10,000-5,500 Before Present--Glacial meltwater still gushed to the ocean and sea levels fluctuated wildly. The oldest surviving artifacts are stone tools that indicate, among other things, that aboriginal peoples were fishing salmon on the Fraser River.

5,500-1,500 BP--Great shell middens date from this period including the Marpole midden in south Vancouver, which covers several hectares up to five metres deep. Artifacts point to a civilization characterized by concentrated wealth, political complexity, the waxing and waning of hegemonies and sophisticated art.

1500 A.D.--There are large villages made up of sturdy, decorated cedar houses. Fishers, traders and diplomatic travellers come and go in sea-going canoes, travelling hundreds of kilometres offshore. Important guests are greeted by elaborate protocols of feasting and there are ceremonies where great chiefs disperse their wealth.

1579--On June 5, Sir Francis Drake reaches Barkley Sound. This may be the first European contact with the Northwest Coast people.

1741--Vitus Bering, commanding a Russian ship exploring the Aleutian Islands and the coast of Alaska, sights the St. Elias Mountains in B.C.'s far northwestern corner. He dies in a shipwreck on the return voyage but survivors tell the Russian czar of the enormous wealth from sea otter furs. The czar determines to keep Bering's discovery a state secret.

1763--With the French and Indian wars raging around the Great Lakes, King George III recognizes Indian tribes as nations and acknowledges that the Crown must sign treaties with them before acquiring land for European settlement.

1774--Spain, learning of Bering's discovery and alarmed by Russian encroachments on territory it claimed in 1493, orders Juan Perez to sail to take possession of the territory. On July 18, Perez sights the Queen Charlotte Islands and anchors. It is the first recorded contact with Europeans. Unable to land, Perez sails south, but makes contact again on August 8 at Nootka Sound with the Nuu-Chah-Nulth. Again he is unable to land.

1775--Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra sails just off the Nass River and records a vast volcanic eruption, which destroyed many Nisga'a villages and killed thousands of inhabitants. His log entry is an independent corroboration of the accuracy of Nisga'a oral history.

1776--Smallpox depopulates whole villages and shreds once-powerful cultures.

1778--Captain James Cook puts in at Nootka Sound. He is the first European to set foot in what will become B.C.

1785--James Hanna arrives at Nootka Sound. His sailors humiliate the great Chief Maquinna by igniting a small amount of gunpowder under his chair. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth later attack Hanna's ship. Hanna begins the fur trade by taking sea otter skins to China.

1786--Surgeon John Mackay becomes B.C.'s first known, non-aboriginal resident, spending a year with Chief Maquinna at the request of Captain John Strange. Strange doesn't return for Mackay who is picked up the another trading vessel the following year.

1788--British trader John Meares establishes a base at Nootka Sound. He leaves a shore-party, including 30 Chinese carpenters, to build the first ocean-going commercial ship in these waters.

1789--In June, British Captain Thomas Hudson witnesses a ceremony at Nootka Sound claiming the territory for Spain. Later that summer, two Spanish warships seize British trading vessels, bringing Spain and Britain to the brink of war. When all the Europeans leave. The Chinese carpenters are abandoned, becoming the first permanenet immigrants to B.C. Their fate is unknown.

1791--American traders build Fort Defiance on Meares Island, the American trader Washington is attacked and nearly overwhelmed by the Haida while the Americans conduct a massacre in reprisal. Spanish Lieut. Jose Maria Narvez explores the Gulf of Georgia, charting 10,000 kilometres of coast line in one summer.

1792--Captain George Vancouver begins his marine survey. The American trading ship Columbia uses cannons to distroy 200 longhouses at an Opitsaht community of Clayoquot Sound. Vancouver meets the Spanish at Friendly Cove.

1793--July 22, Sir Alexander Mackenzie arrives at Bella Coola--the first European to cross the continent by land--helping secure Britain's claim to the northern half of North America from sea to sea.

1803--The Nuu-Chah-Nulth attack an American trading vessel, capture it and execute the captain and crew. One survivor, John Jewitt, keeps a journal of his two years as a captive.

1805-1808--David Thompson and Simon Fraser begin charting the interior of what will become British Columbia. Fraser establishes forts at Stuart Lake and Fraser Lake. Thompson establishes kootenai House. Fraser descends the river that bears his name, reaching the Pacific at what is now Vancouver's Musqueam reserve on July 2, 1808.

1821-1842--The Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company merge, creating a vast fur-trading network from the Columbia River to Fort Liard and from the Rockies to the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Chief trader Murray Yale's men are killed at Fort George on the junction of the Fraser and nechako Rivers in 1823. Another attack results in the massacre of trader Guy Hughes and a canoe full of voyageurs at Fort St. John. Fort Langley is the first European settlement in the Fraser Valley. After American sea captain John Dominis threatens to visit a new sickness upon those who don't trade with him, an unknown fever ravages the Columbia River.

1843--Chief factor James Douglas founds Fort Victoria.

1850-1854--James Douglas, governor of he new colony of B.C., negotiates 14 treaties on Vancouver Island that include cash compensation for aboriginal land as required by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

1864--Chief Klatsassin leads the Chilcotin Uprising, attacking and killing 13 men in a party of surveyors planning a road to the Cariboo gold fields from the head of Bute Inlet. Klatsassin's attempt to foment a general insurrection ends when he and four other chiefs arrive at Quesnel on what they think is a guarantee of safe conduct to negotiate a treaty. They are seized, tried, and hanged.

1866--The colonial administration's unilateral "adjustment" of lands set aside for Indians near Kamloops permits their pre-emption by "white settlers" and sets the precedent used later for a series of large-scale transfers of Indian lands in the Fraser Valley.

1867--Canada is established by British North America Act, giving jurisdiction and ownership of land and resources to provincial governments while Canada assumes responsibility for Indians and land reserved for Indians.

1870--The colony's assembly prohibits aboriginal people from pre-empting unoccupied, unsurveyed or unreserved land without special permission, a decision that effectively establishes a 10-acre maximum and denies Indians the right to acquire land held by non-natives.

1871--B.C. joins Canada. Under the terms of union, Article 13 establishes that Canada assumes responsibility for Indians and management of their lands. Joseph Trutch, a former chief land surveyor during the Fraser River gold rush, is appointed lieutenant governor and B.C. abandons its policy of treaty-making for more than 100 years.

1872--The B.C. legislature removes Indians' right to vote in provincial elections. Coast Salish chiefs and hundreds of followers protest the government's restrictive policies outside the New Westminster land registry.

1874--Canada's first Indian Act consolidates all laws relating to aboriginal people. Ottawa asks the B.C. government to adopt the national standard for establishing Indians reserves of 80 acres per family. Fifty-six chiefs petition for reserves that meet the federal standard.

1876--A joint federal-provincial commission for the settlement of Indian reserves sets aside fishing stations, cemeteries and village sites.

1884--Canada outlaws the potlatch, the major social, economic and political institution of Northwest Coast tribes. Ceremonial regalia is seized and, in some cases, privately sold to foreign museums and collectors by Indian agents.

1884-1894--Using federal fisheries legislation, Canada alienates aboriginal peoples' right to a commercial fishery. Provisions under the Indian Act for a food fishery are interpreted to mean a strictly subsistence fishery.

1899--Concerned about impediments to the Klondike gold rush from hostile Indians in the northern Interior, the province accedes to a federal intiative to extend Treaty 8 from the Northwest Territories into the northeastern third of B.C. This is the last treaty signed in B.C.

1906--A delegation of three traditional chiefs--Joe Capilano, a Squamish, Basil David, a Shuswap,, and Chillihitza, an Okanagan--travel to London to meet King Edward, who rebuffs them on the grounds that Indian land claims are purely a Canadian matter.

1907--Chiefs in the Nass Valley form the Nisga'a land committee to fight politically and in the courts for their land rights.

1909--Chiefs from the North, southern Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland form the Indian Rights Association. Interior Salish chiefs form the Interior Tribes of B.C.

1913--The federal McKenna McBride Commission begins three years of hearings to find a ffinal solution to the Indian land question.

1916--B.C. aboriginal organizations form the Allied Tribes of B.C. to pursue their grievances on land and title in the courts. A few days later, the McKenna-McBride Commission recommends the total area for reserves be set at 2,698 square kilometres, down from 2,887 square kilometres. It recommends that 352 square kilometres of new territory be added but that 191 square kilometres be cut off existing reserves. The land added is generally scrub and remote wilderness, valued at just over $10 per hectare. The land cut off is mostly regarded as highly desirable by farmers, developers and municipal officials with an appraised value of about $50 per hectare.

1920--Aruthur Meighen's consevative government enacts the cut-off proposals. Indian agents and the RCMP launch a wave of arrrests and prosecutions of Indian leaders and elders along the coast.

1921--Ruling on a land question in Nigeria, the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London rules that aboriginal title is a pre-existing communal right that must be presumed to have continued unless the contrary is established.

1924-1927--Because of the possibilities raised by the Nigeria ruling, Ottawa amends the Indian Act to prohibit native organizations from raising money or retaining legal counsel to pursue land claims.

1931--Alfred Adams, an Anglican lay minister, founds the Native Brotherhood of B.C.

1949--Following Canada's accession to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the B.C. government restores the volte to aboriginal citizens. Nisga'a leader Frank Calder is elected to the B.C. legislature on the CCF ticket, the first Indian elected to a legislature.

1951--Parliament repeals laws prohibiting the potlach.

1960--The federal government grants Indians the right to vote.

1969--The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs is founded, representing 140 bands and 85 percent of the status Indians.

1973--In a landmark ruling on a suit launched by Nisga'a leader Frank Calder, six of seven Supreme Court of Canada justices rule that the Nisga'a held title to their traditional lands before B.C. was created. Justice Emmett Hall's powerful dissenting opinion defending their title convinces the federal government to adopt a comprehensive land claims' policy.

1976--Ottawa begins negotiating a treaty with the Nisga'a Tribal Council. B.C. does not participate.

1982--Section 35 of the new Candian Constitution affirms existing aboriginal and treaty rights but does not define them.

1984--In awarding $10 million in damages to the Musqueam Indian band after reserve land was leased by Ottawa to a golf club at lower than market rents, the Supreme Court rules that the government has a constituionally entrenched fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of aboriginal people.

1987--The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people, who live near the Nisga'a, launch a suit asserting their aboriginal title to traditional lands. The court hears 318 days of evidence from more than 60 witnesses.

1990--In ordering a new trial for Ron Sparrow, a Musqueam band member charged with violating the Fisheries Act, the Supreme Court rules that an aboriginal right cannot be extinguished without a clear and plain intent. The B.C. government agrees to negotiate native land claims.

1992--B.C., Canada and the First Nations Summit establish the B.C. Treaty Commission to serve as "keeper of the process."

1993--A 31-member treaty negotiation advisory committee is formed to advise B.C. on third-party interests. The treaty negotiation process begins.

1996--The Nisga'a, Canada and B.C. reach an agreement in principle for a treaty which sets out terms for a cash settlement, land, self-government and divisions of powers.

1997--In the Delgamuukw suit, the Supreme Court orders a new trial. But the ruling throws treaty negotiations into turmoil because it broadens the definition of aboriginal title and gives greater weight to oral histories previously dismissed by lower courts.

August, 1998--Representatives from the Nisga'a and the federal and provincial governments initial a treaty, which must be ratified by the Parliament, the legislature and a vote.

The Vancouver Sun, August 29, 1998