Life in a northern B.C. boomtown

searcher · Jun 26, 2023

Life in a northern B.C. boomtown

The town of Kitimat, B.C., is folded into a forested valley, tucked back from where the ocean meets the land at the end of a roughly 100-kilometre long inlet. The hub of the community is a jumbled complex of malls with a handful of shops, restaurants and offices serving the population of around 8,000. You can’t see the ocean from here or the sprawling industrial complexes that crowd the waterfront.

Kitimat was settled on Haisla lands in the 1950s, a planned community built on a promise of prosperity from the Aluminum Company of Canada, also known as Alcan. The town was designed to serve the company’s energy-intensive smelter, which would be powered by a dam built on the other side of a range of snow-capped mountains. Now owned by international mining giant Rio Tinto, the smelter’s smokestacks have been puffing ever since.

Across the harbour from Alcan is Cʼimaucʼa (Kitamaat Village), a reserve home to around 700 members of the Haisla Nation. Nestled along the shoreline directly opposite the industrial complex, the village has had a front-row seat from day one.