Сhapter SIX
ALONG THE WEST COAST of Canada, extending south from the tip of the Alaska panhandle, is a chain of islands that some call Canada's Galápagos Islands. During the last glaciation, some ten thousand years ago, most of Canada was entombed in an ice sheet more than one mile thick. It is thought the ice might have encircled but not completely enveloped the islands, which became refuges for species that could move away from the ice. As ice formed, plants and animals moved up the mountainsides, which eventually became islands in a sea of ice and the repository of the survivors. Today many of their descendants are found nowhere else on the planet. This is Haida Gwaii, the land of the Haida people, which was named the Queen Charlotte Islands by more recent arrivals.
In the early 1970s, a combination of citizens, First Nations, and environmentalists on Haida Gwaii had become appalled at the logging practices on the islands and called for the British Columbia government to intervene and protect the land from the depradations. A symbol of the contentious areas was Windy Bay, a pristine watershed covering 12,350 acres of Lyell Island near South Moresby Island in the southern third of the archipelago.
In 1974, a group of citizens on Haida Gwaii demanded protection of critical parts of the islands from clear-cut logging. In response, the provincial government set up the Environment and Land Use Committee, made up of representatives of the various interest groups. In 1979, one of the committee's recommendations was not to log in Windy Bay. That was not an acceptable option to the forest company, which continued to press the B.C. government to allow logging. But Premier Bill Bennett could not ignore the environmentalists' increasing outspokenness or the public's greater awareness of environmental concerns. So in 1979 yet another group comprising a broad spectrum of environmentalists, forest company representatives, and other interest groups was set up as the South Moresby Resource Planning Team, chaired by Nick Gessler, an American expat who was running the Queen Charlotte Islands Museum.
I first heard about this controversy in 1982, when I received a handwritten note from the New Democratic Party member of Parliament representing the Skeena riding, which includes Haida Gwaii. In his note, Jim Fulton, the young social worker who had defeated the beautiful, charismatic incumbent and cabinet minister, Iona Campagnolo, wrote: “Soozook, you and The Nature of Things should do a program on Windy Bay.” At that point, I had no idea what the battles were about or even where Windy Bay was. But as I learned the issues, I could see it would be an important story and I suggested to Jim Murray, executive producer of The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, that we do a program on the fight over its fate. In fact, Dr. Bristol Foster, a wildlife biologist who had worked for the B.C. government for years before quitting in frustration, had already contacted Murray about the Windy Bay story.
Jim assigned the program to producer Nancy Archibald, and after the show's writer, Allan Bailey, had researched the background of the issue, Nancy and a crew flew to the islands to film. I followed days later to do some critical interviews and stand-ups on location in different parts of the archipelago. It was expensive to hire a helicopter and fly to the significant sites, so there wasn't a lot of time. Working frantically with Allan, I wrote, rewrote, and memorized the on-camera pieces as we flew by helicopter to different locations. Looking over those stand-ups today, I am gratified that they still resonate with relevance. I began the report this way:
The vast forests of Canada are more than just a potential source of revenue: they're part of the spiritual mystique of the country. I'm on Windy Bay in the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, and this virgin forest began its existence over eight thousand years ago. Many of these trees were already mature adults long before Christopher Columbus discovered America. It was here that the Haida Indians hunted and fished. They used these trees to build their dugout canoes and their longhouses. It was these trees that inspired Emily Carr to paint some of her most haunting pictures. Having existed for thousands of years, this forest could disappear in a matter of months through logging. Tonight we face a special issue that could affect all Canadians and asks us to redefine our notion of progress.
I continued with a piece on location in a clear-cut on Talunkwan Island, not far from Lyell Island, where logging was speeding along:
There's nothing subtle about logging. It's the application of brute strength to efficiently clear large tracts of land. This is Talunkwan Island across from Windy Bay. Ten years ago, it was covered in forest just like Lyell Island. Then it was logged. It'll be a long time before the land recovers. We often hear of “harvesting” trees, but in areas like this, you can't farm a forest the way you do corn or tomatoes. The topsoil takes thousands of years to build up and the population of trees changes slowly over long periods of time. Now the thin layer of soil is exposed to easy runoff—and it rains a lot here. No one can say what these hills will look like in a hundred years, but you can be sure the forests will look nothing like the ones that once were here.
At the end of the program, this was my conclusion:
The Queen Charlotte Islands are at the outer edge of the west coast, a unique setting where we can be transported back to prehistoric times when only natural laws prevailed. It took thousands of years and countless seeds and seedlings before giant trees like those at Windy Bay took root and survived. Many of them are more than six hundred years old. Once it took two men weeks to cut one of them down—today one man can do it in minutes. Is this progress? Wilderness preserves are more than just museums for relics of the past, they're a hedge against our ignorance, a tiny reserve from which we might learn how to use our powerful technologies more wisely. But in the end, our sense of awe and wonder in places like this changes us and our perspective of time and our place in the nature of things.
I have often been accused by vested-interest groups like loggers and forest company executives of being biased in my reporting. Viewed through their perspectives of immediate jobs and profit, my statements may seem slanted, but nature and so many other values are ignored by the lenses of such priorities. I believe a huge problem we face today is the overwhelming bias of the popular media that equates economic growth with progress.
For the program I interviewed Tom McMillan, then federal minister of the environment; environmentalist Thom Henley; Bill Dumont, with Western Forest Products Limited; forester Keith Moore; Nick Gessler; Bristol Foster; traditional Haida Diane Brown; Miles Richardson, then president of the Haida Nation; and Guujaaw, a young Haida artist and carver. Ruggedly handsome, long hair loosely braided, a twinkle in his eye so you never knew whether he was serious or kidding, Guujaaw changed the way I viewed the world and set me on a radically different course of environmentalism.
The Big Four on Haida Gwaii—me, Miles Richardson, Jim Fulton, and Alfie Collinson
I knew that unemployment in Skidegate and Masset, the two Haida communities, was very high, that some of the loggers were Haida, and that the non-Haida forest workers often spent money in the two communities. If economic opportunities were desperately needed, one would think the Haida would welcome forest companies; yet Guujaaw had been a leader in opposing logging. When I asked him why, he answered, “Our people have determined that Windy Bay and other areas must be left in their natural condition so that we can keep our identity and pass it on to following generations. The forests, those oceans, are what keep us as Haida people today.”
Windy Bay, forests, and oceans were critical to Haida identity? This was a statement of a fundamentally different relationship with the “environment” than most of us have, a sense that we are where we live, a relationship that is essential to future generations for whom present Haida people feel a responsibility. I wondered how many executives of forest companies—or of any company for that matter—would consider future generations a fundamental part of their planning and actions.
I continued my interview: “So if the trees are logged off—” Before I could finish my question, he responded, “If they're logged off, we'll probably end up the same as everyone else, I guess.”
“The same as everyone else”—such a simple statement, yet so deeply significant. It was only days later, while I was watching the rushes, that I recognized the enormity of this insight. Since then, Guujaaw has confirmed that my interpretation of his remarks is correct: Haida people do not think they end at their skin or fingertips. Guujaaw opened for me a window into a radically different way of seeing the world. As I reflected on his words, it became obvious that these words are true for me and for all of us.
If we looked at another person with a machine that registers temperatures in different colors, we would see a gradient of heat exuding from her body into her surroundings. Water vapor and tiny electromagnetic emissions also fan out from any body while we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with plants on land and in water. Each of us is connected to our surroundings, just as the Haida see that the air, water, trees, fish, and birds of their land make them who they are. Talk to most Haida and within a few minutes it becomes clear that Haida Gwaii, “Island of the People,” the islands they consider home, not only embody their history and culture but also are the very definition of who they are and why they are special and different.
Miles Richardson once told me about a meeting of the Fourth World Wilderness Congress, held in Colorado and attended by delegates from fifty-five countries and indigenous representatives from around the world. Miles was there for his expertise in aboriginal politics. One evening, he found himself in a circle with other First Nations representatives, including some elders. He was lamenting that the Haida had lost so many of their ceremonies and cultural traditions, as well as their language. An elder sitting next to him, who Miles had thought was snoozing, lifted his head and remarked: “You know those ceremonies, those songs, those traditions you're talking about—they haven't gone anywhere. They're in the same place your forefathers found them. They're in the forests, they're in the ocean, they're in the birds, they're in the four-leggeds. You've just forgotten how to listen. I have a suggestion—before you take another step forward [meaning, do more politicking], take a step back and remember how to listen.” Miles was tremendously moved by this and says he hardly said a word for the next three days.
My grandparents, like most newcomers to North America over the past five centuries, arrived with a very different attitude to the land. To them, Canada was a totally alien country. Many earlier immigrants survived only because of the knowledge and generosity of the aboriginal people. The attraction of North America may have been freedom from the tyranny of church or despots, opportunity in a resource-rich region, land for farming, ranching, mining, or other development. But most of those immigrants were incapable of learning from the aboriginal people or the indigenous flora and fauna because they lacked the respect to watch, listen, and learn from them. Instead, they attempted to “make over” the land to what was familiar, bringing their domesticated plants and animals, clearing the land of its native forests and prairies, draining wetlands, straightening or damming rivers, and dumping wastes without a thought. And once they were established, they attempted to remove the indigenous people by killing them or forcing them to abandon their languages, culture, and values to become Canadians.
The Nature of Things with David Suzuki program on Windy Bay was broadcast in 1982 to a large audience and elicited more letters in response than any other show in the series since its inception in 1960. After the program had run, the South Moresby Resource Planning Team reached the same conclusion as the committee before it—Windy Bay, a jewel set in the misty isles, had to be protected from logging.
Premier Bennett still resisted the team's recommendation because of immense pressure from logging interests. He did what politicians often do in such circumstances—he punted, setting up yet another group, the Wilderness Advisory Committee, headed by the respected lawyer Bryan Williams. But so many battles over logging had broken out all over the province that the committee was charged with examining sixteen contentious areas and coming up with decisions on all of them in three months! After years of deliberation and no decisions about Haida Gwaii, Bennett set a ludicrously short time to decide on all these areas. Environmentalists immediately pointed out there wasn't enough time to perform the job responsibly, adding that the committee's membership was too heavily weighted toward the logging industry.
By then I was fully engaged in the battle over Windy Bay, and I made a submission to the Wilderness Advisory Committee. The body included Les Reed, a forest economist who occupied a chair at the University of British Columbia funded by the forest industry. He once boasted that in contrast to people like me, he did not have tenure; I don't know what he was trying to imply, because tenure is a privilege conferred on academics to free them to speak out on issues about which they are knowledgeable, without fear of reprisal. In contrast, Reed was completely dependent on the forest industry for his continued support—like someone who works for the tobacco or nuclear industry, he was too dependent on vested interests to be credible.
At one point during my submission to the committee, I mentioned that I had just driven through forests in France while filming and had noticed the roadkill—animals killed by motor vehicles. Before I could finish my sentence, Reed interrupted me to blurt out, “We have lots of roadkill in B.C. too.” I responded that the point I was making was that in France I hadn't seen any roadkill. Instead, I saw a lot of tree plantations of the kind the forest industry wanted to substitute for old-growth forests, but judging by the lack of roadkill in France, there was little wildlife in them compared with our forests—as Reed had pointed out. The audience hooted its delight as Reed scowled at me.
The really hot area examined by Williams's committee was Windy Bay. In the end, the committee came through, recommending that 363,000 acres, including Windy Bay, be set aside as parkland. Response from the forest industry was furious, as well-known radio talk show host Jack Webster took on the issue and attacked environmentalists (it was revealed later that he was a shareholder in one of the companies logging the area). In the heat of the controversy, I was invited to debate the issue on Webster's show. I was very nervous, because I was a latecomer to the controversy and didn't know all the details, as others who had been involved for years did.
To my surprise, when I arrived at the studio, I could see immediately that Jack was equally scared of me. No doubt he too felt insecure about his facts. Once he opened his show, he was very polite and respectful as we sparred over the issue. Finally I said, “Jack, it's disgraceful how little land we set aside to protect. Do you know how much we protect on the coast?” Now, in a way I was bluffing—I had heard Thom Henley quote a number that was very small but had not seen the evidence for myself. If Jack had answered, “No, I don't. How much do we protect?” I would have had to sound foolish by replying, “I don't know either, but it isn't very much.” To my relief, he began to stutter, then paused and finally said, “Well, I have to admit I don't know,” and he lobbed me an easy question on a different subject. He was as shaky on the land issue as I was at that moment.
Bennett was still under too much pressure from the forest industry and loggers to be able to accept the Williams recommendation. Even though a mere sixty to seventy logging jobs were at risk if the area were set aside as a park, the industry held the rest of the province to ransom, railing against the “greedy” environmentalists who cared more about trees than people. I heard of a public meeting that was held in Sandspit, the community where most of the men logging South Moresby lived. Debate was heated as loggers demanded their right to make a living on Haida Gwaii like anyone else. At that point, a Haida elder stood up and asked how many loggers were buried in Haida Gwaii. After a long pause, the answer came back: “None.” The elder responded that her people had lived there for thousands of years and their bones could be found throughout the islands.
At last, in 1987, new premier Bill Vander Zalm decided to include the disputed land in a park to be jointly administered by Parks Canada and the Haida people and known as Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site. It was a massive area of almost six hundred square miles, representing 15 percent of the islands of Haida Gwaii.
Vander Zalm had been vacillating back and forth, leaving environmentalists whipsawed between the excitement of potential victory and despair at the possibility of losing. He was in direct phone contact with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as they debated the amount of money the feds would kick in. I was in Russia filming, and it seemed that each time I called Tara, a different outcome was imminent. I was writing a weekly column for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto at the time and had to go through all kinds of machinations to send the columns from different parts of the Soviet Union. I was filming along Lake Baikal in Siberia when the decision was finally made, but I had written two columns—one congratulating politicians for the wisdom of their decision, the other decrying their cowardice in making the wrong choice.
Frank Beban, the owner of the company that was doing the logging, ordered his men to cut on Lyell Island around the clock, dropping the trees as fast as possible and just leaving them on the ground until the deadline in July when all logging had to stop. Then they could haul them out more leisurely. I flew over Lyell Island with Tara, and her eyes filled with tears at the sight of the trees lying crisscrossed on the ground, the wanton destruction a last-gasp thumbing of the nose at all the “preservationists.”
I was invited to the provincial government buildings in Victoria for the July 1987 signing of the agreement between B.C. and Canada that would help to create Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. It was a rare moment when environmentalists could celebrate a victory and rub shoulders with politicians. Tara had already flown to Haida Gwaii, where a great feast was being prepared in Skidegate to welcome home Lootaas (“Wave Eater”), the fifty-foot dugout canoe carved there for Expo 86 under the supervision of the Haida carver Bill Reid. In Victoria, Premier Vander Zalm signed along with Prime Minister Mulroney. Afterward, Elizabeth May, who was a special assistant to federal environment minister Tom McMillan, was given permission to take a government jet to Haida Gwaii, and we flew off in a state of euphoria.
Our elation ended abruptly as we stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac at Sandspit, the logging community in Haida Gwaii. We were met by a mob of women pushing against the fence and screaming at us. It was an intimidating situation that none of us wanted to exacerbate by entering the airport building. Undaunted, Elizabeth noticed that there was a military Sikorsky helicopter parked on the tarmac; flashing her government credentials, she commandeered the machine. Without even entering the airport building, we climbed onto the chopper and in a few minutes had left the bitter crowd behind. We were whisked across the water and landed in Skidegate, where the people were in a high state of excitement.
We were ushered into the village's great hall, where tables were set for a feast. A row of hereditary chiefs in full regalia presided over the long head table. Many people, including Minister McMillan, were feted and honored in speeches and with gifts. The tables sagged under the weight of the food from the ocean—salmon, halibut, herring roe, crab, and eulachon, as well as bannock, pies, cakes, jelly, and so much more. Speeches, drumming, and dancing followed dinner, including the demanding eagle dance; the most admired performances of this require the dancer to squat as low as possible while hopping and swirling, a feat that leaves me breathless in just seconds. (The next day I encountered children who told me they had seen me dance. Then they giggled.)
Alan Wilson, a Haida hereditary chief, was one of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers at the protest line at Windy Bay. He had been caught in an agonizing position—he understood that the confrontation was about the land that made the Haida who they are, yet as an RCMP officer, he had to enforce the laws of the dominant society. The three elders who had insisted they be the ones to block the road and be arrested included his own aunt, Ethel Jones. Alan had approached the elders with tears streaming down his face in a scene that would appear on national television. “It's all right, dear,” his aunty assured him as she took his arm and walked to the helicopter that would whisk her away to jail.
Alan leaped up at the Skidegate feast and publicly announced that he was giving me his dance apron, part of the formal regalia. Decorated with strips of copper, buttons, and figures of whales and birds, it was the first piece of regalia I ever received and is a much-treasured gift. Each time I wear it, great memories flood back.
The Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site agreement was signed in January 1993, after almost six years of negotiation between Canada and the Haida Nation. The official title recognizes that the Haida designated Gwaii Haanas a Haida Heritage Site in 1985.
ANOTHER BATTLE THAT TOOK place during this period was the fight to protect the Stein Valley, at 425 square miles the last large unlogged watershed in southwestern B.C., relatively close to Vancouver.
In 1984, I received a request from organizer John McCandless on behalf of Chief Ruby Dunstan of the Lytton First Nations band and Chief Leonard Andrew of the Lil'wat band to speak at the first of what it was hoped would become an annual festival to celebrate and protect the Stein Valley. The First Nations who had roamed the valley for thousands of years claimed it as a spiritual place. Unfortunately, I had a previous commitment at the time of the inaugural festival in 1985 and was unable to make it, but John invited me early so that I could attend the next year.
John was an American who had left his country during the Vietnam War; he ended up moving his family to the Fraser Valley in B.C. and working for the Lytton band. As was common practice in British Columbia at that time, a forest company had been granted a license to log the Stein Valley, without any consultation or approval from the people who had been using it for their sacred burial sites and as a source of berries and salmon long before Europeans arrived. Environmentalism was growing in British Columbia, aided by the high-profile fight against clear-cut logging by the Haida.
John had conceived of the idea of raising the profile of the Stein Valley by holding a First Nations–run festival that would feature speakers and musicians. That first gathering attracted up to five hundred people, who hiked high into the alpine at the valley headwaters in a terrific kickoff to what would become an incredible success.
What impressed me over the years was John's ability to manage all the details required to hold the Stein Valley Festival. He eventually inspired the support of hundreds of skilled volunteers from the two host communities, but try to imagine the logistics involved in pulling off a celebration that hundreds (eventually tens of thousands) of people would attend in a very remote and wild part of B.C. Posters and advertising had to be arranged; parking sites had to be found for hundreds of vehicles; trails had to be cut for hikers. As the success of the festival grew, loggers went in and felled several huge trees across the path of hikers, creating a lot of tension over possible violence. Campsites and cooking facilities were needed; food was arranged for special guests, elders, and staff; portable toilets had to be installed before the festival and removed after; first aid was necessary for everything from sunburn to broken bones; a stage and a sound system were needed for performers; garbage had to be dealt with; elders and VIPs who couldn't hike had to be helicoptered to campsites; tepees were set up for special guests; guards were recruited in case of confrontations with loggers or rednecks, and cleanup crews were needed during and after the event. And, of course, the money had to be raised. It was like mounting a major battle, but somehow, with the help and direction of chiefs Dunstan and Andrew, year after year John pulled it off.
Sev, Guujaaw, and Tara at a Stein Festival in the alpine meadows
For the second festival, Tara and I were delighted to have the chance to camp in a part of the province we hadn't seen before. The festival site was alongside the lower Stein River, in a meadow, and there might have been a couple of hundred people there. In preparing for my talk, I had to integrate my ideas about the environment with what little I knew about the traditional values of First Nations.
The first night, Tara and I and our two very young daughters were put up in a large tepee with several other people. We had settled comfortably into our sleeping bags and were about to drop off when a group right outside the tepee began to drum and chant. For hours! Tara was beside herself with frustration at first, but in the end our daughters slept through it all. The night grew bitterly cold, the drumming and singing droned on, the wind blew the dry soil under the edges of our tepee, and we felt so far from our world that we were finally transported to a different state: we knew this was a watershed experience in our lives.
In the next tepee were Miles Richardson, the young, charismatic president of the Haida Nation, involved in his own battle over the land; Patricia Kelly, his Coast Salish girlfriend; and Guujaaw, the Haida artist who played such an important role in my education and who would himself become president after leading the fight against logging in Haida Gwaii. They would become our dearest friends and companions over the years.
Time changed for us. The drumming continued through the night as we drifted between our dreams and the people outside. The lead drummer was a young man who called himself “Seeker,” and in the following days, Tara and I found he had much to teach us. He told us the reason this valley was important to him and his people. “White people go to church, but I come here. When I bring my kids here,” he told us, “all my problems fall away and I feel at peace. This is my sanctuary.” I began to understand what the word “sacred” means.
Because of its relative proximity to Vancouver, the Stein Valley became a favorite place for my family to hike and fish. When Sarika was six, we backpacked along the river one Thanksgiving. We reached the Devil's Staircase, a steep climb over a rocky scree that was a formidable challenge for the children. As we began to climb, Sarika lay down on the trail and refused to go any farther. I took the pack off her back and urged her on for a few hundred yards, at which point she stopped and refused to go on. I ended up carrying not just her pack but Sarika herself until we got over that hump. But she has never refused a hiking challenge since.
Severn and Sarika admiring a spawned-out chum salmon in the Stein Valley
Thanks to the increasing attendance at the festival, interest in the Stein Valley grew. The environmental community rallied to the cause. Colleen McCrory of the Valhalla Wilderness Society in New Denver, B.C., had successfully led a fight to have the area where Dad and I fished while at the wartime camps in the Slocan Valley set aside as Valhalla Provincial Park, and she took part in the later Stein festivals. The Western Canada Wilderness Committee, one of the oldest and most effective grassroots activist organizations in B.C., had pioneered the issue and continued to pitch in with posters and papers publicizing the Stein.
Celebrities began to lend their names to the cause. I called and recruited the Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot, who flew his entire band to the Stein to perform free. Later, Gordon became a very good friend and donated a large sum of money that pulled the festival out of debt. He had asked me to tell John McCandless how much he would give, and when I did, John's face sagged with relief and his eyes welled with tears.
Somehow, in 1987, I was able to find a phone number and call the American singer John Denver, who answered the phone himself and said he knew who I was. He accepted my invitation to perform at the Stein, and, like Lightfoot, he traveled in at his own expense, flying his plane to the Kamloops airport. His performance in the alpine meadow high up in the valley was the highlight for the two thousand people who had hiked up the mountain.
John became a friend and invited me to give talks as his guest at Windstar, his retreat/think tank near Aspen, Colorado. He was a huge talent, and he supported environmental groups around the world; yet he was surprisingly insecure about his failure to have a big hit record for years. He told us proudly how, when visiting China, he had come upon a peasant who did a double take and shouted, “John Denba! Countly Load!”
In 1997, Tara and I were driving back to Vancouver from Williams Lake and stopped at the same Lytton motel that had always been our Stein headquarters, overlooking the ferry that crossed the Fraser River to the trailhead of the Stein. Out of the blue, the radio announced that a plane being flown by John Denver had plummeted into the Pacific off Monterey, California, killing him. We were stunned. I'm glad John knew before he died that the Stein Valley had been set aside as a provincial park.
Tara worked full-time on the Stein campaign as the unpaid Vancouver coordinator. She was able to get the Hawaiian phone number of the Canadian First Nations singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and called to ask her to sing at the Stein Valley Festival. Buffy had to go to an audition for a job in Washington, D.C., and agreed to perform on condition that we pay for an executive-class round-trip plane ticket from her home in Honolulu to Vancouver and then to Washington. That would be a very expensive item, but she was a huge star and we agreed.
That summer, she flew in to Vancouver, where she was put up in a hotel. She didn't want to drive all the way to the Stein, so we had to charter a helicopter, at great expense, paid in advance, for her flight the following morning. Tara and I were already at the festival site when we learned that Buffy had slept through the morning flight-departure time and now insisted she be flown up in the afternoon. We had no choice but to pay for the helicopter a second time.
But when she arrived at the festival, her impact on the First Nations people there was electric. I immediately saw the value of having a headliner with whom the First Nations could identify. The audience was ecstatic, and it was clear to me that however much of a pain she had been, she was worth it. Buffy was a real pro, her unique voice projecting warmth and charisma onstage while telling the rapt audience how happy she was to be there. Afterward she climbed into a car to go back to the airfield and disappeared in the chopper back to Vancouver and on to Washington.
John Denver and his wife, Cassandra, at the 1987 Stein Festival
In October 1987, B.C. forests minister Dave Parker, who had been chief forester overseeing the clear-cutting of the Nass, the sacred valley of the Nisga'a, gave the go-ahead to log the Stein. The rationale was that it was “only” to be 22,000 of the 260,000 acres in the water-shed, but it would have cut out the heart of the valley bottom. However, the buildup of support for protecting the valley paid off: because of the festivals, the Stein had become too well known and support for its protection too great to send the loggers in.
By 1988, 3,500 people were attending the Stein Valley Festival. The following year, 16,000 people drove to the event, held at the rodeo grounds near Mount Currie. They were entertained by Canadian stars Bruce Cockburn, Gordon Lightfoot, Colin James, Valdy, Blue Rodeo, and Spirit of the West, among many others. The festival had become so huge that it now made money, and I was sure the size of the crowd ensured the valley would never be logged. In one of many dramatic moments, Woody Morrison, a Haida, rose and told us he had served in the U.S. military in Vietnam, but even the most heavily bombed land he had seen there had not been as devastated as the clear-cut area visible behind him. In another, Hollywood director and Canadian Norman Jewison got up on the stage to announce that he and American singer Cher were contributing $5,000 to the cause.
That was the last Stein festival I attended, because, as with Windy Bay, I was sure public support had reached a level that meant no politician would ever dare allow the valley to be logged. That goal had been the rationale for the festival in the first place. In 1995, B.C. Premier Mike Harcourt held a ceremony with Chief Ruby Dunstan and Chief Leonard Andrew to set aside the entire watershed as Stein Valley Nlaka'pamux Heritage Park, administered by the Lytton First Nations and B.C. Parks. Now, each time I return to hike up the valley, it is gratifying to think the ecosystem will continue to flourish long after we are gone.
IN BOTH HAIDA GWAII and the Stein Valley, the battle was led by First Nations. Theirs was a struggle over land, not for the superficial needs of money, jobs, or control, but for the most powerful need of all—to remain who they are. In the past, and even in the present, environmentalists often recruited First Nations communities to support their agenda of protecting forests, rivers, and wildlife without regard to the people's even broader cultural and spiritual needs. In sharing their land as park reserves, the Haida and Lytton people gained tacit recognition that these areas are part of their territory but are to be protected for all people for all time. It is a generous gift.