NORMA RAE OF THE OKANAGAN The workplace was tense, rumours swirled of secret lists, people to be fired and homes to have their water cut off. Finally, Evelyn Lube decided she'd had enough. Something radical had to be done, even if asking for help from a big union risked ending in a racial showdown

JOHN STACKHOUSE

In the sun-drenched Okanagan Valley, where baseball diamonds and trailer parks sprout like peach groves, the people of the Westbank First Nation thought there was nothing left to absorb from the white world. Their ancestral land had come to look as suburban as a strip mall. Old hunting grounds had been turned into a theme park, berry patches into drive-throughs and big-box outlets. Where fishermen once threw their nets, yachts and jet skis now ruled the waters. In almost every visible way, their lives seemed no different from those of their 100,000 neighbours in Kelowna. But that was before the biggest public-sector labour union in British Columbia knocked on their doors, and band members were reminded that they were supposed to be different -- a communal people quite unlike the class-riven society around them.