51�Թ�

Two weeks earlier, artist, author and activist Lawney Reyes — an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Sinixt band — had passed away, at the age of 91.

Meanwhile, many Sinixt people still lived in Washington, separated from much of their traditional territory by an arbitrary border that had existed for a relative blink of an eye in comparison to the thousands of years they had spent on that land.

Before Europeans arrived and eventually drew a border along the 49th parallel, the Sinixt lived in what is now southeastern B.C. and northeastern Washington.

Canada’s government recognized the Sinixt, known there as the Arrow Lakes Band, in the early 1900s.

Desautel said he’s been traveling to the ancestral lands on the Canadian side since the 1980s “when I first realized that the Sinixt people lived in that area and walked into those grounds, feeling my ancestral roots.”