B.C. court ruling could change how Weyerhaeuser
logs
Decision spells a new future for the forests of Haida Gwaii
Thursday, May 9, 2002
By PAUL SHUKOVSKY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF
QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS, B.C. -- Guujaaw, the leader of the Haida Nation, ambles
through a tiny island of ancient forest searching for evidence of his ancestors.
Suddenly, in the soft light sifting through a
canopy of 800-year-old cedars, the hulk of an
unfinished dugout canoe appears -- unchanged
since it was abandoned more than a century ago.
For at least 9,000 years, these ancient forests have
provided the Haida people with food, clothing,
shelter, tools and canoes.
But these sanctuaries -- these forests that define
the Haida -- are being consumed, falling to the
inexorable advance of men with chain saws.
In
the
silence
of
the
lush
forest
glade,
you
can
hear
the
distant
rumble
of
Weyerhaeuser
Co.'s
sorting
yard,
from
which
a
wealth
of
logs
has
been
loaded
onto
barges
to
feed
America's
hunger
for
lumber.
"We've
been
watching
the
logging
barges
leaving
for
years
and
years,"
says
Guujaaw.
"And
we have seen practically nothing for Haida."
But on Feb. 27, everything changed.
On that day, a B.C. appellate court ruled that the province and Federal Way-based Weyerhaeuser
must try to accommodate Haida concerns before cutting the forest.
The Haida maintain that the ruling gives them virtual veto power over Weyerhaeuser's actions in the
woods. Weyerhaeuser, which says it no longer clearcuts in the Queen Charlottes, disagrees and is
appealing.
The ruling, though, has raised fears that British Columbia's economy will slow even more as Indian
tribes around the province follow the Haida into court.
The case could create a precedent in international trade organizations for such countries as Chile,
Japan and Mexico, where indigenous people say they've been victimized by companies taking their
natural resources.
It could have implications in Washington state, where mills have been hurt by competition from
cheap Canadian imports.
And it highlights issues raised in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization conference.
A few days after their victory over Weyerhaeuser, the Haida went to court asking that all of the
Queen Charlotte Islands and the surrounding waters sitting on an estimated $300 billion worth of oil
and gas be declared their property.
Although the Haida might profit handsomely from exploitation of the oil resource, the tribe --
impoverished by most mainstream standards -- has no plans to become an island of opulence.
Guujaaw, who uses one name, opposes lifting a government ban on drilling in the ecologically
sensitive waters.
"You cannot buy the lifestyle we have with money," he says.
It's not that the Haida want to give back the winning lottery ticket.
It's just that most of the aboriginal people on these islands they call Haida Gwaii think there are
things more important than money at stake.
Reynold Russ, the hereditary chief of Old Masset, the northernmost village on Haida Gwaii, puts it
this way:
"We would have pockets full of money, but where would we go to spend it? If we kill the Hecate
Strait with oil rigs, what would we have left?"
A connection to the Earth
In Old Masset, unemployment runs as high as 90 percent.
But putting food on the table is not a problem. People here still do it the way their ancestors did.
For example, there are Russ's neighbors, the Churchill sisters.
A couple of weeks ago, the three sisters -- all master weavers who have displayed their traditional
native art at museums such as the Smithsonian Institution -- gathered in the home of middle sister
Evelyn Vanderhoop.
Even as Vanderhoop wove a chief's robe,
emblazoned with totemic figures of eagle and
orca, from wool and cedar cambium in the way of
her mother, and as her sister, Holly Churchill,
wove a cedar basket in the manner of her
grandmother, neighbors were on the way with
food.
Monte Stewart-Burton stuck his grinning face
through the kitchen door carrying a box filled
with food he and his brother had gathered.
There were halibut, herring roe and salmon, both
kippered and fresh. That afternoon, Churchill
cooked up the herring roe, still attached to the kelp
on which the herring spawned, with butter and
garlic. And she fried fillets of black cod caught by
Evelyn's 13-year-old son, David.
Being unemployed on Haida Gwaii doesn't mean
being idle. Nor does it mean going hungry.
The Haida's connection to the Earth sustains them.
When the sisters gather their materials, such as spruce root, cedar bark and cambium, for weaving,
they approach the trees with respect.
"Our grandmother," says Churchill, "blessed the grounds as she gathered and made it clear how the
roots and the cambium of the cedar sustained our lives.
"When you're harvesting, it's not your selection, it's the tree's. You only take what you need."
Churchill makes intricately woven baskets from spruce roots. But not just any spruce root will do.
You need the dark of the grove -- ancient groves undisturbed by logging.
These are the kind of groves that are rapidly disappearing from Haida Gwaii.
As April Davis, the oldest of the Churchill sisters, recalls a flight she took over the nearby Ain River
basin, her eyes fill with tears.
"It was all stumps and clearcuts. I couldn't believe people would be so cruel to trees. As a weaver,
you wait to see which tree wants to make a gift to you. I was crying all the way home."
Chief Russ also mourns the Ain, the place where
he fished for sockeye salmon with his grandfather
and grandmother some 60 years ago.
"Since they started logging the area, the Ain River
has gone dead," Russ says. "They killed the Ain.
And I see the downtrend on all the rivers. The
elders would say in the Haida language that the
Ain is asleep. But I have lost hope the fish will
come back."
After her flight, Davis set aside her beloved
basket-weaving. As she says, "If we don't have
these trees, we don't have access to the things we
are. We won't exist anymore."
Now, Davis says, she does her weaving on a
computer, working for Guujaaw at the Council of
the Haida Nation to help empower her people to
preserve Haida Gwaii.
The old village chief -- in ill health -- struggles for breath, smiles and says: "Weyerhaeuser owes me
a lot of money."
'Grabbed by the ear'
It wasn't Weyerhaeuser that clearcut the Ain River basin.
That was done primarily by MacMillan Bloedel, a Canadian company with close ties to old Seattle
timber money. It was acquired by Weyerhaeuser in November 1999.
Recently, Weyerhaeuser has begun to soften the clearcuts by leaving little islands of intact forest
that, from the air, look like plugs of green hair transplanted onto a bald man's head.
"Weyerhaeuser is better than Mac and Blo, but they're not good enough," says Guujaaw as he
bumps along a logging road behind the wheel of his pickup truck.
"Their idea is to replace all the old-growth forests with 80-year rotational crops," he says. "We want
to keep some places in their natural state."
Guujaaw wants entire watersheds left untouched; he wants cedar of varying ages left intact so future
generations of Haida will always have old-growth trees to turn into canoes, baskets and totem poles;
and he wants to make sure no more rivers such as the Ain go to "sleep."
And while Guujaaw had been never shy about asserting the interests of his 3,700 people, he figures
Weyerhaeuser is paying closer attention to those interests since Feb. 27.
So does Gilbert Parnell, vice president of the Council of the Haida Nation.
"We really grabbed them by the ear with that court case," Parnell says. "They are responding
somewhat now ... they are saying, 'What cedar areas do you want to preserve?'"
Visions collide
Ray Lorenzo runs Weyerhaeuser's operation on the Queen Charlottes. Like most of Weyerhaeuser's
160 employees here, he used to work for MacMillan Bloedel.
Lorenzo insists he's been consulting with the Haida for a "quite a while." Those consultations, he
says, are not a result of the court case.
"But I think there is more emphasis on accommodation now than ever before."
What is clear to Lorenzo -- in fact, clear to everyone on the islands -- is that there's a difference in
the way Guujaaw envisions harvesting and the Weyerhaeuser way.
"We believe we are eco-based harvesting right now because we don't clearcut anymore."
Garth Johnson, a Weyerhaeuser forester, says that "virtually entire watersheds" are being preserved
by Weyerhaeuser at the behest of the Haida.
However, Weyerhaeuser has not met Guujaaw's demand that the harvest levels be slashed. Guujaaw
contends that current cut rates cannot be sustained without decimating the forest.
This year, Weyerhaeuser plans to cut about 160 million board feet of forest -- enough lumber to
construct about 16,000 homes, Johnson says.
He acknowledges that that cut rate might not be
sustainable.
"There's a certain reluctance to back off on those
cut levels in the government's and the company's
view, because it's revenue in the government's
pocket and wood in Weyerhaeuser's mills,"
Johnson says.
But Weyerhaeuser, Lorenzo and Johnson say,
must cut at the levels set by the owner of the
forest -- the B.C. government.
Ownership of the forest is at the heart of the
problem, and Weyerhaeuser, caught in the middle
of the conflict, has made its view clear:
"The government of British Columbia is the
owner of the resource and is the party that
determines the basic logic of forest management in B.C.," says Bill Gaynor, a senior vice president
of Weyerhaeuser and head of its Canadian subsidiary.
Despite Gaynor's assertion, sovereignty over the public forests of British Columbia remains an open
question.
Unlike most of the rest of Canada and the United States, British Columbia's native peoples never
signed treaties ceding their land to the Canadian federal government or the imperial British empire.
That, says Louise Mandell, a Vancouver lawyer, means that the title to that land remains in the hands
of Indian tribes, known in Canada as First Nations.
Mandell prevailed in a landmark 1997 case in which the Supreme Court of Canada held that
governments must recognize indigenous peoples' titles to the land and their laws governing the use
of that land.
Under the ruling, courts must take into account oral histories passed on from elders about who used
the land and how they used it.
But Mandell says that the B.C. provincial government has continued to take a position that "we stole
it fair and square."
"What was important about the Weyerhaeuser case is that it completely repudiated the position the
province has taken ... that a First Nation has to prove their title prior to it being enforceable,"
Mandell says.
And in the Weyerhaeuser case, a court declared for the first time that the province and Weyerhaeuser
must consult with an Indian tribe and make a good-faith effort to accommodate their interests -- even
though there hasn't been a ruling on whether the Haida have title to the land.
'They're stealing the wood'
B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant says the ruling creates uncertainty in the already struggling
economy of a province whose leading industries involve resource extraction: forest products,
minerals and fisheries.
"The existence of unresolved aboriginal claims contributes to a measure of uncertainty that makes
the road to economic recovery a little more challenging," Plant says.
Gaynor of Weyerhaeuser says the province must revitalize its stalled treaty negotiations.
"The problem has to be solved," he says. "This has a potentially severe impact."
The uncertainties, meanwhile, could get worse for
Weyerhaeuser.
Last month, the U.S. Commerce Department
decided to impose duties averaging 27 percent on
the import of Canadian softwood lumber.
The agency says companies such as
Weyerhaeuser-Canada receive illegal government
subsidies by getting timber at artificially low
prices.
A coalition of B.C. Indians complained to the
department, maintaining that forest-product
companies were being subsidized because the
trees belong to First Nations and not the province.
The tribes essentially said, "It's not their trees, they are not the true owners. We are," says Russel
Barsh, a New York University law professor and United Nations consultant.
Ultimately, Barsh says, British Columbia will have to pay First Nations for resources taken from
their land.
In the wake of the Weyerhaeuser decision, he predicts that the province will have to scale back or
stop extracting resources, rather than continuing with taking trees and minerals now and paying for
them later whenever legal claims are resolved.
"If they don't get Indian consent," Barsh says, "they are clearly stealing the wood."
Partners in the forest?
On this day, Guujaaw stops his pickup truck at Weyerhaeuser's vast waterfront log-sorting yard.
From here leave barges laden with logs cut from forests that the Haida have roamed since the end of
the last Ice Age.
Weyerhaeuser officials "seem quite eager to make arrangements with us right now," says Guujaaw.
"And we will certainly consider it."
Asked about such arrangements, Weyerhaeuser's Lorenzo foresees a solution to the competing
visions for managing the forest.
"I believe somewhere down the road, there will be a business relationship between us and the Haida.
I don't know what it will look like. But they've been prepared to sit down and discuss it with us. We
are all part of the island. We all live here."
There is precedent for such an agreement; its Indian name is iisaak, which means "respect."
From MacMillan Bloedel, Weyerhaeuser inherited a joint venture with five Indian tribes in the
Clayoquot Sound area of Vancouver Island.
That venture, with the natives holding a 51 percent interest, has reduced harvest levels by about 90
percent and is preserving pristine valleys on Vancouver Island's west coast.
Pressure from environmental groups, natives and the softwood lumber trade dispute are converging
on the big timber companies along the B.C. coast.
And the rhetoric is rising.
Take Robert DuDoward, a Weyerhaeuser "bull bucker." The 44-year-old Haida runs a crew of
timber fellers on the island.
DuDoward doesn't blame Weyerhaeuser for what he calls "the wasteful liquidation of the forests."
The fault for that, he says, lies with the B.C. Forest Ministry whose rules reflect an outmoded
"plantation mentality" in which everything is cut, whether it has value or not, he says.
But DuDoward is concerned about Weyerhaeuser's relationship with its workers on Haida Gwaii, of
which about 35 percent are natives.
Last June, Weyerhaeuser laid off just about its entire 160-person work force. Although the workers
were later rehired, the layoffs and the increasing use of contractors has left employees bitter.
"They're chopping down the social fabric," says a worker who didn't want his name used.
One Weyerhaeuser manager, who also did not want his name used, says that "almost every hourly
employee wants the Haida to take it over."
DuDoward believes the Haida should create a partnership to manage the forest with Weyerhaeuser
employees -- not with the company.
"Deal with the Americans," says DuDoward. "Send a delegation down to Federal Way and offer to
buy the place. I'd offer them $10 million."
Not everyone on the Queen Charlottes would welcome a Haida takeover of the forests.
At the Sandspit Inn on Moresby Island, a longtime resident having a cup of coffee railed against the
possibility of being ruled by the Haida.
"Why should it be theirs because they were here first?" asked the man, who did not want his name
used, because, as he says, "I have to live here."
Just down the road, at a private timber company, forester Rob Wood also has concerns.
"If (the Haida) are going to subsistence only, fishing for food, logging for art -- it will certainly
remove us from the provincial and global market," Wood says. "And I absolutely do not want to see
that happen."
Guujaaw doesn't want to see that happen, either.
His people need the jobs.
So does everyone on Haida Gwaii.
"My dad logged," Guujaaw says. "Pretty well everybody around here logged."
There's a somber look on Guujaaw's face as he surveys the log-sorting yard.
In the Haida language, he explains, when you cut down a tree, you "kill" the log. His people always
took one tree at a time.
"When you take a tree, you've got to do some fasting. You talk to the tree. You ask it to fall lightly.
And to forgive you for taking it." |
