A First Nation on northern Vancouver Island is considering how to deal with a request from members to expel and banish drug dealers and bootleggers on its reserves.
Elected Kwakiutl First Nation chief Verna Hunt said band members voted June 9 in favour of a motion calling for four of its members living on reserve to be exiled and struck from the nation’s membership list. The members are accused of selling illicit drugs and alcohol in the community.
“We’ve been mandated by our community members to banish or evict these people,” she said in an interview, adding that the request came from members, not council.
Hunt said the council will approach the situation carefully, to ensure both the nation’s rights and the rights of the accused are upheld in the process.
The nation has been trying for more than a year to evict problematic members from its reserves near Fort Rupert, about 11 kilometres southeast of Port Hardy.
Hunt said a notice of trespass and expulsion was given to some members on April 26, 2024, informing them they were trespassing and had to leave because they had committed illegal activities.
But a lawyer representing one of the recipients said the order was only based on rumours and hearsay and should not be executed, Hunt said.
The person in question has not been charged by the courts and has yet to leave the reserve, Hunt said.
There have even been calls from the community to burn down the houses where the accused drug dealers and bootleggers reside, but Hunt said that’s not going to happen.
“We’re going to do it legally. We’re going to research as to how other nations do this, go through the courts,” she said.
In April, Frank Young, a convicted drug dealer charged with second-degree murder in relation to the death of a 32-year-old man, was banished from Haida Gwaii along with seven of his associates and family members.
RCMP had to escort the group out of Skidegate to Prince Rupert due to widespread protests. Before Young left the island, more than 100 businesses on Haida Gwaii said they would not serve Young or his associates.
Four of the five homes that Young and his associates owned on Haida Gwaii were purchased by Skidegate Band Council and subsequently demolished, Haida Gwaii News reported.
The banishment in Haida Gwaii was a big moment for Indigenous communities across 小蓝视频, said Kwakiutl hereditary chief David Knox.
“We’re tired of watching our loved ones get killed from these toxic drugs,” he said in an interview.
Knox, who is also an elected councillor of his nation, said the membership meeting at the Kwakiutl band hall where the banishment was voted on was attended by more than 100 people.
The Kwakiutl Nation, with a population of 1,030, has about 300 members living on its reserves.
Knox said some people in the nation wanted the banishments to have come sooner, while others asked why people accused of sexual crimes against children weren’t also being considered for banishment.
The last time Kwakiutl exiled someone from their community was because they were preying on young children, but that was decades ago, he said.
Banishment is a “hard, ugly” way of justice, but it was how the Kwakwaka’wakw people kept their community safe prior to contact, Knox said.
Hunt said the tone of the community meeting was emotional in the wake of the death of a young woman about two weeks prior, which was suspected to be from toxic drugs.
“A lot of people feel that there should be repercussions,” she said.
But she said that drug dealers often sell drugs because they are also drug users. “After they get addicted and don’t have the money to buy it, they will start selling it and it just goes around and around.”
There are also people who say it doesn’t matter if the four members are banished, as people who use drugs will find another source, Hunt said, adding there’s nothing to stop banished members from living just off-reserve in Fort Rupert.
A “dial-a-dope” drug-courier service active in the region also has to be stopped, she said.
Hunt said there has been discussion of putting up security fences around reserves to become a gated community like the We Wai Kai Nation on Quadra Island, but there are questions around how effective it would be.
Last year, the nearby Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw Nations declared a state of emergency following the deaths of 11 members in two months. Many of those deaths were caused by poisoned drugs and alcohol, the nation said at the time.
Hunt said Kwakiutl and neighbouring Quatsino First Nation were part of the discussions with health authorities last year when the emergency happened.
Island Health has created a community crisis line with on-call outreach workers, and the First Nations Health Authority provided funding to bring more mental-health and substance-use support and programs into the Port Hardy region.
First Nations people in 小蓝视频 die from toxic drugs at nearly seven times the rate of others.
They make up 3.4 per cent of the 小蓝视频 population but accounted for 19 per cent of drug deaths in 2024, according to data from the First Nations Health Authority.
Knox said one solution is to encourage youths to reconnect with the land and traditional practices of the Kwakwaka’wakw through knowledge camps and other programs.
“If we want to break that historical intergenerational trauma, we start with the youngest ones,” he said. “This is how we change — get the youth, give them identity, give them that purpose of life again.”
