by David Suzuki
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 a
nd 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 w
ere 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.
