Homeland Journey is back. Seven years after Resource Works first sent a camera crew into the territories of First Nations across western Canada, the series is returning with two new episodes filmed with the Gitxsan Nation in and around Hazelton, B.C. The first chapter in a new season that will carry the project well beyond Gitxsan territory in the years ahead.
A journey that began in 2019
Homeland Journey launched in 2019 as a collaboration between Resource Works and the Modern Miracle Network, built around a simple premise: let the people at the centre of Canada’s reconciliation and resource story tell it themselves. Produced and directed by Resource Works founder Stewart Muir, the series has sat down with more than two dozen Indigenous leaders across the province, from Dallas Smith on self-governing nations to Chief Larry Nooski of Nadleh Whut’en and the leadership of the Burns Lake Native Development Corporation. The throughline in every episode is the same: Indigenous communities reviving language and culture while treating natural resources: timber, land, water – as a route to self-determination rather than a threat to it.
Two new chapters, two hereditary chiefs
The new episodes bring that same approach to the Gitxsan Nation, whose 22,000 square kilometres of traditional territory surround the Skeena, Bulkley and Kispiox rivers in northwestern B.C.
The first, a short vertical piece built for social audiences, features hereditary chief Skyan. She speaks about what it means to carry a name passed down through her matrilineal house – a responsibility she says took her fifteen years to fully accept, and about the regalia that marks it: a chief’s blanket bearing her house’s eagle, salmon and bear-den crests, a woven hat, and cedar neck rings earned through years of work for her people. “It’s heavy with responsibilities,” she says of the blanket. “It’s heavy with knowledge that was passed down to you.” Her connection to the land she was raised on is just as direct: “When we harm our environment and our animals, we’re harming ourselves. That is how it works.”
The second episode, a full-length conversation destined for YouTube and the Resource Works podcast feed, features hereditary chief Brydie O’Brien , Giluget,of the community of Kispiox. She walks through the Ayookw, the Gitxsan legal system that governs land, kinship, marriage and spirituality, and describes what happened when that system met Canada’s colonial legal order. O’Brien recounts the Gitxsan Nation’s role in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, the landmark case that saw the Supreme Court of Canada recognize Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en oral histories as valid evidence of Aboriginal title. This is the product, she says, of years of the nation organizing itself to bring elders’ testimony before the courts. She’s just as candid about the tension her generation now navigates: standing timber that is ceremonial and sacred to her people can, in a different worldview, be read simply as an economic resource – and reconciling those two views is central to how the Gitxsan Nation now approaches relationships with government and industry.
Beyond the Gitxsan Nation
These two episodes mark a return, not a one-off. Homeland Journey has always ranged across western Canada’s First Nations, and the Gitxsan chapter is the opening act of a new season that will carry the series to other nations in the region in the coming months – continuing the project’s original mission of letting Indigenous leaders across western Canada tell their own stories of culture, law and land.
Watch the new Gitxsan episodes, along with the full Homeland Journey archive, on the Homeland Journey YouTube channel and at resourceworks.com/homelandjourney.
Resource Works News
