Darren Bolton

The hazelnut tree has long been a part of the landscape in parts of British Columbia. A 19th-century settler gave the village of Hazelton in northern B.C.’s Skeena region its name because of the abundance of hazelnuts in the area.  A new study indicates Indigenous peoples in B.C. had been cultivating the beaked hazelnut for thousands of years, which researchers say challenges the notion that pre-colonial Indigenous people in northwestern B.C. were only hunter-gatherers.  The findings indicate hazelnuts had been transplanted and cultivated for at least 7,000 years by Gitxsan, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a peoples. The research emphasizes Indigenous peoples’ contributions to the creation and maintenance of the region’s ecosystems and “cuts through assumptions of B.C. and the Northwest Coast being wild and completely untouched.”