Siska, British Columbia
Siska is also home to the Siska First Nation, a local government of the Nlaka'pamux peoples who have lived in the Fraser Canyon for thousands of years. The Siska First Nation rancherie - main residential area - is just off the highway on a broad benchland just below the CPR bridge, and has a general store, the museum and band office, plus other band services. One of the band's economic ventures, a project in applied ethnobotany intended to use traditional knowledge to help preserve the land against logging extraction through economic competition for forest leases, is the nurturing and harvesting of traditional food and other plant materials in the surrounding wilderness, made into health and bath products and teas and other products.
Siska is the northernmost point in the Fraser Canyon where bigleaf maple is found. Other vegetation is noticeably denser than at Lytton, part of the transition from dry Interior to coast rainforest ecotypes that begins near Siska and is largely complete at Spuzzum.
References
- ^ BC Names/GeoBC entry "Cisco (railway point)"
- ^ "The Ecology and Silviculture of Bigleaf Maple" (PDF). B.C. Ministry of Forests. March 1999. Retrieved March 28, 2022.
50°09′00″N 121°34′45″W / 50.14996°N 121.5792°W