Our Lands

Honouring, protecting and sustaining our territory


Our Territory – Our Keyoh

Our Territory lies almost entirely within the Interior Plateau, and within smaller areas of both the Coast and Columbia Mountains physiographic regions.

Our Territory encompasses eight of British Columbia’s fourteen biogeoclimatic zones: 1) the alpine tundra (AT) zone; 2) the coastal western hemlock (CWH) zone; 3) the Engelmann spruce sub-alpine fir (ESSF) zone; 4) the montane spruce (MS) zone; 5) the interior Douglas fir (IDF) zone; 6) the sub-boreal pine spruce (SBPS) zone; 7) the sub-boreal spruce zone (SBS); and 8) the interior cedar hemlock (ICH) zone.

The Territory is 6,987,064 hectares (ha), and the boundary is displayed in black in the figure below


The Southern Dakelh Nation Alliance (the SDNA) First Nations have a holistic perspective. We believe the health and integrity of the land is inextricably linked to our own health and well-being. Our Nations have expressed concerns about the state of the wilderness (i.e., native ecosystems) due to existing cumulative effects coupled with the hundreds of applications for new human disturbance (e.g., development, land use change, resource extraction) each year within their Territory. We, the people of the Southern Dakelh Nation Alliance have never ceded our Rights and claimed title to our Territory land and natural resources. Nevertheless, they have not had just decision-making power to determine how our Territory land and natural resources are used or managed.

As such, we, the SDNA have the vision that protecting and sustainably managing ecosystems within their Territory is necessary. The SDNA plan to achieve this through various means including the development of a Territory Land Stewardship Plan (the Plan), which will be used to inform both the referral process, and future government-to-government negotiations about land and natural resources. The Plan will be a living document that is revised each year as new information becomes available to inform it. The Plan will provide the SDNA’s vision, goals, objectives and policies that are premised on our constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights and our claimed title (the Rights), and concerns, interests and perspectives.