By Aaron Hemens, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, IndigiNews On this stretch of the Nicola River, Brian Holmes misses the sound of water. “This is heartbreaking,” he quietly says to himself as he prepares to park above a kilometre-long stretch where no surface water remains. In the absence of the river’s flow, birds can be heard in the thick vegetation, their calls occasionally joined by a horse neighing in the distance or a car passing along Douglas Lake Road above. The 44-year-old Upper Nicola Band (UNB) member and father of two leaves his vehicle and disappears into the bush separating the river from a small ranch below the road, a few minutes downstream from his community of spaxmn (Douglas Lake) in the Nicola Valley, in B.C.’s southern interior. He re-emerges from…
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