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ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS on HAIDA GWAII by Michael Dean A

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ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS on HAIDA GWAII by Michael Dean A “WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO THE LAND, THEY ARE DOING TO US”: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS ON HAIDA GWAII by Michael Dean A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (VANCOUVER) October 2009 © Michael Dean ABSTRACT This paper discusses the development of Native environmental politics on Haida Gwaii, also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, since the late 1970’s. During that time, concerns among the Haida about the impacts of industrial logging on their culture led to the emergence of a sustained, innovative challenge to the existing regime of resource extraction on the islands as well as the larger colonial structures on which it was premised. As a result, environmental activism became a means for the Haida to pursue decolonization outside the official channels of the land claims process. In particular this paper focuses on the conflict surrounding logging in the area of South Moresby Island culminating in the creation of the Gwaii Haanas National Park, which was the first National Park to be co-managed by the Government of Canada and an indigenous nation. By tracing the development of environmental activism on Haida Gwaii it contributes to an understanding of the ways that recent Native environmental movements have formulated indigenous identity and drawn on cultural traditions as well as their experience of colonialism. It also contributes to debates surrounding co-management and TEK by showing how the development of Haida environmental management structures occurred in conjunction with the development of a Haida environmental politics without which it would not have been capable of delivering on its liberatory promise. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..ii Table of Contents...……………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...iv 1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 2 Environmentalism, Knowledge, and Politics: Scholarship and the Ecological Indian……………………………………………………………………………..5 3 Creating the Queen Charlotte Islands: From Time Immemorial to the Golden Age of Capitalism……………………………………………………...15 4 The Emergence of Native Environmental Activism on Haida Gwaii………21 5 Confrontation on Lyell Island…………………………………………………25 6 Public Consultation, Traditional Knowledge, and Resource Management..32 7 The Creation of Gwaii Haanas………………………………………………...41 8 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………44 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….48 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all of my colleges at the UBC, who were largely willing to put up with my tendency to launch into interminable debates only incidentally related to the practice of history. Special thanks to Coll Thrush who guided me through the process of producing this paper, for entertaining my fantastical notions of what it could be while helping me to develop realistic ideas of what it would be. Thanks to Eagle Glassheim for acting as the second reader for this paper, and to Michel Ducharme for helping me develop an understanding of what it means to be a historian. Finally, thanks to my parents for all of their help and for providing the intellectual environment that led me to where I am today. iv 1. INTRODUCTION In March of 2005, the people of Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), an archipelago comprised of over one hundred islands off the northwest coast of British Columbia, set up a series of roadblocks in what they called the ‘Islands Spirit Rising.’ Carrying the red and white flag of the Haida Nation and banners declaring that “Enough is Enough,” Haida and non-Haida residents of the islands sought to block logging operations by forestry giant Weyerhaeuser. This action was taken in response to what they felt were violations of a six point agreement the Council of the Haida Nation (CHN) had reached with Weyerhaeuser over logging practices in 2002, as well as the failure of the Government of British Columbia to fulfill its responsibility to consult with the Haida on forestry policy as it had been ordered to do by the supreme court of Canada in a recent ruling.1 According to the Haida, the BC Government had continued to allow logging in areas designated for protection in the Haida Land Use Vision (HLUV), despite participation in ‘Land Use Planning’ consultations with the CHN. The ‘Islands Spirit Rising’ was to serve as added incentive for the Government and Weyerhaeuser to deal fairly with the Haida in considering their interests. Between March and April, 2005, the Haida, with the support of local communities like Port Clemens and Sandspit, manned blockades at the Yakoun and Hona rivers, set up checkpoints to record the names of people traveling to protected areas, and seized logs on 1 Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests). 3 S.C.R. 511, 2004, SCC 73. 1 their way out of the designated zones.2 Feasts were held in various communities on the islands in support of the action and people gathered to show support for the Haida as far away as Toronto and New York. These blockades and demonstrations seemingly succeeded where court action could not, since after weeks of negotiation the CHN and the province reached an agreement to resume the land-use planning process and suspend further logging in the contested areas.3 As a result of this planning process, in December of 2007, Gujaaw, president of the CHN, and Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia, signed the Haida Gwaii Strategic Land Use Agreement, based on the concept of ‘Eco-system Based Management’ (EBM) which the agreement defines as “an adaptive, systematic approach to managing human activities, that seeks to ensure the co-existence of healthy, fully functioning ecosystems and human communities.” The agreement furthermore recognized a number of “Haida Natural, Cultural, and Spiritual Areas” which the Haida would maintain “in accordance with their laws, policies, customs, traditions and decision-making processes.”4 The events of the ‘Islands Spirit Uprising’ and the dual strategy of engaging in popular mobilization while pursuing official processes like court battles and inter- governmental negotiations should be familiar to anyone who has followed events on Haida Gwaii over the last forty years. In particular, it is reminiscent of the efforts throughout the 1980’s to have the area surrounding South Moresby Island in the southern end of the archipelago protected from logging, which culminated in the creation of the 2 For a complete account of these events see the Islands Spirit Rising website: http://www.haidanation.ca/islands/islands.html (accessed 08/04/09). 3 “Understanding Arising from April 22 2005 Discussions Between the Province and the Council of Haida Nation,” text available at http://www.haidanation.ca/islands/Agreement.html (accessed 08/04/09) 4 Haida Gwaii Strategic Land Use Agreement. September 13, 2007, http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/Programs/Land_Use_Planning/PDF/StrategicLandUseAgre/HGstrategicD ec_07.pdf (accessed 08/04/09). 2 Gwaii Haanas National Park in 1993. From at least the mid-1970’s, an increasingly assertive Haida environmental politics has emerged on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Since this time, the Haida have pursued a number of strategies, from participation in cooperative management processes to illegal roadblocks, in order to reclaim control over the forests and waters of Haida Gwaii. Throughout this period the Haida continued to draw links between their opposition to the environmental damage wrought by resource extraction industries and the nature of colonialism in BC. In the last decade or so, scholars have been increasingly interested in the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmentalism. A number of historians and anthropologists have sought to problematize stereotypical notions of the ecological Indian, even while other scholarship, and a growing body of government policy, has been premised on the notion that indigenous peoples do indeed have some sort of special relationship with nature in the form of their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Furthermore, indigenous people from the Canadian north to Oceania have, more and more frequently, positioned themselves as better stewards of nature and have allied themselves, although sometimes uneasily, with a variety of environmentalist movements. Among scholars of indigenous North America, the question of how to understand indigenous environmental politics and the growing currency of notions like TEK has, therefore, been a contentious one, not least because how we understand these questions has serious political implications for indigenous people in the real world. While most writers on the subject have positioned their arguments as supporting anti-colonial struggles, it is not uncommon for particular positions to be accused of giving succour to the very structures they purport to oppose. The reception Shepard Krech’s The Ecological 3 Indian: Myth and History (1999), which I discuss in greater detail below, has become something of a cautionary tale in this regard. In a 2007 essay on the critical reception of Ecological Indian, Krech quotes one critic as describing his book as “the worst among many egregious examples of the American professoriate serving the systems that are so effectively destroying the earth,” another raised the possibility that his analysis was driven by “a political doctrine of the imperial kind.”5 These questions, then, are not merely ‘academic’ but are often central to the ongoing
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