Genetic analysis of ancient hazelnut trees could help First Nations secure land rights in Canadian courts.
In the forests of British Columbia, the fuzzy leaves and pointed husks of beaked hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta) can cover the floors of entire valleys. This wild plant, whose seedlings proliferate after a fire, served as a vital food source of many of the region’s Indigenous people, who tended it with prescribed burns. Despite this, the Western ideology that dominates Canadian laws has often considered Indigenous people’s impact on some of this land to be trivial, and so discounts their land rights.
Now, a genetic analysis of these hazelnuts published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests Indigenous people of British Columbia actively cultivated this crop, deliberately transporting beaked hazelnuts across about 500 miles (800 km) to cultivate the nutritious and reliable food source in new regions. The trees’ modern diversity and widespread coverage is a result of these ancient efforts, the researchers report. The findings could bolster First Nations tribes’ legal claims to their traditional lands.
How so? Well, to claim such rights, a Nation must prove “continuous, exclusive, and sufficient” use of the land, according to a 2014 Canadian Supreme Court case - Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia.
As Indigenous food cultivation often left a less obvious impact on the land than agriculture, that can be difficult to prove. But genetic evidence from the hazelnuts and other cultivated plants may help tribes make their case. “It proves that as Indigenous people, we have been thriving on this land long enough to share the wealth with others,” says Jesse Stoeppler, deputy chief of the Hagwilget First Nation.
Hazelnut pollen found in layers dating to about 7,000 years ago suggests Indigenous peoples had deliberately brought the hazelnuts north from multiple different locations, then tended and cultivated them here.
The research “provides just a really solid case study in how non-domesticated plants … are manipulated and used in many of the same ways that domesticated plants are,” says environmental archaeologist John Marston of Boston University.
Oral histories and traditions surrounding the beaked hazelnuts abound in the Indigenous communities of British Columbia. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University and colleagues wondered whether the plants’ genes echoed those stories. “We wanted to see if there was a genetic signature of that on the landscape,” she says. “We found that there absolutely is.”
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