In their efforts to rebrand themselves as a city-owned museum that isn’t colonial or anti-Indigenous, the busted Nelsonia Museum wrote an article in the oligarchic Dark Star newspaper outlining how much harm the UnCanadian nonPacific Kansas City Railway caused to the landscape, culture & societal virtues in the Valley of the Lost Souls. In doing so, the “History Buff” author revealed once again how much the White Heritage City refuses to acknowledge the ongoing plight of the Autonomous Sinixt and their continued federal status as an extinct peoples to this day who are still suffering through what their matriarchal authority Marilyn James calls their “genocide”.

To the writer’s credit, they mention how “many railways in the region were built along the extensive trail networks developed by Indigenous nations” and “huge land grants were provided to railway companies, including land that was not subject to treaties and had never been ceded by First Nations communities”, along with the damage done to “Chinese people (being) barred from working on the construction of many rail lines due to government legislation and opposition from white workers”, and that “the CPR took advantage of tax exemptions from the city(!) and quickly constructed… a new station… built on the site of a Chinese-owned vegetable garden, and Cottonwood Creek was diverted for its construction”.

However, as many guilty parties do when trying to make up for their sins of the past, the Dark Star’s new monthly columnist and his editorial overlords chose to overlook how the destruction and harmfulness of the past still stands today without any reconciliation or remediation conducted by the white male power titans still in charge of suppressing the Autonomous Sinixt and all their relations. For instance, the imperial Oak Bay media baron’s local office of the Dark Star sits on unceded territory while they pay their rental allegiance monthly to the industrial titans of the UnCanadian nonPacific Kansas City Railway itself who own the train station in daftly named Railtown where you can’t catch a passenger train to anywhere.

Cottonwood Creek still doesn’t support the kokanee salmon population which was killed by CPRKC back in the dire day, even though the Queen Consort City worships the almost extinct fish on their civic crest, despite making no progress other than sad lip-service on recreating their destroyed spawning grounds. The Nelsonia Police State is still in cahoots with the federally unaccountable keystone cops of the militaristic Yankee-owned CPRKC, who conduct violent safety blitzes which harass the local unhoused population and threaten innocent mothers and children with jail-time who just want to walk from Shitty Hall to the low-income grocery store. When WASPy Nelsonia opened up its tech hub at the squatting train station a few years back, the Shitty Council featuring many of today’s councillors and our Mayor B&B had no problem supporting and welcoming the hostile removal of their vulnerable disenfranchised citizens from the unceded premises, while participating in the documented mental health slander of those who dared to protest against Corporal Creel’s ham-handed fascistic aggressions.

Worst of all, even though Jean-Philippe Stienne recognizes that unCanadian nonPacific and their totalitarian fraternal brethren left what he charitably describes as a “mixed legacy of land ownership issues, displacement, heritage buildings and attractions, environmental damage and rail trails”, there’s absolutely no condemnation in his predictable puff-piece of the absolute refusal by the white supremacist powers that shouldn’t be to clean up their polluted mess on the waterfront, or give back land that the Dark Star takes advantage of without any land acknowledgements on their consumerist website which sponsors climate-antagonistic Burger Month, or acknowledge the whitewashing Nelsonia Museum’s disgraceful treatment of the Autonomous Sinixt’s matriarchal authority and their sacred baskets during the pandemic.

If the dastardly Dark Star and the White Heritage City’s museum really want to do the right thing, they should concede that they are still participating in and profiting from the exact same duplicitous double standards which ruined the West Arm of Kootenay Lake’s fragile paradisiacal ecosystem in the first place.