Kootenay Central.
4 candidates, one seat.

The Ktunaxa Nation says that Ktunaxa people have occupied the lands beside the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers and the Arrow Lakes for more than 10,000 years, and it calls its territory ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa. The Nation's map page gives ʔaqyamⱡup as the Ktunaxa name for Nelson and yaqan nuʔkiy as the name for Lower Kootenay. BC Geographical Names records ʔaqastu as the traditional Ktunaxa name of Kaslo, and a Ktunaxa Language Program note of April 2006 as its source for the Ktunaxa name of Creston.

Yaqan Nuʔkiy, the Lower Kootenay Band, is one of the six bands of the Ktunaxa Nation. On its own website the Band says its name means "where the rock stands" and refers to an important place in the Creston Valley. It says its people settled along the Kootenay River and at the south end of Kootenay Lake, and used the canoe on the river, in the wetlands and on the lake for all sustenance activities. A study of the Creston Flats published by NiCHE says reclamation projects reduced the Band's access to a river that has been central to its culture and food for centuries.

The City of Nelson says it resides and operates within the unceded traditional territories of the Sinixt, the Syilx and the Ktunaxa peoples. The Village of Nakusp says the Sinixt were the original inhabitants of the Arrow Lakes area where Nakusp now lies. The Syilx Okanagan Nation says that Syilx Okanagan and Sinixt people from the eastern parts of Syilx territory were dispersed by colonization, and that they keep returning to the Arrow Lakes to hunt, fish and hold ceremonies. The Supreme Court of Canada's summary of R. v. Desautel records that Richard Lee Desautel, a member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes, shot an elk in the Arrow Lakes region in October 2010, and that the majority accepted the trial judge's finding that the Lakes Tribe is a successor group of the Sinixt people. The 2021 census counted 2,785 people with Indigenous identity in the district: 1,200 First Nations and 1,495 Métis.

Shawn Lamb, a retired archivist of the Nelson Museum, writes that in August 1886 the brothers Osner and Winslow Hall found a copper-silver deposit on Toad Mountain, southwest of Nelson. The find began a rush to the mountain and led to the founding of the town. By the winter of 1887 to 1888, between 300 and 400 people had set up tents along Ward Creek. BC Geographical Names records that the site was divided into town lots in 1888, that it was called Salisbury, then Stanley, and then Nelson, after Hugh Nelson, the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, and that its post office opened on August 1, 1889.

Lamb says that by 1894 two railways served Nelson, and that in 1895 a gravity-operated aerial tramway four and a half miles long began carrying ore from the Silver King mine to a smelter in the Rosemont area of the town. The smelter was active until 1908. BC Geographical Names gives March 18, 1897 as the date Nelson was incorporated as a city. Lamb adds that a street car system begun in 1899 by the Nelson Electrical Tramway Company was later run by the city, and that in 1977, the centennial of incorporation, more than 350 buildings received heritage designation.

Several of the district's towns date from the years of the Kootenay silver rush. BC Geographical Names records that the Kaslo townsite was plotted in 1891 by John Keen, that its post office opened on August 1, 1892, and that it was incorporated as a city on August 14, 1893. The mining recorder's office moved there from Ainsworth in 1894. The Canadian Encyclopedia adds that a flood in 1894 destroyed Kaslo and that it was rebuilt at once.

On Slocan Lake, the surveyor Perry named a settlement El Dorado in 1891. BC Geographical Names says residents met in 1892 to choose a new name and picked New Denver, and that its post office opened on September 1, 1892. Silverton was surveyed in 1893 as Four-Mile City, after Four-Mile Creek, and its post office opened on June 1, 1894 under the name Silverton, after the silver mines of the area.

The Village of Nakusp says its town site was put up for sale in 1892 by the Rand Brothers, with lots selling for as much as $300 each, and that goods reached the town by paddlewheeler on the Arrow Lakes because it had no roads or railways. BC Geographical Names records that Salmo began as Salmon Siding during construction of the Nelson and Fort Shepherd Railway, and that its post office opened on May 1, 1897.

Touchstones Nelson, the city's museum, says that steep mountains and water-filled valley bottoms restricted railway building in many places, so travel by water was the most effective way to move goods and people. Its booklet on the sternwheelers says the boats carried the materials used to build railways, smelters, lumber mills and towns, and that many areas they served never had a railway. It says the highway systems of the early to middle 20th century made the boats obsolete.

The Kootenay Lake Historical Society says the SS Moyie was built at the Nelson shipyard in the summer and fall of 1898 and launched on October 22. After 59 years on Kootenay Lake, the Canadian Pacific Lake and River Service retired her in 1957, because a major overhaul and a new boiler were too costly and the Nelson shipyard had reduced capacity. She was sold for a dollar, towed to Kaslo and brought ashore at high water in the spring of 1958. The Kootenay Lake Historical Society was established that year and became her custodian. She is a National Historic Site of Canada.

BC Geographical Names records that Creston was called 7th Siding during construction of the Crowsnest railway line in 1897 and 1898, and that Fred Little, a landowner from Creston, Iowa, would not transfer land to the Canadian Pacific Railway until it named the station Creston. The post office opened on March 1, 1899. Creston became a village municipality on May 14, 1924 and a town municipality on January 1, 1966.

The Creston Valley Wildlife Management Authority says the Kootenay River basin once formed 70 kilometres of wetland, 8 to 10 kilometres wide, from the south end of Kootenay Lake to Washington State. Attempts to alter the marsh began in the mid 1880s, and in 1894 a record flood destroyed the dykes. NiCHE names William Adolph Baillie-Grohman as the first to begin diking and dredging, in the 1880s. The Canadian Encyclopedia says the federal government began reclaiming the bottomlands in the early 1930s and eventually reclaimed 8,100 hectares.

A biological study presented in 1947 found that the Kootenay Flats were the largest and most important resting and feeding ground for waterfowl in the interior of British Columbia. The Creston Valley Wildlife Act, passed in March 1968, created the Creston Valley Wildlife Management Area, a 7,000-hectare area of provincial Crown land along the Kootenay River system.

Parks Canada lists the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre at 306 Josephine Street, New Denver, as a National Historic Site of Canada, designated on June 8, 2007. Its record dates the construction of the camp to 1942 and gives 1946 as a significant date. The plaque text says the centre is a reminder of the forced removal of the Japanese Canadian population from the West Coast during the Second World War, and that the centre is located at the site of a former camp.

Parks Canada says the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre was created in 1992 to 1994 to preserve buildings from the internment and to commemorate the internees' experience. The site includes a Japanese ornamental garden, the austere cabins in which internees lived, a Buddhist sanctuary, artefacts and interpretive panels. The Kyowakai centre, the only building on the site still in its original place, serves as an ofuro, a traditional Japanese bath, and as a community centre. BC Geographical Names places New Denver on the northeast side of Slocan Lake.

The BC Geological Survey's MINFILE record says the three ore zones of the Bluebell mine lie along the Riondel Peninsula on Kootenay Lake, from the Comfort zone in the north to the Kootenay Chief in the south. From 1888 to 1896 the Kootenay Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd. operated the mine. The record says the Canadian Metal Co. Ltd. took over the property in 1906, and Heritage BC dates the purchase by that company, which held French capital, to 1905. Heritage BC says the growth of the mine led to a post office called Riondel, named in honour of the company's French president, Count Édouard Riondel.

The MINFILE record says the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada Ltd. acquired the property in 1931 and did exploration work. Diamond drilling in 1947 outlined the three orebodies, and the mine reopened in 1948. The record says the mine closed in December 1971 because its ore reserves were depleted. Elections BC lists the Riondel Community Centre among the voting places of the district in 2024.

The Village of Nakusp says the Celgar company began operating there in 1951 and that forestry became the main part of the local economy. Nakusp was incorporated as a village municipality on November 24, 1964, according to BC Geographical Names. In the same year, on September 16, Canada and the United States ratified the Columbia River Treaty, which required Canada to build the Duncan, Arrow and Mica dams. The British Columbia government says the Arrow dam was later renamed Hugh Keenleyside.

The government's treaty history says that filling the Arrow Lakes reservoir flooded large sections of valley bottom land, inundated traditional First Nations sites and displaced communities. Arrow Lakes Historical Society records show Nakusp preparing for the higher water. One photograph shows new foundations for a Nakusp building to be moved on September 7, 1968. Another shows land cleared in 1968, including the original Highway 6, with a new wharf at the village. The Village of Nakusp says the Nakusp and District Sports Complex was officially opened on February 12, 1980.