The targeting of Old Growth Red Cedar on Haida Gwaii is bringing global attention to the madness that exists within the B.C. government and its forestry industry. Meanwhile, an unfair trade-off continues. Short term monetary gain for the depletion of some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the Planet.

Haida Gwaii is an archipelago located off the coast of the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia. Known as the ‘Galapagos of the North’, the lands and seas that make up the more than 200 islands belong to the Haida People, whose culture is inextricably connected to the place from which it was born out of.

Cedar is an incredibly culturally significant tree to the Haida People. It is a resource that is cherished and valued in both spiritual and material ways. Currently old growth red cedar is being targeted and destroyed as a means of attaining monetary gain. The exploitative economies of resource development are running amuck like a wound up pendulum that doesn’t know how to stop.

In November of 1985 Haida Gwaii’s forests were being majorly highjacked. It was during this time that a group of Haida citizens blockaded a logging operation that was taking place on South Moresby Island. A total of 72 Haida citizens were arrested by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). This demonstration, now known as Lyell Island, led to the establishment of Gwaii Haanas Park where, to this day, 51% of the islands southern region is protected as a Haida Heritage Site. Gwaii Haanas is managed by the Haida Nation and by BC Provincial Parks. This joined venture is a leading example of thoughtful conservation and management strategies which place emphases on Indigenous People’s rights to manage and maintain their own territories. But while the south portion of the island remains protected, the northern portion of the island is currently being picked apart for every last morsel of high value timbre.

In 2009 an agreement and protocol was decided upon between the Province of BC and the Haida Nation which established that decisions around resource extraction were to be reached through the process of consensus. The Haida Nation had to be in agreement. While working as a representative at the solutions table for the Council of the Haida Nation, Sean Brennan started noticing large numbers of red cedar going off island in 2016. A range of 60-65% cedar instead of 38 or 37.5%, not matching up with the profiles of the forests. The Haida Nation started denying consent to companies, Sean stopped counting at 38 denied applications. At the time Leonard Mund was the District Manager for the BC Ministry of Forests and he continued to approve all of the applications despite the Haida Nation saying no. A race to exploit some of the world’s last stands of old growth red cedar was taking place. High grading of material was reported by several members of the community, a well known industrial forestry practice in which all the land is clear-cut after which the most valuable timber gets loaded up while the less desirable varieties of raw timber get dug into the earth or burned within ‘waste’ piles. This industrial mentality and culture of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ trickery can also be seen in how cut-blocks along the side of the highway in the northern parts of Haida Gwaii are concealed by a thin band of trees, masking the reality of clear-cut logging methods where not a single plant is left standing. An absolute decimation of the land.

In 2018 a company named Husby Forest Products Ltd. were logging in an area known as St’aala Kun or Collison Point. Concerned locals reached out to Lisa White (Haida artist, environmentalist and activist who lives in Old Masset) to let her know that the majority of what was coming out of the woods was old growth red cedar. This was the beginning of the stand at Collison Point. Logging roads were blockaded, trapper cabins built up, ceremony and songs were brought back to the lands. The stand lasted 7 weeks until an injunction was granted by the Crown, at which time the RCMP came in and cleared out the camp. Logging, of what the Haida Nation has described as the last available stand of old growth cedar on the island, continued. And four years later, it still continues and sadly in the north, it is practically gone.

Below you will come across photographs that are meant to highlight the cultural significance of cedar. Also photographs that are meant to tell part of the story of the stand that took place at St’aala Kun while also illuminating the stark reality of the logging practices that are currently taking place on the island.

After spending time learning about forestry on Haida Gwaii I began to speak with people in the community about their feelings around what was taking place on the island. With permissions, I recorded my conversations and compiled a set of direct quotes from each interview that I have consolidated here at the lower portion of this page.

Some thoughts from the community on logging and forestry operations on Haida Gwaii. Taken from conversations that took place in early 2018.

K̲uuyang Lisa White

“I was raised around Elders and Aunties and they always taught us to take what you need…you don’t want to kill a tree if you’re taking bark. You don’t want to take more than you need for fish, more than you can work on. If you always maintain that balance you know the earth will always be there for us, provide for us. Don’t be greedy because in our culture when you’re greedy there are always repercussions for that. Whether it’s something dying out or a species dying because it was disrespected, there’s lots of stories about that. You don’t take more than you need. You respect the life of that animal or tree and don’t be wasteful. [In the past] I know that there was a single select harvest. They would test hole a cedar tree to make sure it was sound for their purpose…they would not take a whole bunch of trees in one area unless it was a village spot. That method enabled them to thrive on this island. The plants could still grown, the animals could still live there. There weren’t these piles and piles of dead waste everywhere. They utilized what they took out of the forest. [They had] and economy built on the forest, with making and trading canoes all along the coast and making boxes. They were known for that. Because they always had these trees that were up and coming, they weren’t cutting down trees that were all different ages and weren’t mature yet.”

“Our forests are 100% exported. We have shares in a mill in Port Clements for about 4 or 5 years now and we can’t even get tress from our own company, or from any company. So it’s sitting there idle. And all our trees are leaving here. And in the mean time a lot of our people in Old Masset are living in poverty. It’s not like we want to be rich from exploiting the land either. I think we need to find a way to respect the forest and still be able to create jobs and employment. Meaningful jobs and employment, not just any jobs. I think that cutting down the entire forest is a really spiritually damaging job. I don’t think it’s good for our people’s healing.”

“It’s really upsetting to go out to the cut-blocks and see the piles and piles of waste, waste wood. It’s just busted up and thrown into heaps. And there are no animals, no insects. Just like a big dead-zone. It’s really sad and it’s unacceptable. And they often do it in these places that are isolated from us. It’s hard to get to them. I’ve been trying to teach myself how to look at [forestry] maps because they make it so complicated, there’s so many companies and areas and there are sub-contractors. And the thing is we don’t know where they’re logging at any given time and we don’t know where the trees are going, we don’t even know where the trees that they are planting are coming from.”

“We were definitely spending more time on the land when we were kids, always in the forest. Always running around in the forest or else going out gathering food, my brothers were all fishing with my grandfather, river fishing. And now with the rivers being the way they are and the bureaucracy that is unfortunately accompanying it, you can only go fishing on this weekend or next weekend and that’s it. And it’s costly to get up there and a lot of people don’t have the money to get up there or the boats or the nets. And besides there are hardly any fish there. There are all these factors that are affecting people being out there. I think we have to start paying attention to creating plans to get people out [onto the land], to start restoring these river systems that are really in need of some care, some love, and some give back.”

“What I envision for [the future of Haida Gwaii], if we could, I thought we could go out and plant areas and restore areas but if they’re not protected then what’s the point? If we’re just going to do that for them to just come back and cut it all down again in 40 years or whatever it is, then it’s not worth it. It needs some level of protection first of all. And then after that there’s money in Gwaii Trust and there’s money in other areas where you could partner to do some restoration. And I think that would bring the people out onto the land. Get people out across here [across the Masset Inlet] to start walking the river and assessing the river. And then build a plan so we can restore it to its former self. That would give people meaningful work and it would get them back out onto the land. And it would get them doing a job that they could feel good about, that they could feel pride in. And I feel like it would be healing our land and our people at the same time. And so I believe restoration work is the way to go. I believe that is the only thing that can happen for reconciliation if you will. Like they talk about reconciliation but you know, if they just continue to devastate our lands and our rivers then how can we reconcile?”

“[To access the old growth forest from Masset] we could maybe go across the inlet but hardly anyone has boats. We’re living in a poverty situation here so it’s challenging. All our fishing boats got taken away in the late 50’s. There’s not one person in this community that it didn’t affect. They [the government] took away licences and they gave them to other people…if we don’t have boats we can’t go around our islands and see and assess what’s going on or see what’s going on on our own land. You get stuck in survival mode and it’s a struggle to make ends meet and then it’s pretty hard to fight for your land or fight for your rights, I think that’s what [the government] wanted. I feel like it was a plan to do that.”

“What’s happening now is just huge clear-cuts…who knows how many culturally modified trees are being cut and have been cut in the past. I’ve heard stories of hundreds of cedar canoes in every stage of development being cut into shake posts. My kid’s uncle, who was a logger in the 70’s told me that himself. That they were ordered to do that.”

“We are a living culture, we are trying to come back from oppression and poverty and all the terrible things that happened. Our genocide, our small pox genocide that happened to our people. All of these things. So we are gathering strength but the thing is, if we don’t protect what is left, what are we? How are we going to continue our culture if there isn’t any graduation of trees, or heathy forests, or healthy rivers to be in?”

“I think the land has to get the respect that it deserves. And I think that it hasn’t been respected for the last hundred years and that’s my concern. I think we have to do something now while there’s still some beautiful forest left to save.”

“I want [Haida Gwaii] to be a biosphere.”

“I think we have to give back to Haida Gwaii. I was taught as a Haida growing up that you’re supposed have a reciprocal relationship. Whether it’s with other people or the land. You know you always have to give something back, even when you take salmon out of the rivers you’re supposed to put the bones back in the river.”

“I wish we had protection for the north as well [as the south]. We have rich beautiful lands here too that deserve protection. And all around Masset Inlet, it was put as a timber supply area and we didn’t have any say in that.”

“Who’s paying attention to how much habitat loss is happening for the bears? And the goshawks, the ermine. All these unique species that are here in Haida Gwaii. These animals have been living here for thousands of years, they need old growth. A lot of them need old growth to survive and they’re a part of the ecosystem just like we are.”

“I’m kind of known as an outspoken person about the environment and protection of our environment so a couple of people starting coming to me and talking to me about their concerns. Even including loggers who were saying, you know, something has to happen because there won’t be any jobs in a few years, like we just see it happening so fast. We’re out there and we see it you know, it kind of gave me a sense of urgency like I had to do something but at the same time I didn’t know what to do. So what I started to do was try to educate myself about where they’re cutting, who the companies are, what are the rules. Because really most of us, the average person really has no idea. And who are these companies. They don’t give anything back to our communities. All they do is take, especially across the inlet here, I’ve never heard of them ever donating a single thing back to the community…At some point some of our people were like, we need to make a stand somewhere at some point. And we decided the closest place to us that was being logged at the time was Collision Point, being up the inlet an hour or two depending on what kind of boat you’re on. So I started learning about that area, and the company was Husby Forest Products. Learning about how long they’ve been here just logging, logging, logging and that half their employees are not even from here. They import a lot of their employees, even their tree planting company that they hire is not local. So our trees aren’t grown here, a lot of the people with jobs aren’t from here and they just export 100%, and they just leave a big devastating mess behind. So I think that some of our members wanted to take a stand and say enough is enough, we want you to stop. We feel like what you are doing on our land is illegal. This is against our Haida Laws. Our Haida laws are respect, consent, reciprocity. Not taking more than you need. So some of our people went out there and I said, you know 100% I support you and as much as I can, what ever I can do I’ll support you. So some people went out there. Eventually the company got an injunction against us. They didn’t say we were Haidas, they said we were John and Jane Doe, and the way they made the injunction was that if we got arrested, if we got out there and got arrested that we would not be able to speak why we were there. And the fact that we’re Haida people, that we’re the first people of this land. And that we have a right to be there, we have a right to be anywhere on these islands. These are our islands. They are unceded Haida territory and what is happening out there in many of our eyes is illegal. It’s all illegally appropriated land and the licences are illegally permitted.”

“You know 7 weeks we had people out there holding the line. Being on the land to be there to say we’re here and we want this to stop, until we were removed by the RCMP. So that’s a long time to be out on the land and to count on people supporting you with food and donations. We got a lot of support from our northern people in Old Masset mostly. [We chose not to get arrested], we got legal advice that if we were to get arrested under the way the injunction was written we would not be able to speak to why we were there and the fact that we are Haidas. So we needed to have that injunction varied or changed. And so that still hasn’t been done. If we had a lawyer to do that for us maybe we could get back out there. But people were definitely willing to get arrested. All of our Matriarchs and Aunties, Elders have told me they support us and thank us. And you know when an Elder comes up to you and gives you 100 dollars and a sleeping bag and says thank you for doing this. Then you know you are doing the right thing.”

“I don’t understand why we’re still clear-cutting today when we know in Europe and other places that clear-cutting just devastates the land. And they got down to their last few percent of original forests. You know, that’s what clear-cutting does. You destroy every age group of tree.”

“My business [Gin Kuyaas gift shop] is really seasonal, I sell the odd bit of stuff before Christmas or here or there, birthday presents. But mostly it’s tourism and largely I sell the jewelry and artwork in the summer months. And I’m really concerned that if we allow them to continue devastating our land here that that is going to go away also. They are not coming here to see stumps. People are finding it harder and harder, people come here to see big trees. Well that’s going to be only in Gwaii Hannas if we don’t stop it. We do have some big trees over here but under their plan with the timber supply area we won’t have that. Once they are gone, they’re gone. Unless we make changes. So I think that we’re really cutting ourselves in the throat by allowing [logging] to continue. I think that there’s big huge potential in eco-tourism if it’s done with rules and structures. That and restoration work, I think that could be huge.”

“I think what people are forgetting is that our language comes from the lands. Our songs comes from the land. Everything comes from the land and the ocean surrounding us. Our culture is very very dependant on having a healthy land. To be able to create those beautiful monuments, like my father Chief Edinsu, Edenshaw. Morris White. He was a canoe builder and it’s like his knowledge was inherent. But in order to do that you need to have those beautiful healthy trees to make a canoe, to make a traditional Haida canoe. You need an old growth tree cedar.”

“It took me over three years to access some cedars through the bureaucracy that’s been created for us here. As Haida people here, we used to be able to go out to get it. That should be our right, to go out and get some trees. We’re given such a hard time over getting a few trees when there’s huge barge loads going out every single week out of our inlet. Every single week there’s [pause]…And that’s part of your culture right, of keeping the culture ignited. If you don’t have access to those things then it’s almost another form of cultural genocide. And oppression. It really is. How many people have the skills to fill out paper work and go out onto the land to GPS your own wood. That’s what I had to do. I had to have a plan, a drawing, like a building plan. It makes it really challenging for most people, besides the financial parts of it.”

“We need a healthy forest to have healthy red cedar. Our houses were built with red cedar, our canoes were built with red cedar, our totem poles were built with red cedar. We used other trees also but that was the most important tree, but you know, we can’t just protect the cedar. Because you need a healthy forest to have healthy cedar.”

“We don’t have the kind of capacity to fight this big fight unless we all work together. If every one of us reached out to people that could help us, and if we could all get on the same page and say, look we all love these lands and we gotta find a way that people could still have jobs but not at the expense of the environment or the land or the rivers. Because clear-cutting is just not it. It’s barbaric, it’s time to change. We need to do something different and it has to be done in a respectful way if we’re going to do anything at all. So god willing I know there are people that care in the world and I hope that we can reach out to them to help us develop a plan.”

“There used to be thousands and thousands of Haida here. They used [resources from the island] for their own needs plus they traded some. Yet the environment was still in perfect condition. So nobody can tell me that with 5000 people populating this island that we can’t be self sufficient. I think that’s another aspect that needs to be examined. Self sufficiency as an island. It should be our needs first. Where do you go to buy siding on this island? There is not one operating mill. There are a few people that are salvaging. But there’s not even a mill operational here. You could potentially support yourself as an artist here for a couple of months on one chunk of wood. How much money do people need? I think a lot of the decisions that are being made here are made because of greed. Greed of companies and corporations and individuals. And that’s it. There’s not enough for every man’s greed. But there’s enough for every mans needs right. I remember reading that somewhere, I can’t claim that one but it’s true.”

“Who’s going to pay for the restoration? These companies come, they take everything, they do the bare minimum of planting the trees and then they leave until they do the next block.”

“Well I think it’s interesting that you talk about the connection between the land and the sea. And you know it’s the same thing, the things I learned from my mentor, my language mentor Steven Brown. There was always a respect for the land and the sea. When you think about it, salmon spend half of their life in the ocean and half of its life in the rivers. These salmon, I learned from a new friend of mine Sm’hayetsk (Teresa Ryan) Tsimshian professor from UBC, about how the salmon come out from the oceans and they go up into the rivers and how they’re going up to spawn and reproduce. And the bears eat, they take the salmon from the rivers and they eat them, they carry them into the forests where they fertilize our beautiful trees and our beautiful forests with the remains of that salmon. And when you are clear-cutting areas you are really interrupting that whole system. Those bears aren’t fertilizing the forests anymore. There are no forests to fertilize when you are clear-cutting all the way around a river, only leaving a tree and a half length beside each side of the river. And so they are loosing their pathways that they’ve used for centuries, so we are totally interrupting the natural cycle and the natural order of things. So I’ve heard that salmon are creatures of the forests and even trees. What trees do for us, we are so ignorant to it. They hold the land in place but they also take the carbon dioxide out of the air and they create oxygen for us to breath. And they even create weather systems, they hold water and that water evaporates back into the air and it rains again. We have areas in the world that are deforested and they’ve become desertified. There’s no more rain. But there’s hope too, you can replant but you have to let that forest get healthy again too. And it has to be done naturally, not a tree farm. If you’re going to heal it, it has to be done with great thought and care. The moisture comes off the ocean and it goes into the trees and the trees provide shade for the salmon and the animals. It’s all a big system that we have to think more about.”

Charlie Cowpar

“My grandmother raised me more than anything and she always said never take from the earth what you want, just take what you need. When I got into logging I was a tree hugger already because the forest was where I went to get my comfort. When you’re young and the trees are big it’s get it down and chop it up, but there’s more to it than that. Especially when you see the status quo, how the big corporate guys just scoop it all up and take it away…it just keeps going and going.”

“I never did work for the big companies that much because I’d seen what was happening and they wanted you there Monday to Friday and I didn’t like working Mondays. I always worked for the little guy whether it was 3 or 4 guys working and you sort of mixed up and did everything. You didn’t have to be a clone and get in the crummy and ride into work and only have the weekends off, they were just going gung-ho in those days. I never did stick to that so I didn’t stay in the line up for my union pension and all that. I just said I don’t need that, fuck you guys. So I worked for the gyppos [small independently owned companies] and bounced everywhere. And I’m glad I did because I learned a lot more and I feel better about it. About myself that way. I don’t want to be a part of that because you don’t really care about anything except getting the wood off. And it’s still the same.”

“You gotta get rid of clear-cutting somehow. You have to get rid of the big guys, they’ve had their share anyways, it’s time they get out as far as I’m concerned. They’ve been doing it for years, just cut and run.”

“Collison Point should have been left alone. It was a timbre supply area but somehow Husby and their cohorts and all that money somehow got it so they could just log it. Without any repercussions, until now. I’m so happy that [the blockade] is happening…there’s only that little but left between Collison Point and Denin Bay.”

“They were doing better forest assessments when the forest practices code came in. They started employing people…to look out for goshawks…But now all that is kind of gone. There’s really no assessments anymore.”

“Now with the price of cedar even the crappy cedar is going for megabucks.”

“The whole thing about logging is that it doesn’t seem to want to change. Like they could log an old growth patch like I logged it a few years ago, where you can go in and log it and take 30 percent and when you move out, you look at it, and it looks just like it did before you went in there. But you go in and you take out good trees, no use taking taking rotten trees because they’re habitat…all the flora and fauna and you know everything still crawls and creepies and it’s not a wide open big sun space. But they don’t want to seem to change because everything’s a machine now a days…which cuts down on jobs, it cuts down on community employment cause they’ve got one guy on a machine doing three of four guys work…it’s industrialized. It tears up the ground way more, especially now that they’re on the steep stuff and they’re still using machines. It tears up the mosses and the bushes and roots…If you leave the blanket on top, there’s less erosion and there’s still all that stuff alive down there…”

“Haida Gwaii has very nice wood. Lots of high grade spruce and cedar…[the forestry industry] moved in and phump, they logged it all and that’s the story.”

“They could leave the second growth even instead of logging it, it’s like a lot of it they’re logging because it’s the ideal size for a feller buncher to fall. For mechanized logging right. It’s still young, why cut it down now? It’s just coming up, give it some time and it will be bigger and you’ll get way more yield off the land, but for some reason they want to clear-cut it. Maybe because it’s all they’ve got.”

“As far as logging, ideally I’d like to see it go back to manpower. But they say, oh that’s not possible. But it is. You’d burn a hell of a lot less diesel. Yes, it’s slower, you’re not going to get the production, but what do you need the production for if it’s not going off island? You produce enough for the local people. More that what local people need. There’d be less jobs as far as shipping them out by barge load but I don’t think there’d be less jobs in the long run once you got it going because there’d be more value added jobs right”.

“ Five years from now there ain’t going to be any Ian Lake or Tlell watershed. It will all be done. And then there’s just second growth mechanical logging and so it will take a big flop. But it would be nice to see a change while there’s still some left.”

Nang K̲uyaas Russell Davis

“I think everybody in the village sees what’s going on, there’s barges going in and out of here. After a while, after many years of seeing this and not seeing our community getting anything in return, that’s what angers us because the destruction they are doing up there. I’m a fisherman, I’ve been a fisherman all my life and I enjoy being out at sea. I see the decline of fish in the rivers, year after year…you think about what my grandchildren are going to see when they grow up. Are they going to see the beauty we see? I don’t think so.”

“Clear-cutting the forest not only destroys our livelihood. Our cedar, our poles, our canoes are made out of these historic logs, they’re all going to be gone…and there goes our culture.”

“There’s just so much that isn’t right, what [the government] is doing. They couldn’t wipe out our culture or the Indian in us so they picked the way of destroying our food source and our livelihood and our culture. They’re going to destroy it that way. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about this place"

“I was willing to get apprehended [by the RCMP at St’aala Kun] for the cause of what I believe in, saving our forest. It’s a small price to pay for our livelihood, because it’s not just for me, it’s for my grandchildren and their children. That’s how much I want my grandchildren to see what I’ve seen, to experience what I’ve experienced on the waters. To feel that joy to be out in the forest or the waters, to feel the ancestors with you. It’s just, we can’t stand by any longer. It’s disappearing too quickly. We need to figure out the next step and what needs to be done.”

“There was only about 6 or 8 of us that stood up [at St’aala Kun]. We said, we don’t want you taking any more logs, we’re going to stand here. We can hold our ground. They didn’t put up much of a fuss because they knew they were in the wrong, they knew they were taking too much.”

“I think the feeling was that people didn’t want to get arrested. And this technical world that we are in right now and sickness, all the drugs that are flowing through the village. There’s no mutual sharing anymore, nobody visits anybody. It’s not there anymore. We talk to one another when we cross the street but the communication is gone. Even families don’t see eachother. There could be more activity, more things for the children to put together. Something for the kids to do rather than get themselves into mischief. They need to learn how to communicate with the land.”

“If we don’t do nothing, there’s going to be nothing left.”

“No more. They’ve taken too much, way way way too much. It’s crazy, out of madness.”

“It would be so powerful if we did stand together and fight as one. It would be so awesome. I’d love to see that before I pass, see us working together instead of working against each other. We’ve all got the same blood. We all have our ancestors blood in us…We have to stand our ground because they did that many years ago. Our last Elders that stood up on Lyell felt very strongly about it and as time went by that little group got smaller and smaller. Now there’s only a few of us that care it seems like.”

“I remember when I first started fishing with my Uncles, how much beauty there was. When you fished, the abundance of fish, there was so much. There was so much work and when you went to the rivers to fish for sockeye, your net would be so full it would almost sink. And now you stay out there for days and you come back with a couple. The fishing is going to be depleted because there’s no where for the fish to go, because after their long journey to come home to spawn, they find it destroyed. They’ve got no where to spawn and that’s going to wipe out our fish.”

“I used to see [goshawks] when I’d go fishing but I don’t see them anymore. It’s depressing when you think about it, how fast things are disappearing right before our eyes. And hardly nobodies trying to put a stop to it. Even us, when we were standing and then all of the sudden there was nothing [after the injunction]. I keep on asking what are we going to do now? We can’t stop you. Just because they won, doesn’t mean we have to stop.”

Salaanglay Vern Williams

“If I go picking berries and I go through and I slaughter every berry. I use machinery and I’m not just picking the ripe ones, I’m just picking everything. I’m killing all the small ones that could keep growing, so instead of lasting the year it’s done in that one day. And then you’re done. You may get a little bit of reward but you don’t get that continued growth throughout the year.”

“We had it perfect for over 10,000 years. 150 years. The world’s in danger. In less than 200 years. Resource, everything’s a resource. Even all the jobs that you do there’s always one worker called the human resource worker.”

“Right from the time we’re born stories were our babysitters. That’s why stories were told of different creatures, different beings that were in the forest that we had to be wary of. And that controlled the distance we would go in as young people, and then as you grow older you start figuring out that some of us are braver than others and they’ll go past the limit. And then they’ll learn more from other people once you start going [into the forest] further. You always find somebody who knows the trails, and knows how to travel, and knows what plants are there. That’s how you find your way in. It’s connected to everything we do, because when we walk through the forest we’re looking for plants that we are going to need through the winter to keep us healthy so we know where they are because there’s always a certain time to pick plants.”

“We are connected to everything. If we care for the plants properly we know what they need. [That caring has] already been there, the bears understand, the eagles understand, all the bears understand that the forest needs food too, the same way we do.”

Sophenia Jones

“We have to be able to put a stop to all the logging, hopefully for good here on Haida Gwaii. There used to be these great gigantic cedar trees and now there’s nothing. There’s too much logging in this district here. All the trees are all gone because of too much logging for too many years. The old growth that was here before, how can I put it? They’re the ones that are holding us up. That’s the only way I can put it. They’re so strong, their roots are way down under the earth. These trees right here, even though they look big they’re not. Their roots aren’t dug way in like it should be. Specially when it has to protect the rest of the forest.”

“Our land has been taken away from us all our lives.”

“[In the past] every section of land belonged to each and every person. You had a section of the forest where I’d have to go and ask permission if I could even enter. By asking permission I’d bring you a piece of tabacco or a piece of fish or something like that. And then I could enter. Now they don’t do that. They just go in there and kkkkkkkkhhhck, everything out. They don’t ask permission. Is this your land? Is this your piece of property? They don’t do that anymore….A lot of our people are backwards, they don’t really understand. They’re so drilled in one way. And that’s the white mans way. It’s that way or no way at all right? That’s how they’re brought up. And if they see us trying to maintain something that we figure is okay, everybody from our family could benefit from it, all hell brakes loose. And it’s still like that today. It’s too much quarrelling, we don’t know how to communicate anymore. It’s just devastating because it’s the most important way of getting around in this world.”

“Our own people started deleting woman out of all their discussions. Having the white man rule right. We were the most powerful beings, the woman. We were the ones that ran everything right.”

“We were brought up [learning about respect]. We did little things like pack in water, pack wood for the neighbours. We’d have supper and we’d talk about what you’re going to do for the day. And what we’re going to do tomorrow and they’d say, with love you go over. You pack wood in, you see the need for it, you play around and you see something that needs to be done, you go and do it. So that’s what we did. We’d pack water in, we’d pack wood in for anybody, it wasn’t just for the old people, it was for everybody in the village. And it was with love.”

“Greed is like… people always desire things. We were brought up to not desire anything. And a lot of people were brought up to desire. You desire, you desire. And that’s where the greed comes in. If you don’t desire anything, things work out a lot better. Your life gets a lot easier, you’re not so frustrated with life and at least you’ve always got food on your table and a roof over your head. That’s one of the main things you always have to worry about, nothing else. Get rid of desire and the world would go around a little bit better. Even amongst us in the past there was greed. When people get too greedy and they’d start stealing, what the Elders told us was that they’d put four or five crabs on the ground in a circle and all the people would be gathered around in a circle. The one that stole, the crabs used to walk directly to that person. That’s what they used to tell us. When the Haida would desire, something to eat or a woman, or a man. It would even start war amongst one another. Amongst the family. And it would last for years and years and years until that person or that family owned up to why they desired what they desired.”

“Whales used to come [to the Masset Inlet]. And sea lions and seals used to be out on that spot. And when the whales used to come in they’d go after the sea lions and they’d grab them and flip them. We’d stand here and watch. They’d flip them around like basketballs and wow. There’d be hundreds and hundreds of whales. You could walk on their backs when we’d come down here. Now we don’t see nothing, not a thing. And it hurts so bad. It’s all I can say. Hundreds of whales, we used to be able to walk on the backs of them.”

“I was brought up with the bible. And I couldn’t understand, especially when I was in the residential school, when they used to say god this and god that. He was such a mean god right. I couldn’t understand where that god was coming from, because the god I knew wasn’t like that.”

Barney Edgars

“I’ve worked 10 years in forestry and 10 years with fisheries. I quit forestry because it wasn’t going anywhere. I’m also a bark stripper. I’ve been doing it since I was 12, it’s gotten to the point where I have to go further and further away to get yellow cedar. The second growth red cedar is closer but I have to strip 12 trees to get the same amount compared to 4 trees with old growth.”

“[Forestry] auditors don’t have enough experience, it’s probably what the companies want anyways. It takes only five days to get CFI(cultural feature identification) certification. If I had it my way I’d just cut them all down. What are you protecting these single trees for? [referring to trees that get protected for being recognized as a culturally significant] Go out and look at it. If there’s a CMT(culturally modified tree) how did it get there? There was a trail of course. That wasn’t recognized. We need the intact forest to be able to read what was happening there. If companies see culturally modified trees it’s going to cost them money, what do you think they’re going to do about it? ”

“[In the past] a tree thirteen feet wide wasn’t uncommon.”

“Everything’s all tied up in politics.”

“When you cut all these areas, and you put them together…that’s a lot of heat. It’s like shaving your head bald and standing out in the sun. And they’re talking about global warming.”

“I thought we fought for this during Lyell.”

“At Watt Lake where selective logging took place, it didn’t look like anything happened there logging wise. The economics of selective logging is not feasible for a big company. But you and I, we could go out and make money. But a big company could not. That’s the biggest problem we have to solve. We need to solve the economics for the island and only for the island, then we’ll get somewhere. When companies off island and the government are making the decisions it’s never going to happen. In my opinion all the forestry operations on Haida Gwaii should be put under one roof, with so many companies you get the run around.”

“They’re in the headwaters of the Hancock River. Once you’re at the headwaters you start changing the hydrology.”

“When I was 15/16 years old I participated in a summer program where you were paid to spend time with the Elders. Went fishing and hunting, all the guys who went, none of them are in trouble now. That’s the best thing I’ve done, going out and spending time with the Old Guys. It put life into more perspective for us, so many benefits down the road. It was better than school.”

Mike Hennigan

“Clear-cut, gotta be clear-cut. Nothing else. Not only economically but from an ecological, every point of view. Clear-cut. There’s no other way to do it. Except clear-cut and then you get the second crop going, it’s all about the second crop. And we can show you on paper that the second crop yields are higher than the old growth yields. More meters per hectare, more fibre, meters of fibre per hectare than the old growth. So it’s all about the second crop. Okay…so they’re all trained like that.”

“[In my experience logging selectively] 30% held up to blow down studies and everything held up, you can’t see it from space, the bird people, everything you know. They said the birds of prey do a little better because it’s a little bit more open for them…we’ve done this several times, several places, then ramped up a few times over the years. The habitat is intact, the habitat characteristics that existed pre-logging still exists, you don’t need to do inventory of species because they still live there.”

“FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) watered down their standards to meet SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) standards. That’s why they allow hoe-chucking and shit in the bush now.”

“It’s all a game. Like Ray said, Ray are you trying to tell me they’re squashing your report? No! I would never say that Mike. I’ve been reassigned temporarily. It’s been 10 years Ray! It’s coming out next year. That’s the kind of thing you’re up against. He’s not going to lose his job over it and his pension you know what I mean? It’s tough. You can be invested but when push comes to shove.”

“Look what they’re doing in the second growth, that’s the crime. You know. There’s no way, that’s the best growing land, that’s all the valley bottoms, that’s all the southern slopes. This whole idea, oh give us the old growth and we’ll stop all old growth logging, that’s so backwards. It’s like no, all that’s left is the north slope crap folks, I’ve got news for you. If you agree with that deal the other side of it is that the companies get the valley bottoms and slopes forever. They’re only good for three crops and then they have to fertilize, they already know that. Like holy crap are you out of your minds? Protect the valley bottoms and the southern slopes. That’s where all the animals live, that’s where all the action is. Restore those you know. Selectively log those, they call that commercial thinning. Open those stands up, don’t clear-cut. God, whatever you do don’t clear-cut those. Right now they are just whacking them. Tons of major whacking of second growth. Back to the money.”

“[I]f you go, let’s thin the second growth because the woods worth so much we could almost break even now. We atleast create jobs, train people and so on. Which there’s a shortage of trained people so, that’s all good. And if you break even because the price of wood’s so high and then in fifty years look what you’ve got. You got this forest all thinned, let it grow for another 50 years. Hoooooo!”

“Now you can, instead of getting on this whole second growth thing, forestry is so complicated world-wide and it’s such a chess game with the countries and everybody, the way they play it. You really gotta be careful chasing the money because you gotta look at our play situation here. Why are we different? Why is this different from the mainland or anywhere else? This is the most expensive wood in the province, the most expensive wood well probably in the world…it would be in the ballpark for sure. To hit the market. So you know, use the European model, there’s probably 60 million people living within 50 miles of that tree of 100 miles for sure right. Our trees, we are not in that situation.”

“To think that we are going to put second growth out competitively and maintain any kind of economic employment, I mean where’s it going to come out of? You’re the most expensive wood, barging is what? 18 bucks a metre now, 24 bucks a metre…something ridiculous. But nobody else has that cost. To ship it, to produce it. So why do you want to get in the second growth game, the clear-cut game?”

“If [Taan] ran a company instead of contracting everything out. They would own all the iron, they would know their logging costs. They would have lots of trained people, lots of employees, way more flexibility…But now they’re at the mercy of the contractors, different way of looking at things. So they clear-cut and you’ll never get anyone to shift as long as, like they always used to say, I’m ‘In the Black Mike’. I’m in the black. You’re really going to have to come up with a lot of reasons to change something because we might go into the red…when you’ve got a company that’s making money, the forestries making money doing what they know how to do. Clear-cut. Grapple yarder. Hoe chuck. All your professional people are trained at university, they swear that this is how you do it. They’ll write you reports saying this is how you do it and why you can’t do it any other way.”

“So you look at clear-cut and everybody that does the retention [selective logging] work and is good at it, like all the fallers, the loggers. Because you look at a clear-cut and you can’t hide. It looks like a bomb went off right. Nobody likes that, we know what we kill, we see it. All those little varmints that live in the roots. When you clear-cut, man they’re toast. Maybe some of them get through, you hope some of them get through. But I used to run through the clear-cuts going, “We’re on our way!”, because you’re going to kill every stinking living thing in there right. You’re not just gonna, okay like we need to use some of the trees. Sorry guys, we’re going to destroy the forest. Nobody likes that. Nobody likes that. So can you do it differently? Yeah you can, you go home at the end of the day and you look back…hey, we didn’t nuke it. Didn’t all blow down, it’s not a Mac and Bloe joke. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. Hey all we did was go to work, the Haida have a word for is. You take what you need.”

“Collison point, that’s just, that’s when I walked away. You’re starting to go out there and I was standing out in the swamps because the way she works out there. They’ll be an old 4-5’ cedar snag and a few cedar poles about like this [shows a small circumference with both his hands]. What they were going after, it ran about 220-320 hectare. Traditionally the wood, like the old growths in the valley bottoms ran 1200-1400 meters the hectare. Before we moved into the 200 meters a hectare stuff we were logging 600 meter to the hectare average. Then they dropped to 300. And under 400 there are cost issues that happen, and so now they want to log Collison Point. I couldn’t believe it, here we are. Taking. The [deleted for privacy] and I took a little cruise, he said this, this is beyond braindead. You’re taking the 6 little trees that are growing on humps. Meanwhile you’re making them cut the snag that’s the prime habitat and all the little hemlocks around that are nothing but this [again shows small circumference with his hands]. This is beyond stupid, we could run through here with a small chopper or forwarder- no roads right, maybe a minimal punching, grab the trees you want. Leave a couple, like why are we nuking? We’re just clearing land and a forestry guy said, quote, “Well yeah, the second crop. We gotta get this cleared for the second crop.” The shit didn’t grow here the first time around, what makes you think it’s going to grow a second time?”

“The dark forces are very well organized. They know exactly what they want. The light forces are arguing over who to follow, which person is right. We as the dark forces are very clear on what they want. Where the people trying to change things aren’t very clear on what they want, oh I want to stop all logging, oh I want to stop some logging.”

“I talked to the forester at Taan and she got mad at me. I said how come they watered down those FSC standards? “They did not!”. How come they let machines in the bush? “You can’t log without machines in the bush!” Okay. You know they used to. I mean they’re logging stuff, roads are the absolute worst thing you can do, everybody knows it. They’re putting roads every 400 feet so they can get in with the machines.”

“Are we gonna just keep short-term gaining? The first time around maybe with our old growth we could compete in the market, but are we so stupid as to try and compete with the second growth market when we’re the furthest wood from the whole friggen thing?”

“It used to cost $80,000 to train a guy, straight out of my pocket, across three years. Everyone would say, “why are you doing that, you don’t have to do that.” The companies, “you don’t have to do that.” At the end of 10 years they would say you got the best fallers, how do you have such a good falling crew?…The way I look at it the timber’s here. So I’m this rock. If we can’t train, the basic way I was taught to log. If you can’t obtain that, then why are you cutting it? We aren’t even doing the basic training. What are we moving ahead? We’re right back in the colonial system. Bring guys in, we can’t get local guys. Ahhh for fuck sakes, it’s all about training.”

Greg Morris

“In this forest industry the scale is large, it’s a big boys club. And that’s why Husby is so successful, they’ve got big pockets, they’ve been in it for a long time. They originally got a licence for a lifespan of 12 years, and I understand that Bob Brash…got Naden Harbour and Eden Lake, got set up, jumped to Husby, worked with them as they raped the hillside of every monumental. It’s huge wood, like ancient forest. And they just took everything they could. They are a transient migrant corporation that fills their suitcases and runs with the money.”

“I’m the asshole of the operation. Everything comes through me, I shit it into the water, if I’m not working they are not making money and that’s the bottom line. I speak my mind about Husby, I call them lying cheating thieves to their faces. I’ve worked for them for 7 years. I touch every log that goes to the water, so I’ve seen 80-90% cedar since I started at Collison Point. I’d go out and do de-activation, so I’d be put on these blocks and there’s all this white wood still piled up on the side and you have to make it disappear. You climb up onto the excavator and bust it up and pile it all up into a bee-hive. They’re only taking the better stuff out of the white wood and making the rest disappear. The target has always been red cedar. If the stumpage is going up you push it down with a bunch of crap wood and as soon as the stumpage goes down you go out and log all your gold. It’s a game of crooks, outsmarting the other guy. They’re always trying to outsmart the government, and the government is always trying to catch them.”

“The corporation uses all the tricks they have in their little trick box. They’ll build through monumentals [trees that are of cultural significance. Straight, large trunks which are necessary for totem pole and canoe making material]and flip stumps and put a road over it so you can’t even see the stump. They’ll build pits to build the road and they’ll take, again nice cedar, they’ll try to locate their pits where there is nice wood. Cause again that’s a take, that’s not even part of their license. That’s just in the name of road building right…The industry is constructed in such a manner that it favours the licensee, how they pick and choose how they make their money, how they lay out their land. You know they lay cut-blocks along the edges of ravines where they know there’s monumentals. A truck load of cedar is worth 100 trucks of white wood.”

“The forestry industry just wants to keep doing what they do, don’t give us any hassle. This is how it’s been done forever, it’s a family of mindset and culture, they live in denial and have a hard time accepting change.”

“[Alder] is something for future forestry, we should be seeding alder and putting in alder plantations because it’s a beautiful value added product. I just had my house refurbished, well built, and cabinets put in and it’s local alder that was installed. I think that it’s a money species, really quick rotation. So far as progressive forestry, you can grow it and turn it into that value added product in a 50 year rotation where you should be at least 100 years in conifers, you’re better off to be 200 years and then again, selective.”

“What we’ve been doing out there is just totally segmenting any of the mycelium mass and the connectivity of the land mass and its ability to communicate so that it can adjust to the realities, be it weather or pest. It’s all interconnected.”

“It’s just about at that place where they have to warrior up like they did at Lyell Island and make a stand.”

“It won’t change until it changes and I hope it changes with the Haida initiative. There’s not many places like [Collison Point]. High cedar content, easy logging. They’ve got endless cedar harvesting for their weaving and they can watch their monumentals grow. Right now we are hitting some of the nicest stands of cedar. They are young and vibrant so they would grow into beautiful monumentals over time.”

“I know for a fact that my first banderman who worked with me in 2011, 2012, and 2013. He used to walk the beach and pick agates and he found trade beads right down that creek that you were saying they logged really close to, it runs down right under the sort. He was finding beads in the gravel there. There’s an ancient story [at Collison Point] for sure.”

“The way the government is running forestry, it’s that the industry, the engineers can do the audits themselves. And then potentially CHN will come in a check 20% to make sure it’s aligned with what they report.”

“As far as the goings on at Collison the Haida knew, this is their land, they had a sense. They’ve been on the ground, just a few of them hunting. I took a chap out once, and there’s been a couple boatman out that are Haida and they’ve seen it. And they all talk because this is their land. They should have control over economic activity and how it benefits regional economies and especially the Haida, they are the landlords.”

“Ideally in the future I envision manufacturing on the island. To be taking the white wood and running it through and making prefab solid wood structures and if you wanted it to be a traditionally cedar type place, it wouldn’t have to be solid cedar but could be cedar faced. But solid wood so then it’s healthy to live in. There’s no black mold growing. It goes back to their ancient times of living in cedar homes and the utilization of a product that they leave at roadside. The hemlock, the pine.”

“Licensing. That’s what timber is . It’s licensing and it gives corporate entities the power and ability to take resources and leave very little economic benefit to the region. When you go back in history, in the beginning of licensing and giving of tenure by the government, it always required a manufacturing facility to be attached to the license to harvest timber within the area of where it was logged. There were mills built in conjunction with the tree farm license which created huge tax bases, which in turn created great infrastructure and rec. centres and swimming pools. And that’s what the Haida are saying, how come we didn’t get any benefit? And the Husby’s and the M and B’s just come in and take and take take take and ssssssswt, off they go.”

“Quite often the TSA(timber supply area) is just all the guts and feathers, what’s left. And that’s how Collison Point was viewed all the time, as the undesirable. Everyone was logging all around it and then all of the sudden it became the golden goose and everyone was jealous because all their logging is cedar out there and making gobs of money. Red cedar is a smoking hot market right now, and it’ll only sustain for a bit longer.”

Hl Giiyas Sean Brennan

“The sort of era we are in in Haida Gwaii as far as the context of forestry goes is pretty interesting. My role in it was, it started off a long time ago when I was a wee lad basically doing inventory for plants and monumental cedar and CMT’s (culturally modified trees). So I did that for a number of years and became crew leader when I was 21. About 2014 I started doing more office style work like GIS(Geographic Information System) and I was always doing that on the side but then getting into it so that by 2010 I started getting into more policy. January 2010 is when the land use plan came into effect. It was a new era in forestry, we had EMB which is Eco-based Forest Management and we thought it was going to be great after this because of all the restrictions. What the land use plan turned into was a series of loopholes that [the industry and government] could jump through so they could continue logging at the rate that they were. After the land use plan they found ways to start logging more cedar somehow. Saying, “oh anything under this size doesn’t count as a monumental.” People that were Haida were no longer the ones that were going out and checking what was going on out there, it was people that were working for the logging companies and the engineering companies that didn’t have an invested interest in the island.”

“The provincial government could not agree with the entire land use plan if only Haida people could go out and do cultural feature and identification. Meanwhile that’s our value, that’s our home, that’s our land. That’s what we’re here for to protect. Things like a monumental cedar which became standardized through these series of different things, was no longer looked at in the way of what it could be used for, it was looked at for what was wrong with it. What kind of defects it had. It wasn’t how do we protect this, it was how do we log it. It wasn’t in the spirit or the intent of anything that was supposed to be happening with this whole land use plan.”

“So with Husby (the logging company who logged Collison Point) there’s always been this, not Husby in particular but all logging companies on the island, there’s been a….you’re supposed to be logging to the profile of the forest. When you’re out there logging you should be logging each species equally as to what it’s supposed to be growing back as. Doing it proportionate to natures ability to produce, as a whole. The only company that was doing it was Taan and Taan is not any kind of hero, I’m a shareholder of Taan itself but I’ve never seen any benefits or anything that’s been positive that came back to Haida people through Taan besides a few jobs in Skidegate. Masset’s been completely ignored.”

“We noticed a lot of cedar happening in the south end. And we noticed most of the blocks that we were going and looking at had a huge proportion of cedar, we’re talking in the range of 60-65% cedar instead of 38% or 37.5%, whatever you want to say.”

“The point of this story is that there is too much cedar being logged on Haida Gwaii. I was the only person on the solutions table that was representing the Haida Nation so I was both the chair and the soul voice for the Haida Nation. I started to say if you have anything more than 38% cedar in your cut-blocks I’m just going to say no to you. And then they didn’t, so then they weren’t doing that at all. So then I just started to say, ok this company is no longer going to get any sort of consensus from the Haida Nation because they are refusing to respect us as the authority on Haida Gwaii, respect our traditional territory, and respect our values for having cedar culturally in the future outside of protected areas. So after 38 applications it started to wear on me mentally and physically and any way possible, I could no longer support the process. It went non-consensus which means the province agreed that they could continue to cut while the Haida Nation said no. The district manager for the Ministry of Forests, Leonard Munt continued to approve all these applications despite us completely saying no. After all that happened it continued to happen and we held forestry forums where we talked to the public and it was overwhelmingly obvious that everyone wanted them to stop logging cedar except when they came out with reports from these things like the ministry, everyone was fine with logging on the island. And I was like what the fuck? They didn’t even pay attention to what anyone was saying at all.”

“Why don’t we support our citizens who don’t want any of this shit going down, like why don’t we just listen to what’s going on because this is something they are obviously really passionate about. And we shouldn’t just be heading towards this obvious decline in cedar that’s going to happen in the next 10 years. I don’t see whey people don’t see the writing on the wall where old growth is actually a finite number and it’s not something we can continue for the rest of our lives. I’m surprised it’s even going on still right now. With all the old growth that’s happening the more they are seeing rare animals like the goshawks and that sort of thing. The more and more they are just trying to weasel in-between really sensitive areas with culturally modified trees and archeology and different bear habitat, fish habitat and that sort of thing. All the things we value quite a bit so everything that’s happening right now is looking for loopholes on how they can manage to log through sensitive areas and still get that old growth which is the only things that has any type of profit going on.”

“CFI’s are mandatory in every single cut-block, which are cultural feature identification surveys which look for plants, monumentals[large straight growing cedars used for the making of totem-poles and canoes], CMT’s(culturally modified trees), bear dens, etc. All these things are in the cultural objectives of the land use plan…it’s up to the company to hire who they want to do the cultural identification and it has to be someone certified by the CHN (Council of the Haida Nation) as a cultural feature identifier. CFI certified they call it. And what they do is they send them through a series of courses to identify monumental cedars and CMT’s..that’s a one week course. It could be their own engineer but they have to get certified, at that point, once they do the actual course then they can make whatever calls they want because they are certified. And that’s where I sort of have an issue with the whole process because I don’t think it should be the company that does it. It should be a third party that does the CFI, that’s neither working with the CHN or the company.”

“When you look at a picture of a [historic] CMT area what you see is a complete living forest. What you don’t see in the area is all these stumps of places where they’ve actually harvested from. So what it looks like is standing old growth but but then there’s stumps mixed in-between where they’ve actually gotten monumentals out for canoes or long-house poles. They wouldn’t just do that in one spot either, it was spread throughout a whole watershed. They weren’t cutting things and leaving them to die when they didn’t need to use them. That’s what the test hole was all about, it was to see if it was suitable for their project and if it wasn’t the would just leave it with a hole in it but the tree would survive. Either that or they take a strip of bark off of it and if you take too much then the trees not going to live either so there was definitely basic sacred Haida laws about how much you could take from one area, or one spot, or one tree depending on what you were using it for. These laws weren’t written and they weren’t anything more that just knowing that you had to respect everything that you used or else it would never come back. Living on an island there was always knowledge of a finite resource happening everywhere. So it wasn’t going out and getting as much as you can before your neighbour did, it was everyone working together and respecting everything so that we could continue to live here for eternity basically.”

“Forestry is dead on Haida Gwaii. I don’t see why they can continue logging and actually, if anything it should slow down and let everything grow back for 60 years or more. What they are taking is the guts and feathers of the prime meat that happened back in the 80’s. Nothing that’s left now is like, we would never even look at this when I first started doing forestry when I was 18 or so around 2002. They were too small, they called it non-productive…The volume alone, you wouldn’t go in anywhere that had anything less than 600 cubic metres per hectare. Now what they are looking at is close to 300 or 250 in all these different areas.”

“When you are looking at a cedar tree, what you’re looking for is something that has slow growing rings. The density of the rings has to do with how much quality is has. When the cedar tree is first growing in the forest what happens is that it’s suppressed under the tree canopy for quite a while. It could be up to 50 to 100 years where it’s just a smaller tree. Until another tree, it could be another tree, a really nice old tree- it could be a cedar or a spruce, it falls over naturally, or maybe we logged some tree there to make a canoe but then it creates an opening and that opening is still dense and all the rings are there but it shoots up and so when it does that, it’s not growing a whole bunch of branches, just basically the trunk is growing up and that’s what makes that clear monumental cedar. So you’re not going to get that in a second growth setting, you know what I mean? Everything just basically competing for light and nutrients all at the same time, at the same rate.”

“I remember driving down a lot of these logging roads and seeing trees that were beautiful like every kilometre or so. Now it’s all gone, honestly. And I don’t know what I can even do or say or how I feel about that personally, it’s just a shit show of logging that’s going on now.”

Ralph Stocker

“The provincial government took the land use plan and moulded it and found loopholes, without creating a dialogue while everything was happening. So you take a land use plan. Who made that? People who are Haida and are connected to the land and understand those things, and then the government comes and they just don’t understand those values.”

“We have to decipher the greed on this island level. Because what happens as soon as you go against logging they say, well you’re stopping toilet paper production and we’re trying to build homes. And I tell them, we don’t make toilet paper out of our wood, this is extremely valuable wood. This is the best wood on the Planet Earth. We don’t build our houses out of it either because it’s all going out on the barges. People don’t know, let’s look at the land use plan again and bring it back to the table. That’s what needs to be brought back to all the people that were involved in that. If they could be reconnected again and say, hey, what happened to the land use plan? All your good plans you spoke of?”

“We haven’t even tapped into our own greed yet. The thing is, the greed that we are living on. Where I live here in this Haida village of Old Masset, all I see is poor people here. There’s no work at all, there’s no industry. The only thing we have is razor clam digging, that’s it. We ended up being the richest native village in Canada, the 30’s until the 50’s. Everyone came together. Boom boom boom boom. The fastest they could build a seine boat was 10 days. Fishing boats. We built up the largest seine fishing boat on the west coast of North America. Until we got all our boats ripped off and taken away [by the government]. After the 60’s the boats were taken away and then they came in and just offered welfare to everybody. And that’s what’s happening with forestry. They systematically destroyed Old Masset and laughed. And watched us drop through hey. They tried to wipe us out, they did it deliberately.”

“The solution is the keep our timber in tack right here right now, utilize what we can and rebuild villages, because eco-tourism is going to pay for it.”

“The people have to recognize that they do have a time and place here. Cause what’s happening is everyone is in suspended animation, and we always allow our supposed heavenly fathers from the CHN (Council of the Haida Nation) decipher and do everything for us and everybody’s been told it’s all good, it’s all good. Everything’s good you know. But everything’s not good. The barges are still going out of there every day.”

“The people of the north are trying to stay grounded in their roots and are probably a little more weary of letting a government system come in.”

“People were very well adapted to this beautiful whole entire system, so when you look at it, and I keep telling people over and over again, that the only reason you have seen that picture of every native person being a warrior killer is because that’s what the British wanted you to see. I don’t have a picture of that but I have a picture of living on the land and it being a lot of work. People lived well. There were healthy and strong, you didn’t over do it. You didn’t hurt yourself and your bodies weren’t broken trying to make a living. These were the healthiest people on the Planet.”

Jeff Mosher

“What happened at Collison in some ways I think is, was overdue because there was a lot of cedar being harvested without rationale. They [Husby] had the opportunity to go somewhere else. And as a professional forester [working for Taan, Haida owned and operated forestry company] I communicated with their planning forester at the time and informed them that they need to look at going somewhere else but it was their prerogative to carry on with logging they way that they were doing it and so something was bound to happen for sure…[CHN mentioned] that it’s the last available old growth ancient cedar on the island.”

“Taan ownership wants to see, they want to get away from open cuts, they want to see stands retained for a longer period of time.”

“We’re looking at a 3 entry system. So the first time we go in say [the forest stand] is at age 60, and that’s just to take out a few stems to let the other trees keep growing. We’re then going to go in again 10 years later, so when the stand is 70, maybe 75 years of age. And we’re going to take more stems out. This time we want to take enough out, so again it will be another 10-15%, so now we’re looking at a total of 30% of the stand removed. This is going to cost more than what the value of the timber is going to be. But we want to give it a try. But on a much larger scale it would work. At some point we want to do it across all the tenure, but it’s going to be a transition point. Because we have to look at different stands, the different types of soils, the different terrain. It can’t just be one system that works for every stand.”

“By doing these types of systems [selective or commercial thinning] on these young stands, we’re not getting the volumes that we would if we just went down and cut them all out. So that means that we have to put more pressure on the old growth. We should just be able to recycle the second growth stands, third growth, forth growth stands. But because of the way Haida Gwaii was initially harvested, the whole things was basically, the centre of it was taken out all at one time, relatively speaking, within 20 years. We are waiting for the initial second growth stands to come up. Some stands are good now. We have some stands out there that are 70-80 years old and those ones are meeting market conditions but we have to go and take those right now otherwise we have to start moving up the hill taking more old growth.”

“There’s no plans to stop [logging old growth]. There’s a tre…a lot, I would say a tremendous amount, but there is a lot that gets reserved in every cut block when we do our planning. And that goes for second growth as well.”

“A mill on Haida Gwaii with 30 or 40 people will not work. If you look at the big mills in Houston and Vancouver, I mean these are big processing machines. They take timber, they take millions of cubic metres a year and run those through there. We are dealing with a very small volume on Haida Gwaii relative to what mills can take. So if you have a productive competitive mill it has to be very fast output in just making two by twos, two by fours, two by sixes, as fast as you can. So right now what we’re trying to do is have one mill that would run probably 6 guys. The whole mill proposal has been in place now for over a year, it just has to be signed off.”

“[The challenges we are coming across] is finding the fibre to meet our own objectives. It has to meet market. It has to be economically viable to get to. It has to be a certain diameter, certain sizes and it has to fall within the land use restrictions too, so that’s the biggest challenge.”

“The challenge is that’s nobody knows what [amount of land] the goshawk needs for foraging, we don’t know what the goshawk needs, or what it is that is going to maintain its ability to survive around here…we have a few CFI surveyors and they do look for goshawk, they are trained for goshawk as well and they look for potential nest sites, if they see a hawk they try to get a picture so it so we can try to get it identified.” So the trust, the onus if put on the company? “That’s right yeah. It’s tough, it’s really tough to find those nests. Because they are not on the top, they’re hidden about a third of the ways down. And it is the guys on the ground, there is a lot of onus on them. It’s really really tough right now. I mean we used to put $10,000 plus dollars and we still do when we have it, to go towards goshawk monitoring research. We have two folks running around, Haida Gwaii is big, to find these goshawks is so tough and so if anyone sights one we gotta know about it…there’s only two people. There needs to be a much larger program, if CHN really wants to protect this bird and make sure of its survival, there’s going to have to be a lot more monitoring put out for it.”

“It’s demand from society, is where it all stems from. And so people are demanding cedar and so prices go up and so corporations say, okay well we’re going to have to move into these types of stands or these younger stands, so long as society is demanding it.”

“One of the biggest challenges we have is having people come to work. I just put out two advertisements and I got nobody reply to it. We physically put a job posting is everybody’s mailboxes in Old Masset and Skidegate and I’ve got, my last job posting I had no one apply.”

Danny Robertson

“My name is Danny Robertson. I’m one of the owners of North Pacific Timber Corporation. This company was formed in 2015. So we had initially started the company to do salvage, and savage is essentially taking naturally downed timber either by wind storm or by slide action. Trees that are lying on the ground that essentially just going to rot, we can salvage those and put those into the annual allowable cut…by doing so we’re participating in the economy of the islands forests but we’re not taking standing trees. Right at the same time and part of the reason we got into the logging industry here locally was because Taan forest was formed. Now Taan forest as you know is the logging entity of the Haida Nation, Haiko. Haiko is an umbrella corporation that is owned by the CHN, Council of the Haida Nation.”

“Taan works very hard to maintain that standard of honouring the land use order, they are very good at that. But it’s a slow curve and it can sometimes take a bit of time for the industry to come around to some changes as it always has over the years, over the decades. So when Taan forest took over the tenure and followed the land use order they were still, where they were allowed to log, they were still logging like they always have. And I realized there’s a lot of reasons for that but what I found that in working with them we were being, we were being steered towards production harvesting, essentially clear-cutting.”

“One of our partners, Kris May, he’s a cornerstone of the business in that it’s his vision that brought us all together to head into this logging industry doing salvage and select harvest. This is something else he felt very strongly about. The selective harvest. Select harvest, Kris is a faller, by trade. But he’s worked in the logging industry. Part of Kris’s vision is that we need to participate in selective harvest as a means of which to log because our current rate of logging is unsustainable, hands down, absolutely, and nobody can color it any differently, it is unsustainable. But the reality is the current cut rate of cedar, there will be no cedar left within 20 years. On Taan tenures. Which is stunning. By that I mean old growth or large stands of cedar. The fact that it’s a dead end street that’s happening right now, and we see it coming. We need to stop what we’re doing and reevaluate and change. So with that, selective harvest is a way in which trees can still be harvested but a standing forest, or a largely standing forest that is healthy and has an ecosystem and all that kind of thing, stays intact”

"The way that the forest industry is currently run is they go into areas to harvest and it’s more economical to just cut down everything. Put a road into the middle, put a road in, go from there, drop everything and take what you want and leave the rest. And in some cases the taking what you what amounts to maybe 70%, I mean it can be up to 30% of trees that are either not big enough or they’re not desirable as a species or what have you, they get left behind and ultimately pushed to the burn piles and just left. That amount of wastage is unacceptable in it’s own right but that’s how production harvesting is designed. It’s meant to go in and high ball you. The quicker you can move it to the road and get it to the water, the better…when you do anything fast, it’s really hard to do it with ethics or values. When you do it fast for money, the first thing that goes out the door usually is the care and the respect and the sustainability that should be in something like this industry. So we saw that. So going back to Taan now, so we started doing some work with them and we felt we were going into production blocks that they were doing, and we were yarding for them and I think we were expecting it to be different but we found it wasn’t.”

“We told Taan Forest that we would not do production harvesting for them anymore. So we elected to not do the standard harvesting and they agreed to entertain working with us on a select harvest and salvage. So they slowly opened up the salvage area to us which allowed us to survive [as a company] and work with them.”

“Select harvest was attempted in the past, there’s people that recognized that it may be a good strategy to leave standing forests and not do clear-cuts. Clear-cuts have been wildly unpopular since like the 80’s. A proper select harvest you take out a certain amount of each species so you leave the forest having the same ecological diversity, where as some of the companies were going in and they were taking out all the biggest trees. So essentially back in the early days when select harvest was tried it was abused…they weren’t doing select harvest, there were taking the best of everything, so that high grading gave it a bad name and it went off the map in the 90’s and didn’t regain and traction until now. And that is a direct result of the public pressure. People don’t want to drive and see a clear-cut. Nobody does, it doesn’t look good. It doesn’t matter, everyone will agree, even the foresters. That it’s heartbreaking. It’s ugly.”

“Taan Forest has put a request for bids for a select harvest in the Honna Watershed. We’re hoping we’re awarded that contract. This is what we want to do and we’ve been asking Taan for that opportunity for years. They have the right to log the Honna, not morally but legally. It’s already been harvested once, it’s second growth. So they are allowed to go in there and harvest again but kuddos to them for recognizing that there needs to be a new way of thinking about harvesting something like that. Public pressure is a huge one, public perception.”

“What happens when you start cutting down trees is even in select harvest you open up and expose trees to potential wind that they might have been protected from previously by the other trees that you removed around them. So they’re not quite necessarily as robust to stand up to prevailing winds. So that’s why in salvage if you go into cut-blocks there’s usually the edge where they clear-cut right up to an edge that they’re allowed to and then a big wind storm happens and all those trees blow over because they’re not used to being on the leading edge of the forest. They’re suddenly there and their roots aren’t ready for it and over they go. And that’s why we like salvage because for every tree that we take is one tree effectively that comes off of the annual allowable cut so salvage trees, for every tree we take a standing tree is left.”

"The logging industry as I said is very much a smash and grab mentality. And it was developed, the harvesting techniques that were brought here, that cut-block mentality came from Europe. Those same values came over here and were applied to our coastal rainforests. And it didn’t work but all the technology and all the techniques had already taken hold here so we ran into all sorts of problems that they didn’t really have as much of. Like we have mountainous terrain, coastal wet environments and the list goes on. We’d loose whole mountain sides to slides and things like that. So looking at that as a harvest technique and coming forward to where we are now there has to be, the way we look at the forest has to change. And it can’t just be seen as a commodity. The Haida have a deep sense of connection to the earth and the environment around them. And that is, they’ve been very close to the land forever. For hundreds of thousands of years. Since the supernatural. And so there was a lot of work done. Haida were the pioneers of select harvest. They would walk through the forest and look for the type of tree that they were looking for and they would take only that tree. Now a part of that is because the technologies of the time made taking a tree quite the ordeal so you had to be selective. But I think those same values need to be applied today. They have to be applied today, hands down. And the whole principles of the Haida people is ‘Yaguudung’ which is respect for all things. So respect for all living things and the environment and the air around you and everything and if you respect things around you and you treat them with respect then your place among them is also one of respect and there’s a harmony that comes from that. It’s an undeniable harmony. It’s a connection and it’s a beautiful thing.”

“[With the industrialization of forestry practices] we all became really disconnected from our forests and that’s our greatest, that’s one of the worst side effects of current logging practices and we know them now. Is that we’re not connected at all. And how could we be? Most loggers if they really were connected to it, they would shrivel up. And their hearts couldn’t take it.”

“The Haida values is the consideration of ‘Yaguudung’ which is respect for all things and that has to apply to everything we do. So it’s not just about when you go food gathering or when you go fishing or hunting. It’s not just about when you’re going to harvest a tree to carve a pole or make a canoe or if you take bark. That’s where people think that it applies but is applies to everything we do, everyday. Modern or ancient techniques, whatever they are. You need to respect everything around you and treat it with that respect.”

“What I call, every talks about value added, and I call, value added is a loaded term and everyone uses it and it’s kind of lost a bit of its meaning. Because it’s used frequently. But I get what it means and it’s very important and I refer to it now as economic retention because I want to retain the economy of those forests here on Haida Gwaii, and not just the economy of value added but the standing tree economy. The standing forest. So every aspect of the forest is an economy to us, whether it’s a food source or a tourism source or a fresh air source or a manufactured lumber source. Our forests are so integral to everything in our lives so that needs to be an economy that we recognize and we support and right now we kind of do it but it’s a shotgun approach. And it’s not working as we know. So I believe it can change, I don’t know if it’ll work but when somethings important enough to you, you go for it even if the odds aren’t in your favour. You have to try it. But I’m so committed to it, I just I think how could it not work.

“Everyone’s feeling like it’s time to change and it’s time for us to look at our forests differently.”

“So our products right now, if I took a slab of wood, if we took one downed tree and we quickly manufactured it and we cut it up into some beautiful planks, it’s worth something. And it’s worth something here but local sales are good, but there’s not a ton of demand so It’s not going to carry a whole forest economy. So we have to do export and by that I mean to the mainland, you know Vancouver. There’s customers everywhere that would love this piece of wood and highly value it for what it’s worth. But we are not in a market place right now that allows us direct access to those customers. So the transportation network is a real barrier. So there’s a lot of things, right now that the industry, even the forest practices and the laws around salvaging and everything are geared to the current economy as it sits. So it’s a big task, to change that whole economy and change the way we look at our forest and change the way we harvest them, it’s going to require changes on all levels. How we feel with our forest, how we exchange and interact with them, how we harvest them.”

“We are learning that the deforestation that is happening in the Amazon and our own BC and Haida Gwaii is now affecting all of us.”

“The logging industry should not feel ashamed about what they’re doing. And how do we get there? We have to stop what we’re doing as we know it now and move towards a place where when people walk into a forest that’s been harvested, they’re still going to see a standing forest. It’s undeniable we need wood products, it’s a renewable resource. And it’s one that if taken properly and harvested properly with Yaguudung and everything is used, no wastage of very little wastage. And the network has to be set up around that cause right now it’s just cheaper sometimes to burn in burn piles good wood then it is to get that wood to the market that it needs to be at and that’s wrong. And the only reason for that is, well there’s a lot of reasons that I won’t get into. But that can be changed. That is absolutely doable to change that, but it takes effort and it takes motivation and it takes someone to think that way and have that matter enough to them that they will put in the hard work to connect, to make a path for that. And then that wastage can be reduced. I see a future where people go to a harvested place recognizing that we need fibre for a lot of the things we do. I mean toilet paper, the table we’re sitting at, again it’s a renewable resource and when managed properly and respectfully then we can live with it in a balanced way. It can be a beautiful thing. And then loggers can become respected in a community of people that value the forest for the spiritual and educational opportunities. Loggers can be respected for the way that they respect the forest and bring us the products we need from the forest without wrecking it. And I see that is a direction we are going, we have to. Because I see a future where people aren’t chaining themselves to equipment to say you can’t do this.”

“If we are fortunate enough to get the Honna Block then we will do such a good job. We will be so careful about what we do and we will respect that forest and we will be proud to invite members of the public to come in after and see. And still walk through a standing forest. It will be changed, there’s no doubt about it, it will be changed but it will be intact, functional. They could still walk through it, they could still hear the birds singing and smell the smells. That’s the future.”

“Every time a log barge leaves our island and I watch it go past with all the round logs on it, it kills me because I see exactly what everyone else sees. And that is those are our trees and we all own it. When I say our trees I don’t just mean Haida Gwaii or Haida. I mean those are the trees that belong to all of us on the planet and we have a responsibility to those trees, and our trees here have a value that, we are failing to pay them the respect that they are due by shipping them off like that. So every time I see a log barge go by, that’s so wrong. It’s leaving us, we who are their caretakers ultimately, the ones that should be doing more with them and we’re sending them down to a big machine that has no heart and soul and people are just cutting it up and turning it and selling it to the highest bidder and so that Yaguudung is lost. Every time it goes by there’s a whole forest that’s leaving here that wasn’t given the respect it is due. Right now the economy for the way it is, it’s a big machine and it does a lot right now on our islands and to stop it whole, immediately. Although effective, would, I think we’re not ready to start just select harvesting. It has to happen slowly and it has to get foundation and be built with all the right steps, we should have started a long time ago but we’re starting now. So that’s what we’re doing and we can move towards making that our harvest model and once it becomes established and people start to change.”

”Change, in order for it to really take hold and be long lasting it needs to happen slowly and get established. And if we were to come to a full stop with logging as we know it, which I think is acceptable in some areas for sure, but some harvest blocks are going to have to continue to go the way they are just so we can keep the machine moving while we change that machine.”

“I don’t think we need to harvest [old growth] anymore. That should be select harvest only. Old growth forest is the first place we should be going to do select harvest. But there are vast areas of old growth forest we should simply not touch at all. And if a tree falls in there it’s not even salvaged. It stays there because it’s part of that cycle. We can harvest second growth forest in a different way than we would harvest old growth forest. Old growth forests have to be treated like the precious irreplaceable resource that they are. As opposed to a second growth forest which essentially is a renewed resource.”

“Charlie Cowpar is the Yoda of falling, he is the tree whisperer. He is much along the same thought path as all of us. The truth will rise. The truth not as we know it, but as what Mother Nature is, it will rise and it will come and we are moving there indisputably, irreversibly. Look at global climate change, everybody’s talking about this now.”

“Right now we have a small mill that is at our shop site. We have a proposal that we’re putting into Haiko and what we’re asking them to do is to finance a small mill, through Taan provide us with a minimum amount of volume of wood, a very small amount to be milled for Taan….What we are doing, we’re basically saying, Haiko finance us, Taan supply us with some wood and we will create industry here that is sustainable. Herb H. came here, he’s a forestry guy who’s well connected in the industry and he’s come up to Haida Gwaii, has property in Tlell and he was building a deck. He said, Danny, do you have uhh, this was before we had our mill, he’s like I need to get half a dozen 8 foot 2x4’s. Rough cut cedar. I’m like, you can’t. We live on Haida Gwaii and we can’t buy a stick of wood. Locally. It’s absurd. That’s just wrong. So what did he have to do, he had to go to the hardware store are buy wood that is shipped up from Vancouver. So the carbon footprint on that is filthy. Let alone that it’s not even local wood. It’s awful.”

“Companies like ours are saying we want to participate in this new economy and we want to be part of building it and hopefully it looks like we’ll be successful and hopefully we’ll do this and the result is we are creating a value added economic retention based industry here on Haida Gwaii. It’s [about] starting small and growing…we move forward and slowly. It will take over the industry and we will be providing the world with our wood products that are produced here, milled here, respected here, and cared for. And the Haida people will be the ones that take their wood to the world on their terms.”