 mil-
lion to help the Nisga’a

_Joe Gosnell

buy into the commercial
fishery and $1.22 million
for training and forestry
transition,

Nisga’a leaders were
also under obvious pres-
sure to quickly release
one-time payouts to elders
now that treaty money has
begun to flow.

Each elder aged 60 or
over is to get a one-time
cash payment of $15,000.

“] ask for your

st

patience,” Gosnell told’
them. “EH will happen.”

Emotions ran high.

Some dabbed tears as
Ihe Nisga’a Nation Mass
Band led the hall in O Ca-
neda, signalling that at
after more than a century
the Nisga’a had succeeded
in negotiating their way
into Canada. .

Clarinet’ player Frank
Calder — the province’s
first aboriginal MLA and
the man after whom the
landmark Nisga’a land
claim court case of the
1960s was named ~ played
the anthem’s notes with
trembling fingers.

Tribute was paid to
Nisga’a leaders who did
not live to see the treaty
take effect. -

And many Nispa’a felt
the many compromises
made to gel a treaty clou-
ded the future,

Peggy Nyce, Gosnell’s
sister, remembered their
older brother, the revered

Continued Page A14

Eco-marketing

‘Spirit’ bears way ahead of —
Kermodes in the name game

By JEFF NAGEL
THE SYMBOL of Terrace — the Ker-
mode bear —has become the star of
the global campaign to halt logging
in B.C.’s coastal rainforests.

Environmental groups have made
the city’s beloved white bear the
centrepiece of efforts to preserve the
Great Bear Rainforest.

And as with B.C,’s central and
north coast, they’ve given the rare
subspecies of black bear a new
name: the Spirit bear,

The original name has both his-
tory and science on its side. [t hon-
ours former Royal B.C, Museum dir-
ector Francis Kermode’s early re-
search into the bear, known to biolo-
gists as ursus americanus kermodei.

But so far the Spirit bears are out-
running the Kermodes. .

Type “Spirit bear” inta a search
engine on the Internet and you turn
up a staggering 1,654 web sites that

-use the name. The Kermode name,

meanwhile, scores a mete 464 sites,
A Simon Fraser University mar-

_keting professor isn’t surprised.

“It’s a great product,” says Lind-
say Meredith. “It’s a white bear, it’s
tare and it’s threatened.” :

All. it needed to:become a perfect

‘northern misty islands

paigns was a simpler, easier-to-re-,
member name.

“What was it? Curmudgeon
bear?” Meredith laughs. “You see
you can't remember Kermode bear
two minutes later. But ] can sure re-
member Spirit bear.”

The white bears have appeared in
New York Times ads urging Ameri-
cans to stop buying wood from en-
dangered forests. F

They were invoked
in January by an Earth
Aclion bulletin urging
letters be sent protesl-
ing West Fraser’s five-
year culling plan.

"The Spirit bear,” it
said, “lives nowhere
else on Earth but on the |

and valleys of the Great |
Bear Rainforest.” ame
Simon Jackson, a 17-year-old
West Vancouver sludent named last
month as a Hero of the Planet by
Time magazine, is fighting to set
aside land fora Kermode sanctuary.
He founded the Spirit Bear Youth
Coalition and is taking next year off
from university to work on the issue.
~. “We're not anti-logging,” he’says.
“We're here to protect-this bear

that’s unique (o British Columbia.
N's like our own panda bear.”
Jackson distances himself from
the Great Bear Rainforest campaign
to halt most coastal logging.
Instead, he prefers a proposed
247,000-hectare Spirit Bear Wilder-
ness Conservancy centred on Prin-
cess Royal Island and its high con-
centration of Kermodes.
“It’s large enough to
Sustain a gene pool for
m the bear,” he said. “But
R it’s not large cnough to
threaten the forest indu-
stry as the Great Bear
Rainforest proposal
Bi would,”
Jackson appreciates the
history behind the Ker-
mede name, but says
many peaple mispro-
nouwnce it, sine

Spirit bear is more evoc#werhe

said, and helped focus international
altention on the bear,

“We called it Spirit bear because
it’s kind of like a spirit of the rain-
foresl," Jackson said. “To see this
bear is almost like seeing a spirit.”

See page AS for a special report
on the marketing of the Great Bear
Rainforest. ae