Podunk Below the Masthead, Friday, November 13, 2009

NWCC gets an interpretive garden, CityWest readies its throttling plans and BC Hydro prepares to power down in the city next week, some of the items of note in the Friday news cycle.

Daily News, Front page, headline story
THE 'LEARNING GARDEN OF EVERYTHING'-- Northwest Community College in Prince Rupert is the new home of a First Nations interpretive Garden and last Saturday (November 7) saw the first of the planting for the garden get underway.

City West's plans to throttle Prince Rupert's Internet users was reviewed in the Friday edition of the Daily paper, the controversial plans are set to take place on January 6th and will see the city owned telecommunications company begin to manage bandwidth allocations, limiting the amount provided to users during the heavy congestion periods. While CityWest is portraying this move as a way to ensure service is fair to all, there are some in the community who fear that it is moving towards a greater form of monitoring the types of applications that users are utilizing. CityWest observers also suggest that the company may be falling behind the communication curve by not increasing bandwidth capacity for its customers, rather than throttling what they currently have to offer.

The ongoing debate over First Nation instruction continues on at School District 52. The school board recently received three letters from local First Nations leaders offering opinions on whether to add the Haida and Nisga'a languages into the local curriculum. Part of the most recent concern has been the introduction of non-territorial languages into Tsimshian territory, as well as concerns over allocation of funding in place if new languages were to be introduced into the curriculum.

All Native Basketball Qualifying sessions were featured in the Friday sports section, as well as a review of the Prince Rupert Midget A hockey teams most recent games in Terrace last weekend.
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(Daily News Archive Articles for November 13 )

The Northern View
B.C. Hydro outlines planned power outages in Prince Rupert starting Monday -- BC Hydro makes plans to make your Monday morning a hectic affair as they begin a string of planned power outages across the city. (see article here)

CFTK TV 7 News
Cullen Puzzled Over Attack Ads-- A recent home mailer program to the Northwest launched by Alberta Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, has left the local MP for the region baffled as to where the Alberta MP collected his facts. The mailer paints Nathan Cullen the MP for Skeena Bulkley Valley as being in favour of a long gun registry, even though Cullen most recently voted to abolish the registry during a recent commons vote (see article here)

CFTK TV 7 News
Potential Buyer fo Eurocan -- The rather confusing tale of just how much interest Chinese investors may have in Kitimat's Eurocan pulp mill received another twist with a report from CFTK TV (see article here)

CBC News Northern British Columbia, Daybreak North
Re-drawing the marine highway -- The CBC interviews BC Ferries Deborah Marshall discussing the prospect of an expanded service from the North coast which could see regular trips to Vancouver in the future. The item was first outlined in a Queen Charlotte Islands Observer story of last week and we featured details on the project on this portal earlier in the week as well. (listen to the CBC interview here)

Daily News, front page, headline story
The ‘Learning Garden of Everything’
By Monica Lamb-Yorski
The Daily News
Friday, November 13, 2009

Four years of planning an interpretative First Nations Garden at Northwest Community College’s Prince Rupert campus culminated last Saturday with a morning of planting.

A sign for the new garden, yet to be installed, will read: SUWILAA’YMSGM SNDOOYN, A TXA’NII GOO, meaning “The Learning Garden of Everything.”

The concept for the garden was developed by NWCC college instructor Judy Thompson and on Saturday morning, as she milled around children and adults planting, she was smiling.

“I proposed the project to college president Stephanie Forsyth before the new campus opened,” Thompson said.

Horticulturalist Nancy Ross, a college prep instructor from the Terrace campus, and Nancy Macklin, a landscape ecologist architect and ethnobotanist from Vancouver , were both helping direct the planting.

“I’ve been working with Judy on the project,” said Ross. “We did a garden at the Terrace campus in the summer of 2008. It’s a pretty good size and we’ve divided it into a cultural and a food garden.”

Macklin is in the Northwest because she’s designed the new longhouse that is going up at NWCC in Terrace. “The structure is up and the art work that is going to go in there is absolutely amazing,” Macklin said.

In 2008, Macklin helped with the garden in Terrace and was asked to help out with the one in Prince Rupert. Her task has been to order all the plants.

“They have come from Fraser Farms on Saltspring Island because it’s the only place that has native plants in B.C.,” Macklin explained. “They source from all over the province. Some of the plants are from this area and are brought there to be propagated and then brought back. In a sense they are coming home.”

Campus Principal Deb Stava thinks it has been a great project.

“It’s nice to be able to involve the campus, students and elders in the community,” Stava said.

Martha Cahoose, an adult student originally from west of Williams Lake who moved to Prince Rupert in June to live with her daughter, said it was her first time planting indigenous plants. She was tasked with planning Fritillaria camschatcensis, Northern Rice Root or Chocolate Lily, miyuubmgyet in Sm’algyax.

“I have done traditional use surveys of plants and worked as an archaeology assistant around Anaheim Lake, that’s how I knew about some of the plants we planted today,” Cahoose said.

Now that the garden is in place, Thompson is hoping it will become a community resource. She envisions tours with students, tourists and the general public.

On Friday she hosted a luncheon at the college with elders from the Friendship House, to let them know about the garden and invite them to the planting day.

“The development of such a garden that focused on First Nations people and their relationship with the land will lend itself to being a wonderful educational tool as well as a community building tool,” Thompson said.