[♪♪]
[Jonathan Peyton] In BC,
nature is both a thing that we identify culturally with
as a thing to protect
as well as the heart of the economic engine
of the province.
Part of what makes BC so interesting
is that the strength and the vigour
of the environmental movement in British Columbia
is intimately related
to the strength and vigour of the resource economy
in British Columbia.
They each produce each other.
Environmentalism, as we understand it,
with the environment as something to conserve,
something to save,
only actually exists
because of the way we treat the environment
as something to make money out of.
[Charles Menzies] To understand BC
is to understand the history of natural resource extraction.
Without the triangle of mining, forestry, and fishing,
BC as we know it wouldn't exist.
But even more importantly,
the history of Indigenous communities
is a resource industry in its own sense.
It's an economy, it's a practice.
It has deep, long roots.
[Cease Wyss] From my parents and my grandparents,
I've always been connected to the land.
Once, an elder made me lay on the land
and listen to the land,
and to do what the land told me to do.
No matter who we are, we're born from the land.
[Shane Koyczan] You're looking
at what many people call British Columbia.
But before name or title,
it was already a unique place...
where the veins of rivers flow from snow-capped mountains
into the ocean,
only to evaporate and rain down again,
creating lush rainforests that teem with life,
an immaculate cycle that results in a bounty
as seemingly endless as its beauty.
But these gifts are more finite
than we once thought.
And not everyone who has come to harvest them
has cared about what happens next,
creating conflicts that seem as perennial
as a Douglas fir.
In a short period of time,
the natural riches have been depleted.
At the same time,
our connection to them has only grown stronger,
making us passionate defenders
of what we who live here call home.
Before forestry, fishing, or mining,
what was the very first natural resource of BC?
The answer might surprise you.
[Daniel Francis] The Maritime fur trade
was really the first thing
that attracted outsiders to come to British Columbia.
The early explorers had come,
looking for the Northwest Passage,
not found it,
but while they were here,
what they did find was this wealth of sea otters.
[Clifford Atleo] Captain Cook arrived in 1778,
and it started significant changes immediately.
He stayed for a month.
He traded for timbers to repair his ships.
And it also launched the trading economy,
which really impacted the local community.
[John Lutz] Captain Cook bought furs
from the Indigenous people,
and then the next year, they headed off to China.
And when they got to China,
they found that these pelts were immensely valuable.
[Jean Barman] In China,
the sea otter pelts were much desired for clothing.
They were used for trimming women's garments
for a whole variety of purposes.
[Lutz] Sea otter furs are the densest fur on Earth
because the sea otters spend their whole life at sea.
Sea otter pelts are amazingly warm.
Traders were making big dollars.
It was very lucrative.
[Lutz] One pelt was the equivalent
of one man's pay for a year.
So when Cook's journal was published in England,
it set off this rush to the Pacific Northwest.
[Barman] There were trading ships that came
from a variety of countries in the world.
[Francis] There would be dozens and dozens of boats
during summer season on the coast.
and the early explorers began trading
from the local Indigenous people,
who actually captured the animals.
And so that means
that Indigenous people really learned about outsiders
because the fur trade was the first white presence
in British Columbia.
[Lutz] Indigenous hunters before would have hunted the sea otter
for its pelt,
but there was a limited demand.
You only needed so much fur to keep warm.
What Cook did and the subsequent traders
was connected the West Coast to a global market.
And that market was inexhaustible
in terms of demand for fur.
[Calvin Sandborn] It was one of the most historic,
wasteful hunts
that you can imagine,
because nine out of 10 sea otters
were never recovered.
They would shoot the sea otters,
and nine out of 10 would sink and disappear.
One out of 10 was taken back
and sold for great money in Europe.
[Lutz] The result was that sea otters were reduced
almost to extinction.
[Sandborn] The animals, of course, survived
in other parts of the coast,
Alaska, California,
but were virtually wiped out here on the BC coast.
It's the first example
of overexploitation of resources,
which is, unfortunately, a pattern
that we see repeated again and again
through the history of the province.
Sea otters were not the only animal in the ocean
that were treated like that.
There's also the tragic story of the whales.
BC has a long history of whaling,
a little-known history.
The original whalers, of course,
were the Chah-Nulth people,
who live on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
For many generations,
they had hunted whales off the coast.
[Clifford Atleo] They prepared for it
physically, and spiritually, and mentally
for months and months and months...
until they received some sort of sign
that their whaling expedition would be successful.
They're hunting
some of the largest animals on Earth
with a very modest dugout canoe
with a mussel shell on the end of the harpoon.
There was chanting and praying.
And the whaling chiefs essentially make an agreement
with the spirit of the whale
to help compel the whale to come in.
[Sandborn] How they hunted those whales
was pretty incredible.
The whale would drag them for hours or days.
And then they would bring back the whale.
And there was this tremendous respect
for the whale.
And law was that you don't waste the whale,
giving prayers of thankfulness to the animal
for giving up their life to sustain them.
Commercial whaling, industrial whaling,
starts in BC pre-World War I.
Catcher boats, speedier craft
with harpoons mounted on the bows,
would go off and patrol the coast
and actually chase down the whales.
They were after the greys and humpbacks,
which were slower, larger animals,
easier to hunt.
Occasionally, they might have caught an orca.
They would harpoon the whales...
and then drag them back
to these industrial plants on the coast,
which were shore stations
located up as far as Rose Harbour at Haida Gwaii.
These were small factories,
where they were rendered down
into the products that were sold...
the oil and the meat, and so on.
[Atleo] One of the interesting things I found
was that as commercial whaling really started to take off,
I can't find any evidence
of Nuu-Chah-Nulth people participating
in commercial whaling.
That's significant
because whaling in Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities
falls under the responsibility of hereditary chiefs.
Not just every community member can go hunt whales.
They knew that it was taboo to do it
outside the way that they had done it.
[Sandborn] It's a difference in worldview.
Indigenous people see themselves
in a relationship with the animals.
If you see wildlife as family,
then you want to sustain that relationship.
It's all about relationship with people
and with natural beings.
[Lutz] And so, because this was such a large part
of their spiritual beliefs,
the idea of commercial whaling with these large steamships
was quite repugnant to them.
[Sandborn] Commercial whaling went on for several decades,
until, eventually,
most of the large whale species along the coast
had been wiped out.
So from the very beginning of British Columbia,
the economy relies
on the overexploitation of natural resources.
[Peyton] That relationship that British Columbians have
to the natural environment
as the source of their wealth and their identity
has always been there.
[Severn Cullis-Suzuki] There are ancient examples
from Indigenous people everywhere
that still survive today.
It's a connection to a way of living
that reflects a respect of the natural world.
[Atleo] An elder will say that when the tide is out,
the table is set.
There's this real strong affiliation
with the sea and the ocean.
[Wyss] We love the ocean, we love the sea life,
we love seafood,
but we also love how that ocean has cared for us.
It is part of our family.
It is in our being.
[Joe Martin] One of the most important teachings
of our culture
is that mother nature will provide for our need
but not our greed.
It's about respect for all the creatures
in this part of the world.
Because every one of these creatures
that are here,
we learn things from them.
[eagles chattering]
[Atleo] Near the end of the 19th century,
Nuu-Chah-Nulth people
really started to participate quite heavily
in commercial fisheries.
[Menzies] There really isn't
a single British Columbian Indigenous community
that is not in some way touched by salmon.
It's a cultural symbol and icon.
It's a major trade good.
Indigenous communities treat salmon like other people.
They're social beings
that you're in a relationship with.
It's not like something that's sitting out there
for you just to help yourself to as much as you want.
This is one of the mistakes
that a lot of the kind of colonial mentality has.
They said, okay, salmon was ubiquitous.
But you're actually in a reciprocal relationship
with the salmon.
You take what you need according to your social needs,
but then you return.
[Wyss] The ocean itself is a living being.
We fish, we hunt.
And that sea water is a part of us.
It's in our system.
[Menzies] Indigenous communities get called
"people of the salmon."
You could also call us people of the herring,
people of the eulachon
because these are critically important resources.
From a kind of ecological perspective,
what's interesting
is that the moment
at which salmon becomes critically important
is the same point
in which Indigenous societies became Indigenous societies.
In order to harvest salmon,
you need a technology
about drying and processing and smoking fish,
which doesn't just happen overnight.
It's about being fully civilized and technologically advanced.
You know,
when the first Europeans arrived here,
this land was so rich
that our people
only needed to work for three or four days a week
to survive here.
The fishes were plentiful, everything was plentiful.
[Sandborn] Some Europeans that came,
they didn't realize
that the Indigenous people had rules there
that you take a little and leave a lot.
And so they decided, well, we'll build a weir.
And they took all the salmon,
not realizing
that there was a natural cycle there.
[Menzies] When British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871,
the Canadian Fisheries Act made it illegal
to catch and sell fish anywhere in Canada
without the government giving you a licence to fish.
[Atleo] The debate about whether to agree to licences
was a tremendous thing,
and at the end of the day,
the Indigenous people thought it's just a practical thing.
Though, looking back, there's kind of a lament
that there was this conscious thing
to recognize the authority
of the Fisheries and Oceans to manage the fishery.
So it had, really, a big impact.
[Menzies] Under the Fisheries Act,
if you catch fish without a permit,
it's a criminal offence.
What that immediately did
was turn Indigenous fisheries into illegal operations.
That had a devastating economic impact
in First Nations communities
because it meant
that you had to work for the cannery,
not for yourself.
This transformed Indigenous communities
into wage labourers
as opposed to being the people
who are owning and controlling it.
Our way of harvesting and catching fish
was criminalized,
and that really precipitated
one of the, I think, key shifts in change
in Indigenous economies.
It's the same thing for forestry and logging.
Forestry began tied to the fishing industry.
Small mills cutting up wood
to create boxes and containers and pallets
for the fishing industry.
Later, industrial forestry
became the leading economic generator of revenue
in the province.
If it wasn't for forestry,
a lot of communities wouldn't exist.
We had communities growing up
and beginning to export wood,
whether it was lumber, pulp and paper...
Powell River had the biggest pulp mill
in the Empire
in the early part of the last century.
Plywood that was made in Interior sawmills.
Coastal lumber that was made into American houses.
And a lot of American money came in
to build some of the first sawmills.
Many urban people
don't have a sense of the forest industry
that was actually for decades
the largest employer in British Columbia.
Forestry became, eventually, the underpinning
of the British Columbia economy.
[Martin] It was against the laws of our people
to cut trees in the springtime or in the summertime
because those birds are nesting.
We're never allowed to do that.
But a lot of our tribes
have been put between a rock and a hard place
in regards to employment, huh?
I worked in the forest industry for 12 years,
and when they fell those trees in there,
there was small little salmon about that big
in those streams.
And because I refused
to drag two big logs through there,
I got fired.
And it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders,
and I never went back logging ever again after that,
because I knew that's what was happening
to our salmon stocks.
Many of them are now extinct.
Even thinking about it now, it makes me hurt right here.
[Forsythe] It takes quite a while
before Vancouver comes on the scene
as this little forestry community
on the edge of Burrard Inlet.
[Khelsilem Tl'akwasikan] In 1886,
you have to imagine the city of Vancouver
as very different from today.
There wasn't a city here.
This was not a fort.
A lot of people, when they're looking at history,
immediately assume that Vancouver was a fort.
It was a forest.
[Tl'akwasikan] It was a logging camp, essentially.
There were a number of Indigenous communities,
and there was still a significant amount of logging
that's happening in the downtown peninsula
and what we would call downtown today.
[Menzies] You can actually see the mark on the landscape,
just even around the Lower Mainland,
where there's any bits of forest left,
like Stanley Park.
You'll see big trees growing.
But if you look carefully, you'll see the big stumps.
The original forest was just logged out like crazy.
And this entire area of all Vancouver
just big chunks of trees removed.
[Lisa Anne Smith] Vancouver was a growing city.
There was a mindset of growth
with the CPR railway coming.
Most people were involved in the logging industry
either cutting the trees or milling the trees.
But there were certainly a lot of hotels opening up,
and saloons, and service industries, and...
So it was a very dynamic, very fast-changing city.
Captain Edward Stamp started everything
in terms of Hastings Sawmill.
The mill was actually built right on the water.
[Barman] The big ships came in and loaded lumber,
and the area around the mills was known as Hastings Mill.
[Tl'akwasikan] There was a very sizable village
of Squamish people living next door
that were participants in the life
and the community there.
A lot of our people really jumped at the opportunity
to participate in the wage economy
through the logging industry
because, at that time,
you could still relatively live a mixed lifestyle
where you were perhaps logging in the summer months,
but then practising your culture and subsistence living
through hunting and gathering
during the winter months.
[Barman] There's a Chilean community,
Chinese men,
and certainly there were a lot of Indigenous Hawaiians.
Hawaiians came to British Columbia
because when a ship was going from England
or from the eastern United States,
the trade winds would take them by the Hawaiian Islands.
And some of the Indigenous Hawaiian men
came on board
to work on jobs in the fur trade
in the Pacific Northwest.
[Wyss] Like the Squamish,
the Hawaiians had heard
about the Hastings Mill being built,
and there was work there.
So that's where they went.
When they moved there,
they brought chickens and ducks and pigs,
and they were running all over the town site.
And it annoyed the heck out of the Hastings Mill owner.
So he asked them to move.
They literally climbed into the canoe
and paddled over to where Stanley Park is.
They cleared some land and built homes in Coal Harbour,
where the Westin Bayshore is today,
all the way over to Lost Lagoon.
Then it became known as Kanaka Ranch.
The full term is kanaka maoli,
and it is still a term used in Hawaii.
It means "the real people".
[Tl'akwasikan] In 1886,
the city of Vancouver was piling all of the waste wood
from the logging
and lighting them on fire to burn them,
and lost control of one of the fires.
And the whole area around the town site
caught on fire.
And so now they were kind of landlocked
around this fire,
with Burrard Inlet on the north side.
And so people were running into the ocean
to try and escape the heat.
The Squamish people living in our village
across the pond on the North Shore
could see the fire,
and one of my ancestors,
my great-great- great-grandmother,
Agnes Lacket Joe,
got in her canoe
and started travelling across the inlet,
and led a procession of other canoes
from the community
and started picking up survivors.
And so our people protected those early settlers
and tried to save as many of them as they could,
and brought them back and took care of them.
[Smith] The flames destroyed Vancouver
in 45 minutes.
In the aftermath of the fire, most people had nothing.
But before daylight the very next day,
a lot of people rolled up their sleeves,
banded together as a community,
and started to rebuild the city.
And within six weeks,
Vancouver looked very much the same
as it had before.
[Tl'akwasikan] It wasn't enough
that we were being inundated with foreigners
in our lands,
which was one type of colonization.
They then create a boundary where our people have to live,
and if you don't live within that boundary,
you are considered a trespasser within the lands of Canada.
[Wyss] The inhabitants of Stanley Park remained there
until the '40s.
And then in the '40s, they were kicked out.
[Barman] Over the years, when I was doing research,
I heard several times people saying,
"My family used to live in Stanley Park."
And so I thought
that maybe I would look at some records.
I looked at the Park Board minutes.
No, there's nothing in the Park Board minutes
about any families living in Stanley Park.
How can this be?
And I realized
that the Park Board obliterated these families
from their records.
They didn't mention them at all
because the city,
together with the federal government,
kicked the families out of Stanley Park.
[Tl'akwasikan] And so our people,
who were living in the same spot that their ancestors had lived,
became squatters.
And this then allowed for the government
to then facilitate the use of rule of law
to remove those families from their homes
and their communities.
That term "squatter" is still used
in the same way today
to justify evictions of Indigenous people.
It's always that Indigenous people
are in the way of progress.
[Tl'akwasikan] When the Vancouver Park Board
decides to build a road throughout the park,
they push out the people that were living there.
[Wyss] Dead Man's Island is the tree burial island.
So they removed the bodies,
and then they clear-cut the island.
That was the first stage of dismantling.
[Tl'akwasikan] One of our famous leaders,
named Khatsahlano,
was sitting for breakfast with his family.
And they heard a loud banging on the wall of their house.
And all of a sudden, the big house starts to shake,
and the corner started to become exposed,
and there was a big saw
that came through one of the corners.
And they went out to see what was going on,
and there was a land surveyor, who said,
"Well, your house is in my way, and so we're taking it down."
[Tl'akwasikan] The Park Board commissioners and the surveyors
were starting to tear down the house
when they were still in it,
and told them they had to leave.
Once they were out,
the same day, they burned down the houses
to make sure they wouldn't come back.
And there is stories that survive
of the families seeing the houses burning
as they're leaving.
[Wyss] And so we say "stolen land" for a reason,
because everything we walk on in this city
is stolen land.
[Tl'akwasikan] The atrocities that were done
doesn't have to be who we are anymore.
Vancouver is a very new city.
That means that there is a huge amount of potential
for what Vancouver can become.
We can learn from our mistakes
so that those things never happen again.
Another example of the profligacy of development
has been the hydroelectric dam developments
on the Columbia River and on the Peace River
that flooded some of the most fertile valleys
in British Columbia.
There are still Indigenous people that grieve
over the loss
of some of the most beautiful valleys
in British Columbia
that were flooded for hydroelectric power.
[W.A.C. Bennett] British Columbians enjoy
what I like to call the good life.
[Peyton] W.A.C. Bennett is the longest-running premier
in British Columbia history.
He was a hugely, hugely important figure
for setting the tone for the postwar era in BC.
Scholars call this the era of modernity,
or the age of affluence.
People in the postwar era wanted more.
They thought that they should be able to live
a better material life than their parents
and the generations that had come before.
And Bennett had an understanding of the natural environment
as a thing that was to be exploited
to make people's lives better
and to make money from.
And people's relationship to the natural environment
changed quite fundamentally
as they expect better lives in a material sense.
In the 1950s and '60s,
the production of electricity was vital
to the industrialization of British Columbia society.
And that was as simple as that.
So the Government of British Columbia
sent out a small army of surveyors
all over the north
to find places
where hydroelectric potential existed.
Hydroelectric economies are built in the north,
and the effects are felt disproportionately
by people in the north.
It's this quote-unquote "wilderness"
that's up there,
removed from the metropolitan areas of BC.
[film narrator] Water means wealth
to British Columbia.
Harnessed in giant electric plants,
it gives cheap electricity for industry.
Water power brought British Columbia
the world's largest aluminum smelter,
where, until lately, there was only wilderness.
[Peyton] It is out of sight, out of mind
until you begin to hear the stories
of people who have been displaced.
The Alcan Dam, on the Nechako River,
is a really great example.
It was a dam that displaced multiple communities
of a group of people called the Cheslatta Carrier peoples
in the area south of Vanderhoof and Burns Lake.
[Corrina Leween] The Cheslatta Carrier Nation people
are from the Dene
and are part of the Athabascan tribe.
And we live in Northern BC.
Since the displacement in 1952,
our communities live over 174 miles apart
from each other.
In 1952, Alcan, now known as Rio Tinto Alcan,
received a water licence
from the Province of British Columbia
to create a dam
that generated the power
to run the aluminum plant in Kitimat.
[Peyton] The Kenney Dam
is an extraordinary feat of engineering,
with extraordinarily profound social and economic consequences
for the people who lived in the shadows of that dam.
[Leween] When the Province granted Alcan the water licence,
the Department of Indian Affairs required the Cheslatta people
to surrender our lands to them for their development.
[Peyton] In order to produce electricity
from that reservoir,
the giant spillway needed to be created.
There was a 16-kilometre tunnel through a mountain range
to the city of Kitimat,
which was built on a model
that has come to be known as the garden city model.
[Leween] There were several requests from our people
for compensation of money
for replacement of cattle
as well as to purchase a new home.
Alcan said that we were unreasonable people
and that we were angry Indians,
and they really didn't understand
why we were asking for so much.
[Peyton] The stories that have emerged
in the years since
are deeply troubling
because of the absolute disregard shown
by the state and by the Indian agents
who were responsible for administering care
to the Indigenous peoples on those reserves.
[Leween] There was a surrender document
that was given to the Cheslatta people.
And our people refused to sign the document.
They ended up forging the document,
and then our people were given two weeks' notice
to pack up whatever they could carry
on their backs
and move out of the territory.
And if they didn't leave, they would be put in jail.
[Peyton] There was almost no forewarning
of the flooding.
Most people were on their traplines.
They were out hunting, they were out gathering.
[Leween] Then they flooded our territory out
and walked away.
[Peyton] Their livelihoods were flooded.
Their traplines,
their hunting lands,
their gathering lands were flooded.
Their gravesites were flooded.
[Leween] The devastation that came with this project
for our people was horrific.
When the Cheslatta people left with what they could carry,
they were told that they could come back
the following summer
and collect the rest of their belongings.
But as soon as they left,
Alcan hired contractors to come in.
They burned down their houses.
They torched all of the buildings.
So when the Cheslatta people did return,
they returned to that horrific scene
of seeing everything
they ever lived in and around, destroyed.
They ended up living in tents for two years.
They moved into an area
that did not speak their language.
The culture was lost.
[Peyton] They were, essentially, left to fend for themselves
in a completely different natural environment
that they didn't know in the same way
that they would have known their homeland.
[Leween] So a lot of them were starving,
and a lot of our people were arrested
for trying to put food onto the table.
We had a rise in tragic deaths, alcoholism, suicides.
Our cemeteries are full of our people
that have died very early and tragically.
The flooding continues to this day.
Seeing cemeteries floating away
because our people were buried on the shoreline
is a yearly occurrence.
We're still picking remains of our ancestors
off the shores.
We want to have proper reburials of our people.
When we tell our story
is when people understand what actually happened.
Because in some cases,
people just don't even believe that that could possibly happen.
But it did.
[Peyton] We're shocked by the story now,
but the important thing to remember
is that a different version,
a slightly more palatable version
of this story
is actually happening right now.
We can tell the story about different mines and dams
that have been built all across BC...
the Cassiar mine,
the Iskut-Stikine hydro project,
the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.
So we're shocked by the story,
but the thing that we don't do
is to turn that kind of questioning
onto ourselves now.
This is a way of thinking about colonialism
as though it's something that happened in the past,
and that's simply not the case.
[Cullis-Suzuki] Indigenous people
can't be separated
from the land where they've come from.
The stewardship and management
is part and parcel of their culture.
Also, apart from Vancouver Island,
there were so few treaties signed here in British Columbia.
And so, really,
there wasn't any kind of legal basis
for this actually being British Columbia.
[Atleo] If you Google "treaty map,"
you will get this map of Canada
and you see Treaty 8, and 7, and 3, and 4.
And then you have the Douglas Treaties,
really small, around Victoria
and around the northern tip of the island.
But other than that,
most of the province had been not dealt with.
As a political scientist,
I've tried to figure out, okay, why is this the case?
And I attribute it, essentially, to the fact
that colonization happened here a lot later.
With Cook not arriving till 1778,
the relationship with colonization
was quite different.
While colonies were being established
on the eastern part of the continent,
and the United States
already basically being a country by this time,
I think that the pace and the intensity
of colonization
hit British Columbia much, much quicker.
In central Canada, moving across to the West,
they probably felt
they didn't need to secure the land
with a treaty.
And so the consequence
is you get this weird legal limbo
that, according to international law,
if you will,
this land has never been ceded or surrendered.
It has simply been usurped.
[Cullis-Suzuki] I think it's really natural
that there's been a lot of environmental action here
because of the natural beauty,
because of the diversity of ecosystems.
I think that's why we started to recognize
when the forests here
were starting to be undeniably ravaged
that we were doing something that maybe we shouldn't.
[Atleo] One of the things that I've found
throughout history
is this constant attempt by Indigenous people
to reassert their self-determination
and their autonomy,
so whether it was commercial fishing,
whether it was whaling,
or whether it was the fur trade,
there was this constant effort through time
to try and say, "Hold on a sec.
We are a people, we are a nation,
we have our own governance systems,
we have our own laws."
I think the resistance that we've seen
and the movements that have developed
in British Columbia
are likely, in large part,
because of the Indigenous leadership.
The biggest protected area
and the biggest standoff in British Columbia
was in Haida Gwaii.
And that was the Haida Nation.
[Cullis-Suzuki] When I was about five years old,
back in the mid '80s,
my parents got involved in the fight
here on Haida Gwaii.
And that's where my parents met the Haida,
Guujaaw and Ada Yovanovitch,
these incredible Indigenous leaders
who were fighting for their land.
At that time, the forest industry was king
in this province,
the economic driver.
There was almost a barge load a day,
kazillions of dollars on those barges.
Essentially, they had planned to log everything.
[Menzies] I remember hearing one community leader talking
about how it destroyed the space.
It was no longer recognizable.
It was the same land,
but by removing the trees had removed the place.
[Alan Wilson] I flew over one day.
We did a tour.
And we flew over the south part here,
and we seen...
the clearcut.
Ai.
There was nothing there.
It was moonscape.
It hit me when I seen the destruction.
[Guujaaw] Our people started to realize
that if we don't act,
we're going to be quickly seeing the end of all the old forests.
At that time, blockades were not common.
Any kind of challenge of the forest industry
was unique.
[reporter] A dispute over the future
of a wilderness area in the Queen Charlotte Islands
has led to a confrontation.
[singing and drum beating]
This week, a group of Haida Indians
began obstructing the passage of logging crews
into the South Moresby area.
[man] This is Haida land,
and there'll be no further logging
in this area.
[logger] Not going to let us go to work this morning?
You have abused your right to work
up to this point in time.
Why should we let you continue your poor logging practices?
You're breaking the law.
You will not step aside and let us go to work,
as is our legal right?
[Guujaaw] Nope.
Okay, thank you.
[Guujaaw] We designated certain lands as protected areas
under our own authority.
We weren't going to say,
"Would you please protect this land for us?"
We were saying, "This is protected land."
And it was a different way of doing it.
[Wilson] The Haida Nation had built a camp there.
People had certain jobs.
There was cooks, wood gatherers,
hunters, fishermen.
And people from all over Haida Gwaii
donated food, clothing, equipment.
And the first ones on the line were our elders.
They sat right in the middle of the road.
They said, "You're not going to move us.
We want to save our land."
I was a constable with the RCMP Native Special.
And we went in full uniform to their campsite,
and the elders said,
"If anybody is going to arrest us,
we want it to be you."
And my aunt pointed at me.
And they said, "We're proud of you.
Do your job.
If you have to arrest us, we'll come with you."
I arrested my aunt.
[Guujaaw] Eventually, it became an international story.
[Wilson] Everybody around the world
was watching it at the time.
Not only on Haida Gwaii,
not only in BC,
not only in Canada, but worldwide.
Everybody knew about Haida Gwaii.
Everyone knew about the Haida Nation.
[Sandborn] The Haida message was just so articulate and true.
They were speaking
about their homeland being destroyed.
And when they spoke about that,
I think that that had an impact on people.
[Guujaaw] The Province and the feds
were embarrassed into having to stop the logging.
The feds went in with a swack of money,
paid off the logging companies,
and said, "Okay, we'll have a national park."
And we said, "What are you talking about?"
They said they can't have joint management.
They couldn't recognize any Aboriginal rights in there.
And so we just said, "We don't have a deal,"
and walked away from it.
[Atleo] Who wouldn't like parks, right?
Like, isn't every park a good thing?
But my father says
discreetly setting aside a national park
or a provincial park
tells me that we have an inability
to manage ourselves.
[Guujaaw] Eventually, they came back,
and we agreed the lands would be protected,
and we agreed to have joint management,
them and us,
each coming in on our power.
[Sandborn] Certainly, it was the beginning
of something that we hear all the time now,
which is that Indigenous nations are asserting their laws
and increasingly are saying,
"We want to enforce our traditional laws."
[Guujaaw] I think environmental consciousness
has changed.
I think people recognize
that the Earth does need to be protected now.
So, like many things, we owe Indigenous leadership
for seeding that courage.
And then, I think, it builds on itself.
[Atleo] I think it's not a coincidence that, you know,
there's tremendous flashpoints of activism
around things like Clayoquot Sound,
or Walbran, or Stein Valley.
All of these things really sort of ignited here.
But also, this strong connection to the ocean as well.
For example, it's not a coincidence
that Greenpeace was founded in British Columbia.
[♪♪]
[Rex Weyler] In the early 1970s,
the so-called hippie or counterculture movement
at that time
was in full bloom in British Columbia.
There used to be the Easter be-ins
that were held every year at Stanley Park.
"Environment" was not a household word.
I don't even think we used the word "environmentalist"
at that time.
We used the term "ecologist,"
and I began to meet other people
who considered themselves ecologists.
I was getting more involved with this group,
the Don't Make a Wave Committee.
They had sailed boats into nuclear test zones.
At that time,
Greenpeace had simply been a name for the boat.
But in May of 1972,
the organization formally changed its name
to Greenpeace.
We were the merging of the peace movement
and the ecology movement.
In about 1973,
I was talking to Bob Hunter about what could we do
that would be an ecology action.
And about that time,
Dr. Paul Spong was working at the aquarium in Vancouver
with the captive orca Skana.
[Dr. Spong] I was doing behavioural research
with this newly captured orca.
Previously, I'd thought about her
like an animal or creature
maybe of the order of a laboratory rat.
But one day,
I started wondering about who she was.
And I realized
that what was being done to the whales
was unfair.
The great whales were being plundered
by the industrial whaling industry.
[Weyler] Whaling had reduced the whale populations by 95%.
Paul made a proposal to Greenpeace.
"You've sailed a boat into a nuclear test zone.
Why can't you use a boat to blockade the whalers
and stop the whalers?"
And it just was one of those moments
where it just rang true to everybody,
like, "Yes, this is perfect.
This is the idea we've been looking for."
We were trying to stimulate young people, particularly,
into caring for the environment.
And whales were kind of considered
a good symbol of the environment
and its destruction by, at the hands of human beings.
[crowd cheering and applauding]
[Weyler] We left in May of 1975 from Jericho Beach.
Hip-hip-hooray!
[Weyler] We had no idea where to find the whalers.
There's millions of square kilometres of ocean.
[Dr. Spong] We went through logbooks from whalers,
and we were able to pinpoint the location
that the Russian whaling fleet would likely be.
[♪♪]
We met up with the Russian whalers.
And tried to run interference as best we could.
[♪♪]
[Weyler] None of us had ever been in a scene
like this.
We have the harpoon boat bearing down on us
with this big 250-pound exploding harpoon
on the front of the boat.
The whale's in front of us.
[Dr. Spong] And it's just at that moment
the harpoon was fired.
This incredible shot of a harpoon
flying over the heads of these people
in this tiny boat,
and then plunging into the body of a whale
was an amazing moment.
[Weyler] The next morning,
there were Greenpeace pictures in every newspaper.
It went everywhere.
It went all over the world.
[Dr. Spong] I think the public really became aware
for the first time
of what was happening with whales.
It certainly was the spark
for building the anti-whaling movement,
which ultimately proved successful
in terms of convincing
the International Whaling Commission
to impose a moratorium on commercial whaling.
[Oakenbough] We were on the news right across America.
And pretty soon,
many Americans wanted to either join with us
or do their own thing.
[Dr. Spong] Instead of being Vancouver-based,
suddenly, there were groups of people
all over the world, really,
who wanted to become Greenpeace.
And so it really transformed Greenpeace
into an international organization.
[man] Stop!
I don't think Greenpeace could have come
from anywhere else.
It existed here.
It existed in British Columbia.
[Atleo] Now, if you fast forward a bit to the '80s and '90s,
there was a 13-year span
where about 50%
of the old-growth forests in British Columbia
were logged.
And it is something that seems really egregious.
[Forsythe] There's lots to be said
about the conduct of forest companies over time,
how we managed our forests,
how we overharvested,
how we slashed and burned.
And from that also is the evolution
of an environmental community
here in British Columbia.
[Valerie Langer] By 1993,
what people started to hear on the news
was that thousand-year-old ancient rainforests
on the far coast of British Columbia
were being chopped down
to make pulp and paper for the Los Angeles Times,
for two-by-fours to build suburbs in Arizona.
And nothing about that was consistent
with the lofty proclamations coming from world leaders.
So people were ready to find a place
where all of that pent-up frustration
with lack of action
could be expressed.
And that's what we were able to channel
in a small, remote area of the world,
on the coast of Vancouver Island,
British Columbia.
Places like Clayoquot
have more carbon stored in their soils and trees
per hectare
than any other forest ecosystem type in the world.
The best way to maintain that carbon
is to keep it standing,
not if you cut it down and replant it.
So, protecting these forests
is incredibly important for protecting our climate.
[Berman] There originally had been
359 intact rainforest valleys
on the whole west coast of Canada.
There were only 69 left.
And all of those were slated to be roaded or logged
within five years.
In 1993, the BC government announced
that the majority of Clayoquot Sound
would be open to clear-cut logging.
And this is after decades of community discussions
and land-use planning processes,
much of which had shown
that the way that logging was happening at the time
threatened water systems,
it threatened species,
it threatened the viability of the tourism industry,
and much more.
[Atleo] Leading up to the '90s,
you had this government saying,
"We have to be more conscious of other stakeholders,
other communities."
But ironically, they thought
that they didn't have to consult Indigenous people.
So they didn't consult Nuu-Chah-Nulth people at all.
[Langer] The Ahousaht and Clayoquot said, "No way.
You don't have the rights here."
Chief Earl Maquinna George,
the high chief of the Ahousaht Nation,
took the stand to assert rights and title
to manage the forests of the area.
[Atleo] And the response to that
was Nuu-Chah-Nulth people filed court injunctions.
[Langer] The non-native people of Tofino
joined the First Nations in a supportive collaboration.
[Berman] The scientific recommendations had been
to protect more of the forest.
The majority of the community supported protecting more of it.
And that is what really broke open the issue.
[chainsaw buzzing]
[Langer] Basically, Friends of Clayoquot Sound mobilized.
And within a few days, first, several dozen people came,
and we blockaded the logging machinery.
And those blockades inspired, activated a whole community.
[Atleo] You had this significant non-Indigenous population
that developed this what became a peace camp.
And people from around the world
really started to participate in this.
[Langer] In order to raise the profile,
we decided that we had to do the type of civil disobedience
that grandmothers, schoolteachers, doctors,
university students, artists, and youth,
everybody feel comfortable coming to.
There will be no drugs, no alcohol, no weapons.
We will comport ourselves peacefully.
Good evening.
There were no chainsaws echoing through the ancient rainforests
of Clayoquot Sound today.
Loggers were prevented
from getting to work this morning
by the first blockade of the summer.
[Langer] Every day, people would get arrested,
pulled off, hauled into the police bus.
There was a group of grandmothers
who got carried away and taken to jail.
One day, we were all on the road.
People were sitting down, chanting,
"If we all sit in the road,
they can't arrest us all!"
And they arrested us all.
Here I stand for the wild things
that have no voice in our courts.
[Langer] One by one by one,
they carried people off the road,
and 300-plus people were arrested.
Many of them served time in jail
or were served fines and did house arrest.
Originally, I had said,
"You know, we're going to get, you know,
a thousand people are going to come out
to this blockade."
Well, in the end, it was 12,000 people that came.
It went so far beyond
what we thought was going to happen.
[Atleo] It was Canada's largest active civil disobedience
up until that point of time,
peaceful civil disobedience.
[Langer] People were putting a lot at stake
for British Columbia.
[Atleo] The Nuu-Chah-Nulth people
weren't really as involved in the blockade.
They opted more for political lobbying
and being very strategic
about their environmental allies.
And so they sent delegations to New York and Ottawa
and Washington, DC,
spoke with senators and ambassadors,
and really tried to apply economic pressure
on the Province
to listen to their request.
Whereas the environmental groups were calling
for complete, pristine 100% conservation,
the Nuu-Chah-Nulth people were wanting to maintain
some sort of presence and livelihood
that may have included logging.
Really intense negotiations took place in 1994.
And the Nuu-Chah-Nulth delegation said,
"We're not leaving until we get a deal."
It was literally six weeks.
Every single day they met.
And, interestingly enough,
no government has ever done that ever again.
[Berman] In 1995, we stopped the majority of the logging.
Indigenous nations have decision-making control
over the logging in the region
and the logging company in the region
as a joint-venture project with Indigenous nations.
[Langer] So, to this day,
the industrial logging that was planned
has never happened.
[Berman] 80% of the world's old-growth forests
are already gone.
What Canada has is critical for the world.
And all 69 of those valleys are still standing.
[Atleo] Indigenous peoples started to participate
in the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel.
Western scientists and university professors
and academics, and Nuu-Chah-Nulth elders
working and discussing together
about how to sustainably manage the area.
[Sandborn] All sorts of people acknowledge
that if you meld Western technology
and Indigenous knowledge,
you can have
a real optimal sort of resource-management regime.
When I talk to environmental lawyers
around the world,
they actually look to British Columbia
as a place that's a really exciting place.
[Wilson] Here on Haida Gwaii, right now,
we're kind of back to the way it was, dang, a century ago,
where we can go out and get fish
without any interference from anyone else.
It's almost as if we stepped back in time.
[Martin] Our people have stewarded these lands
since time immemorial.
And it's just time for us to understand each other
and to work together.
[Peyton] I think, today,
BC and British Columbians are at an absolute crossroads,
where British Columbians need to decide
what the nature of their relationship
to the environment is going to be.
I think it needs to shift
from something that needs to be saved
to something that should be considered
as an object of care.
[Sandborn] I actually think
that there's a good news story here.
By mixing Western science and Indigenous wisdom,
British Columbia has a chance
to be an example to the world
of how those things can merge.
So in addition to the cultural reconciliation,
the social reconciliation,
there's the reconciliation with nature
that I think we can accomplish.
[Atleo] I believe we're in a really interesting time
because Canada's been talking off and on about reconciliation.
And you have this province that's saying,
"Okay, this is really important to us."
The teaching about residential schools
and about colonialism
is starting to enter our K-to-12 schools more,
in a way that it hasn't before.
We still have to get past
this awkward time of telling the truth.
And I think everyone's been jumping
right into reconciliation,
but we have to tell the truth first.
Otherwise, what are you reconciling?
[Stephanie Allen] I think it's important
to tell these stories about our history
because it's not finished yet.
And we live
with the daily reminders of our race,
of our identity,
and of our exclusion.
So I think it's actually a story of hope.
To know that people persevere
is actually a really inspiring thing
for everybody,
regardless of where your background is.
[Rod Mickleburgh] There's this history of struggle
in British Columbia,
and we owe those early pioneers,
and those early labour leaders,
and those early workers,
mostly written out of history,
so much for the conditions that we have today.
They all had to be fought for.
[Masako Fukawa] The past generation
are not just survivors.
They have thrived.
They sacrificed so much
so that we can become part of BC.
[Henry Yu] How we've reshaped our history
over the last 40, 50 years
is basically the basis
for what, I think, is a hopeful future.
[David Wong] Looking back in 50 years,
people will go, "Wow, it's really interesting
how, like, we're grappling with something
that seems so obvious."
The stories are still relevant today.
Stories of struggle,
of civil rights,
of equality can inform our future.
It's really about doing the work
to provide a space for those voices to be heard.