As far as can be ascertained, pictographs had deep spiritual meaning. It would be akin to desecrating the alter of a Catholic church. What we know of the Sinixt culture is that it was very old. The oldest archaeological find on the Arrow Lakes at Deer Park is about 9 thousand years old. The oldest perminent villages date back about 3500 years at Vallican and Lemon Creek and show evidence of continual occupation. Theirs was a highly sophisticated complex hunter/gatherer society that basically was the origin of all Interior and Coastal Salish cultures.
At the time, 1956, that they were declared extinct by the Canadian government, there were Sinixt families living at Burton and Edgewood. They were declared extinct because very few would live on the 100 acre reservation given to them in 1911. It was completely useless land and was not conducive to their cultural practices. When government census takers came through every 4 years or so, if the people were off res hunting, fishing or gathering, they were taken off the census list. By 1956, the last person to have been on the reservation when the last census was taken died in the Okanagan while visiting relatives.
It is also quite convenient that at this time negotiations for the Columbia River Treaty were just starting. The evidence points to the extinction of the Sinixt being a purely political move to avoid having to deal with the Sinixt for the flooding of their territory. Over 140 archaeological sites on the Arrow Lakes have been flooded and washed away since the damming of the Columbia River at Castlegar, effectively wiping out 9000 years of pre-history of this region.
So, compared to this, idiots shooting paint balls at ancient pictographs seem quite insignificant in comparison, unless you realize that 90% of the original pictographs have already been destroyed. Those pictographs are some of the last vestiges of evidence that the Sinixt lived here. And considering that those pictographs were hundreds of years old and we can't make a house paint that will last 10 years - it is quite ludicrous for us to call them ignorant savages.
Today, Sunday, I attended the 22nd annual Sinixt Thanksgiving Community feast at Valican. Over a hundred Slocan Valley and Nelson residents attended. The Sinixt are still very much alive. Hundreds live on the Colville Reserve in Washington State and many more live amoung the Okanagan, Shuswap and Ktunaxa nations and some live as far away as the Queen Charlotte Islands. The refusal of the Canadian governemnt to reconcile this gross injustice is nothing short of criminal.
The US recognizes the Sinixt. Their history and culture are the subject of many Canadian and BC government and industrial archaeological and anthropological reports. The Canadian government recognizes the Sinixt as being a living cultural group but refuses to rescind the error of declaring them extinct (according to the Indian Act only) because of the fact that the Columbia River Treaty is coming up for renegotiation in 2014. They might have to admit that their extinction was due to purely political reasons during the original negotiations.
