Imagine yourself as an Indiana Jones personality and you are given a map of where tribal jewelry hot spots likely are in North America. Your task is to think of likely routes the first land bridge migrants from Asia took 30,000 years ago and how far they got before the Ice Ages closed them in. We know they canoed and travelled down the outer islands of Alaska and were able to settle south of there, in the Queen Charlotte Islands and Vancouver Island, and branch out into the interior, and then all the way down the coast into Mexico.



So Mr. or Ms. Indie, here you are out on the wide western desert plateaus of British Columbia in western Canada. We are at a spot where the great migration of the first settlers from Asia into North America peters out, and the trail is not picked up much, other than on the Oregon coast, until we arrive in Arizona where the Apache and Navaho language are related to these first settlers, known as the Eyak-Athabascan language family. Be aware that you can now drop down to sea level from the five thousand foot high plateau you are standing on.

This is where Alexander McKenzie from Canada was told by these first settlers, that out west on the coast were the Bella Coola people, very different, fight strangers; coast people who live on clams and foods from the sea. Beware. He did, in 1792, and missed Captain Cook sailing on by only by weeks, and avoiding hostile natives, left soon. At many places on this continent you can stand at a meeting point between peoples who lived and traded for 30,000 years until the Old World arrive from the east, into this New World. In all ways.

In your time, you could come and share your fascination with the mystery of people who meet, trade, exchange brides and other soft goods, and mostly live in harmony. We could learn. We are learning. From artifacts showing where peoples met and traded and exchanged, we also find middens that display much from the recent and more distant past. How you see your past around you does affect your attitude toward the life around you. How we keep ourselves healthy and alert, as has always been of vital concern to peoples everywhere, affects decisions we make and how we place ourselves in the events of life.

We are that third wave of humanity to surge into the New World, and while we have been imperfect, all in all the New World has given the Old many models and standards to continue to reach towards. See that you are part of the solutions. You can; you know.