Side by Side for Mother Earth
TO SAY THAT INDIGENOUS PEOPLES are environmentalists is a redundancy. We are, after all, the children and the defenders of the land. Our Indigenous economies have been based on cultivation, herding, hunting, gathering, fishing—and their related technologies—all integrated into the natural cycles of the earth. For Indigenous peoples, the air and water, the forests and animals are eternal values, the things that sustain life itself. If you damage any one of these to satisfy your immediate needs, you are literally harming yourself. Watching today’s rapacious industrial development of the land by the Western world is like watching a person with a serious mental illness causing self-harm. But our people, because we are so deeply connected to the land, are generally the first to feel the pain.
Our duty to protect our lands is primordial, and the assault on our lands and resources today is unprecedented. In places like the Alberta tar sands, the scarring can be seen from outer space and the pace of development is accelerating. According to Canadian government estimates, more than $650 billion (yes, billion) in resource extraction investment is expected to pour into Canada over the next twenty years. The great majority of that investment will be targeted on our lands.
Extractive industries seem to view our land as if it was a vast Walmart where they can endlessly go up and down the aisles picking things up—or digging them up—and taking them home. The economic system today looks at Mother Earth and sees only profits; the rest it sees as simply garbage. As if the land had no value of its own and no limits on what it can give. But at the same time, an increasing number of people around the world, including many of our Canadian friends and allies, are coming to understand that this understanding is false. If the old industrial model of viewing the land simply as a resource base for production leading to profit persists, the damage will soon be beyond repair. The planet cannot sustain the damage we are inflicting on it. In some respects—like global warming—we have already passed the eleventh hour.
In the struggle to protect the land, Indigenous peoples are the first and last line of defence. But fortunately, we are not fighting these battles alone. Over the last two decades, Indigenous peoples have been increasingly working in partnership with non-Indigenous environmentalist individuals and organizations. In many ways, this is one of the most hopeful Indigenous/non-Indigenous alliances we have had in any sphere, and it is crucial if we hope to spare the earth from irreparable destruction.
To understand the historic importance of this relatively new alliance, we have to realize that it was not at first a natural one. For more than a century, the environmentalists, previously known as conservationists, with whom we came into contact did not seem to share our fundamental values. Just like the state authorities did, these colonial-minded conservationists often ignored, dismissed, and in extreme cases even attacked our people.
One reason was that the conservationists were not motivated by any profound attachment to the land. They seemed more motivated by aesthetics than by genuine concern for the health of the planet. In a way, early environmentalism was simply an adjunct to the system of production, with an interest in cleaning up or hiding the mess.
Conservationists ensured that toxic materials were buried out of sight. Old growth forests—incredibly complex and diverse habitats—were clear-cut and replaced with acres of monoculture seedlings, ignoring the real, permanent damage to the ecosystem. Production moved on and the damage to the earth continued unabated, with the conservationists plodding along behind, performing a kind of janitorial service for the resource extractors.
This type of conservationism is still evident in most of the world’s carbon-trading schemes. For example, the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD) program, administered by the World Bank, allows polluters in the developed world to continue spewing carbon into an already overheated atmosphere as long as they pay a few cents to save a tree in the Amazon. These carbon-trading schemes are like trying to play three-card monte with the Creator, but ultimately, it is impossible to trick the Creator. This type of environmentalism is built on expediency, a way to try to extend the life of rampant consumerism when the earth is demanding a rest. The self-injury continues.
If you go back far enough, you will even find times when the forerunners of environmentalists and Indigenous peoples were in open conflict. The hostility was most pointed in the late nineteenth century during the creation of national parks, where the settler environmentalist “cleanup” included removing Indigenous peoples from their homelands. The most infamous and violent example came in the early 1870s, when the U.S. government answered the call of environmentalists by making Yellowstone a national park. The problem was that it was the territory of the Shoshone-Bannock people. So the government simply ordered their removal. No thought was given to the fact that these lands belonged to the Indigenous peoples, and there was no reflection that the “pristine wilderness” was in such a state because the Shoshone-Bannock had been taking care of it for thousands of years. The attempt to remove the people sparked a guerrilla war that resulted in more than three hundred deaths, all in the name of “conservation.”
We have also seen numerous examples in Canada where misguided—in fact, perverse—attempts at securing “protected” lands have resulted in tragedy for our people. The most recent deadly example was the 1995 killing of Dudley George, an unarmed Anishinabe youth in Ipperwash Provincial Park, during a protest aimed at returning the land, which had been gradually confiscated from the 1920s to 1940s, to the Stony Point First Nation. Since then, the World Parks Congress has recognized “the rights of Indigenous Peoples with regard to their lands or territories and resources that fall within protected areas,” but governments have almost universally refused to return these confiscated lands to our people.
It is not surprising, then, that Indigenous peoples were isolated from this type of settler environmental movement. But that does not mean we were inactive. We have fought to protect our lands in Canada from the very beginning, and on the international scene, we were present during the first international conference on addressing the world’s fragile ecosystems.
That meeting came in 1972 when the United Nations sponsored the landmark Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm. My father, George Manuel, attended as the head of the National Indian Brotherhood, not as part of the official Canadian delegation or by invitation of Canadian environmentalists, but representing an NGO under the aegis of the Canadian Labour Congress.
The NIB had put together an Indigenous environmental position paper that my father intended to deliver to the conference in Stockholm. But he found himself completely ignored by the official Canadian delegation, including by the Canadian environmentalists, and was given no place in the agenda to address the conference. What saved the trip for him was the fact that the Europeans were intrigued by the presence of a Canadian Indian, and one of the Swedish newspapers offered to fly him up to Samiland to meet with the Sami people in a staged meeting of worlds. While in Samiland my father was able to win support for the idea of a World Council of Indigenous Peoples, and the contacts he made in Sweden led to future funding support for the organization.
The final report of the Stockholm Conference put forward 26 principles and 109 recommendations that largely reflected the production model of the environment, stating things like “Natural resources must be safeguarded” and “The Earth’s capacity to produce renewable resources must be maintained.” In environmental principles for protecting Mother Earth, Indigenous peoples were miles ahead.
For the rest of the world, the realization of the extent of the damage being done to the earth’s ecosystems came gradually. But by 1987, when the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland produced her UN report on the world environment entitled Our Common Future, there was a new urgency in the tone and content of the environmental plan. It also, for the first time, recognized an important role for Indigenous peoples in protecting the earth’s environment. The Brundtland Report observed:
Tribal and indigenous peoples will need special attention as the forces of economic development disrupt their traditional life-styles—lifestyles that can offer modern societies many lessons in the management of resources in complex forest, mountain and dry land ecosystems…. Their traditional rights should be recognized and they should be given a decisive voice in formulating resource development in their areas.46
The last sentence signalled the beginning of international environmentalists’ awareness that Indigenous peoples were not only potential partners in environmental protection, but must also be the decision makers in protecting their lands.
By the time of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Indigenous representatives from around the world were present in large numbers to sound the alarm to the international community. The Rio Summit also turned out to be an important landmark for the world when the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which led to the Kyoto Protocol, were first agreed to. The Summit also gave important recognition to Indigenous peoples. A whole chapter of its political action plan was devoted to “Recognizing and strengthening the role of indigenous people and their communities.” And the Summit significantly expanded the Brundtland Report’s position on the Indigenous role in environmental protection:
[Indigenous peoples] are repositories of much of the traditional knowledge and wisdom from which modernization has separated most of us. They are custodians, too, of some of the world’s most important and vulnerable ecosystems—tropical forests, deserts and arctic regions. We must hear and heed their voices, learn from their experience and respect their right to live in their own lands in accordance with their traditions, values and cultures.
Full and informed participation of people through democratic processes at every level, accompanied by openness and transparency, are essential to the achievement of the objectives of this Conference.47
From the Rio Summit onward, Indigenous peoples have remained central in the international struggle for sustainable development. We have seen this not only in the Amazon forests of Brazil and the tundra of Samiland, but also here in Canada in the boreal forests of the east and the rainforests of the west. It has reached the point today that when governments and multinationals see Indians and non-Indigenous environmentalists getting together on an issue, they become very worried.
At the same time as environmentalists were recognizing the essential role of Indigenous peoples at the international level, environmentalists and Indigenous peoples in Canada were taking the first steps toward working together on the ground. We saw this in a series of battles, starting with the 1984 Nuu-chah-nulth Meares Island logging road blockade and in court challenges to the massive Clayoquot Sound logging protests in the early 1990s. Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, including my friends Steve and Sue Lawson, stood side by side to protect the old growth forests in a battle that took on international dimensions.
My experience in working with non-Indigenous environmentalists began when I worked with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council on the logging issue. Then, in 2001, I was invited by Maude Barlow to a historic international conference on water protection that the Council of Canadians was organizing in Vancouver. At the time, we were fighting to protect Skwelkwek’welt from Sun Peaks overdevelopment, and it seemed like a good way to promote our cause to the world.
The conference was called Water for People and Nature: A Forum on Conservation and Human Rights. When we first discussed my participation in the conference, Maude was very open to the idea of having an Indigenous component. What impressed me about her was that she understood that water is not only the property of humanity, it belongs to all living things—to all of the flora and fauna of the world. She agreed that Indigenous peoples should not be compartmentalized, but should be an important part of the conference mainstream.
We were given the means to invite dozens of Indigenous peoples’ representatives from around the world, and Indigenous delegates met together on the day before the conference began. I was asked to chair the meeting, and we set the goal of drafting an Indigenous position on water rights.
Our declaration listed the attacks on water from chemicals, pesticides, untreated sewage, and nuclear waste as well as the diversion of water for unsustainable resource and recreational developments, and condemned any and all treatments of water like a commodity that can be bought, sold, and traded in global and domestic economies. Water for our peoples is profoundly sacred, and in our declaration we supported the fight of Indigenous peoples and grassroots peoples around the world to protect this special gift from the Creator.
I have remained active in the cause of protecting our water since then. Along with alliances with non-Indigenous environmentalists, I have developed true friendships and have profited greatly from allies’ knowledge and solidarity. This spirit has generally marked the movement that has emerged over the past decades. We have learned a great deal from each other.
Our effectiveness in the environmental battle has been increased as courts have recognized our legal status on our Aboriginal title lands. The recognition of our Aboriginal title in Delgamuukw allows us to challenge the most irresponsible types of development in court. In fact, Delgamuukw gives us a legal duty to protect the land since, according to the Supreme Court, the only way we can lose our Aboriginal title is if we engage in activity on the land that destroys our ecosystem economy for future generations.
Another important breakthrough was the Haida decision in 2004. That case involved a series of transfers of timber licences by the province to forestry multinationals, including one to the logging giant Weyerhaeuser in 1999. Since the land was in Haida territory, the Haida went to court to claim that the province had no right to give out the licences without first consulting with them. The challenged the governments’ business-as-usual approach following Delgamuukw. The Supreme Court agreed. Chief Justice McLachlin wrote the unanimous decision that found that even though the timber licences were merely being transferred from one multinational to another, the province still had a duty to consult with Indigenous peoples and that that consultation had to be meaningful, which might—depending on the strength of the Aboriginal title and rights claim—include consent.
I was at the Supreme Court for the hearing, and I was interested to see that several of the non-Indigenous municipalities on Haida territory intervened on the side of the Haida, seeing in the Haida a kind of protector of the region from the out-of-control industrial development of the multinationals. At the time, I was working with one of the most important Haida leaders in the battles in the forest, Guujaaw, who was for many years president of the Council of the Haida Nation. Guujaaw, along with Naomi Klein, accompanied me on a second visit to Standard & Poor’s. Naomi wrote about this encounter in her recent book This Changes Everything, remarking that S&P understood that we had never surrendered our title but their attitude was, “We know you never sold your land. But how are you going to make the Canadian government keep its word. You and what army?”
At the meeting, Guujaaw, who always understood the importance of pushing our agenda in the international sphere, presented S&P with the Haida Nation’s statement of claim that he had filed before the Supreme Court of British Columbia. We took a common position on many of the important issues facing our peoples, and I was honoured to be invited on several occasions to address the Haida people at their meetings.
In recognizing that even before Aboriginal title was proven in court, consultation with the Indigenous peoples was required, the Haida decision was a direct challenge to the government’s business-as-usual approach. It also put Aboriginal title and rights in a new light for non-Indigenous environmentalists. As Jessica Clogg of the West Coast Environmental Law centre sees it, Indigenous peoples and their rights—once ignored and at times even dismissed by environmentalists—must now be at the forefront of the environmental movement.
The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that there is an obligation to engage honourably with First Nations peoples when decisions are made about land and resources…. But beyond this, First Nations own legal traditions place responsibilities and obligations on them to safeguard the well-being of land and water in order to sustain their cultures, laws and governance systems. These laws and responsibilities are both a source of, and an interconnected part of the First Nations inherent title. In my opinion, the duty on the Crown to accommodate the Aboriginal Title includes an obligation to accommodate these legal traditions in decision-making about the land and water.
Finally, justice and equitable distribution of benefits and resources is a fundamental element of sustainability. There can be no sustainability that is based on the injustice and denial of Aboriginal Peoples.48
Clogg touches on the core of this new alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmentalists. As we have seen, the non-Indigenous activists have considerable financial and international organizational support, and Indigenous peoples have the legal rights on the ground that allow us, in many cases, to actually stop unsustainable rampaging development. This new alliance of Indigenous and grassroots environmentalism has had a number of important victories. We continue to work together on initiatives like opposing the pipeline and tanker export of Alberta tar sands oil through our territories and waterways on the west coast. But at the same time, we still find ourselves on divergent paths with those environmentalists who do not understand the central importance of respecting our Aboriginal title in the long-term protection of the land.
This was illustrated in the battle to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact coastal rainforest in North America. In 1994, the Nuxalk Nation, led by the great hereditary Chief Qwatsinas, invited non-Indigenous environmentalists to their territory to oppose large-scale clear-cut logging.
Qwatsinas was a dear friend of mine—in a friendship that, in a sense, extended back a generation. My father had been very close to the Nuxalk people, and they had presented him with a button blanket that he had cherished. After he passed away, I brought that blanket back to them, since I knew that I did not have the right to possess it. But I was greeted with great emotion, and I sensed the affection they felt for my father. The people put the blanket on me in a potlatch as I continued my father’s work and they always invite me to sit with the hereditary chiefs.
From there, our friendship grew and as I learned from him, I developed great esteem for Chief Qwatsinas. I watched as he worked with the outside environmentalists to build a campaign to save the forest with road blockades and a boycott of Great Bear Rainforest timber. Chief Qwatsinas was one of the first arrested, and he spoke for himself in front of the judge. “I am charged with contempt of court,” he told the judge, “yet there is continuous contempt of our culture, our heritage, our lands, and our rights. Logging companies coming to our land without our consent show contempt of our laws, our land, our people.”
Qwatsinas would be arrested three times, and in jail he would declare himself a political prisoner. But his campaign was working. The loggers were shut out of the forest until February 2006, when Greenpeace and Sierra Club announced they had made a “historic agreement” with government and industry to bring an end to the “war in the woods” in the Great Bear Rainforest. Without consulting the Nuxalk people, they agreed to protection of one-third of the rainforest and to allow logging on the rest of the thousand-year old ancient forest. The sense of betrayal felt by Qwatsinas and the Nuxalk people was profound, and it served as a reminder that in some sectors of the environmental movement, the old “conservationist” attitude remains. Qwatsinas described the deal as a process that allowed the companies to “talk and log.” Nothing changed.
Tragically, Chief Qwatsinas passed away after a brief illness in 2010. It was a great loss not only to the Nuxalk but to all of the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia.
Throughout this period the real enemy, however, was a familiar one, both at home and abroad. The battle hinged on the principle that Indigenous peoples would have to give their prior informed consent before any development could take place on their lands. And the state that stood most fiercely against this recognition was, of course, Canada. This battle was fought most directly at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference in The Hague in 2002.
The issue of requiring prior informed consent of Indigenous peoples had been opposed by Canada even before The Hague meeting. At a preparatory meeting in Montreal in February 2002 that I attended with Elder Irene Billy, Canada was already trying to undermine the “prior informed consent” clause that was supported by the European Union and countries in Latin America, Africa, and much of the rest of the world.
I remember that meeting well because we were up in the theatre seating while the bureaucratic jargon flew back and forth across the stage, and I thought that Irene was probably not understanding much. But she sat quietly listening during a five-day meeting, as the Canadians tried to dramatically weaken our protection by substituting consultation for consent. As soon as the meeting closed, she leapt out of her chair and down to the exit where she could head off the departing Canadian delegation. I watched with delight as Irene—this small, dynamic Indigenous woman—ripped into them, bringing up their repression in Sun Peaks with the arrest of the youth and Elders there who were only trying to protect our forests and mountains. She told them that she had listened to the debate and that prior informed consent meant that “we have to say yes to a development and we never agreed to the expansion of Sun Peaks.” Other delegations stopped to listen at this unprecedented scolding of the Canadians, who tried to escape by handing her their business cards and telling her to contact them after the meeting.
Later, I was with Irene in the lobby where all of the delegates were milling around. We were standing not far from the escalators that led down to the street, and I watched with great amusement as the Canadian delegates practically tiptoed around us to get to the escalators without Irene seeing them. Less amusing was the fact that before fleeing the wrath of Irene, the Canadians at that meeting managed to have brackets inserted around the “prior informed consent” clause to have it reviewed at The Hague meeting in April.
The Hague conference started out well, with the majority appearing to hold fast to the principle of prior informed consent of Indigenous peoples. This stance was not purely altruistic. The world had taken note that while Indigenous territories make up one-third of the earth’s surface, they contain over two-thirds of the planet’s biodiversity. Removing Indigenous consent would open the door to wild-west industrial development on the most precious lands remaining on the planet.
But then Canada went to work. On Monday, April 15, 2002, Canada, Australia, and Malaysia officially opposed reference to “prior informed consent,” supporting consultation in place of consent. That Thursday, the day before the conference closed, the text submitted to the working group by a group of Friends of the Chair, which included Canada but excluded Indigenous peoples, had changed “prior informed consent” to “prior informed consultation.” This change had come about after an intense all-night session, where Canada had threatened to oppose all other decisions of the conference if the wording change was not made.
This was a stunning setback for our cause. The official Canadian delegation was made up of government officials and hand-picked Indigenous representatives from national organizations. My travel costs were being paid for by Canada but my status was as a member of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), not a member of the official delegation. When I arrived at the meeting, I asked fellow Secwepemc Fred Fortier, who co-chaired the IIFB, what could be done about the altered text. He explained that changing text from the Friends of the Chair was pretty hard, if not impossible, because we are not a nation-state and the conference now seemed to be locked in to the position.
I could not accept this.
I went to talk to John Herity, director of the Biological Convention Office at Environment Canada and chair of the Canadian delegation. Herity told me that he required the change to consultation because of the need to protect the power of the federal government to expropriate lands. He also said that he had the support of the Canadian Indigenous representatives.
This is where I, and the other delegates at the conference, learned of Canada’s deviousness and dishonesty in claiming that “Canadian Indigenous representatives” supported his position. I told Herity that I, for one, did not support the Canada position.
“Well, you are just one chief,” he said.
Spotting Peigi Wilson, the AFN representative, high up in the gallery, I pushed my way up through the narrow aisles to speak to her. I asked Peigi if she supported the Canadian “consultation” position. She said that she was aware of the change and she had not supported it, but she had not really opposed it either. I told her that Herity was telling everyone that Indigenous peoples from Canada supported Canada’s position and suggested she go down to tell him that this was not the case.
When I spoke to other Indigenous representatives from Canada, I found that their response was similar to Peigi’s. They had not really spoken up about the change and Canada was trying to use their silence as approval, lying to the chair in saying that Indigenous peoples from Canada supported the change. I told them to all head down there and tell him that they did not agree. Others joined Peigi at Herity’s desk in a chaotic scrum.
On my way toward them, I was stopped by an official representative from Ecuador who asked me to join her and a number of other Central and South American representatives. She told me that they were getting mixed signals from the Canadian Indigenous groups. She said that they had been fighting to get prior informed consent included in this document but we were sending very mixed messages. They pointed to some Canadian Indigenous representatives who started their statements thanking Canada although they opposed our position, when they should be thanking the countries who supported Indigenous prior informed consent.
When I reached Herity’s desk, I was surprised to see Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize recipient, standing at the edge of the group. Rigoberta was one of the keynote speakers at the conference. I had spoken with her while she was touring Canada earlier that year. She had met my father when he was in Guatemala with the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and said he had been an inspiration for her. When Nicole saw Rigoberta in the rotunda outside the meeting room, she told her about our struggle on the floor against Canada’s attempt to water down the “prior informed consent” clause. I was surprised and, I must admit, delighted, when she approached me with her arms outstretched asking me what trouble was being caused to our Indigenous peoples. I told her that Canada was trying to change consent to consultation, and showed her the text. She said that this was shameful and, within earshot of Herity, exclaimed that if Canada did not change its mind, Rigoberta would immediately hold a press conference and denounce them to the world.
Then Rigoberta was on her way to the stage to talk to the chair, distinguished Jamaican environmentalist Elaine Fisher. Rigoberta marched right up the front stairway and motioned me to join them. I was hesitant to follow, so she brought Dr. Fisher to the side stairs where we could talk. Fisher said that the reason she approved the above text was because the Canadian delegation had assured her that they had the support of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. I told the chair and Rigoberta that they did not have my support, nor did I think they had the support of the other Canadian Indigenous representatives who were still surrounding the hapless Herity.
Faced with the vocal Indigenous opposition, and the overt display that his claim for Indigenous support had been untrue, Herity backed down. He told the Indigenous representatives that he would reverse Canada’s position and took the floor first accepting prior informed consent. The EU and Norway supported the proposed compromise.
Where the national legal regime requires prior informed consent of indigenous and local communities, the assessment process shall consider whether such prior informed consent has been obtained.49
I addressed the issue of Canada’s bad behaviour in my closing statement for the IIFB. I said that traditional knowledge and prior informed consent were causes my people were going to jail for back home at Skwelkwek’welt, and that Indigenous peoples in Central and South America were dying for. I said that Canada’s behaviour cannot be accepted and that I would support any statement that notifies the international community that we will take any threat to our rights seriously.
Some Indigenous representatives from Canada, I later heard, worried that making a strong statement against Canada would jeopardize funding for the next international meeting. It is a variation of the argument we have been living with for years: we cannot fight for our rights or for justice because if we do, the crumbs that we are given by governments may be taken away. This argument guarantees our oppression and impoverishment.
On the morning I was leaving The Hague, I had a pleasure that I doubt I will ever have again. As I mentioned, I was not an official representative in the Canadian delegation but Canada was paying my hotel bill, and I was at the front desk when Herity stopped by to take care of the bill. He did it without a word to me, saying to the clerk “I’m here to pay this man’s bill,” as he thrust the government credit card across the counter. It was the first and the last time my participation in an international meeting through the forum was funded by Canada. But as a representative of INET, I have found a way, without government funding, to attend and speak out at every major biodiversity conference since then. What use is it to be part of the Canadian delegation if you cannot speak for your people and their rights, but only parrot the Canadian line?
This instance is typical of the way Canada behaves on the international stage regarding anything touching on Indigenous rights. Canada has a colonial addiction when it comes to Indigenous peoples. It should be noted that The Hague conference was at the time of the Liberal government, which was generally considered a boy scout in international affairs. This reputation might have been valid on other issues, but when it came to Indigenous rights, the Liberals have been determinedly adversarial, relentlessly subverting our cause and protecting their colonialist hegemony.
Since the Conservative government came to power in 2006, it has openly flouted world opinion on everything from climate change to the rights of the Palestinians, at the cost of Canada’s credibility in the world. Ironically, this has helped our cause. After almost a decade of the Harper government, Canada is seen as a self-centred anti-social country. Its interventions against Indigenous peoples are now viewed by the world as simply another manifestation of this approach, and Canada is increasingly isolated.
Even the World Bank, certainly one of the world’s most conservative institutions, now sees a major role for Indigenous peoples in protecting the planet’s remaining biodiversity. The bank, never a friend of Indigenous peoples, now proposes “as the next logical step to develop natural resource and biodiversity conservation and management plans” with the Indigenous peoples themselves given the responsibility of enforcing those plans. As the bank sees it:
In contrast with hired outsiders, Indigenous peoples already live on the land, reducing the cost of a labor force to maintain and protect the area. The existing decision-making structures that govern indigenous communities lead to greater local buy-in on the decisions reached. Local populations have a far greater stake in the successful outcome of conservation and management initiatives on their territories—a critical consideration for initiatives to maintain protected areas over the long term. Traditional resource management systems tend to incorporate the long-term perspectives required for sustainability.50
This is precisely what Russell Diabo was working on at a local scale in his Barriere Lake resource management plan in the 1980s, and what we hoped to achieve with our Traditional Use Study for the Secwepemc people in the 1990s. And it is precisely what Canada fights to avoid in international forums, and even more so within the country, with its extinguishment treaties that aim to remove our lands from us forever and capture the resources and the biodiversity of the land for unregulated industrial extraction by multinationals.
The world understands clearly that stripping Indigenous peoples of their land puts at serious risk the vast majority of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Canada fights against the tide in attempting to retain its full colonial power over the Indigenous peoples within its borders and exclusive control of lands that it does not fully own.
Canada—and in fact, all nations of the world—could learn from Bolivia’s Indigenous president, Evo Morales, who has enacted a law protecting Mother Earth that sets out seven specific rights that Mother Earth and her constituent life systems, including human communities, are entitled to. They include the right to the diversity of life, to clean water and clean air, to the natural equilibrium, to live free of contamination, and to have damaged systems restored. The law gives legal personhood to the natural system, and may allow citizens, as part of Mother Earth, to sue individuals and groups in response to real and alleged infringements of its integrity. This law expresses, in modern legal form, the essence of our Indigenous values.
In the environmental battles, the art of a successful campaign is the art of increasing your forces, so we have looked to sympathetic people in all walks of life. It has been encouraging for our people to see non-Indigenous support for our cause. One of those who responded to our call and who has supported us without condition is film director James Cameron.
I first became aware of Cameron when I was working on a contract for Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI), a large fly-in community on the shores of Big Trout Lake in Northern Ontario. KI was engaged in a bitter dispute with Platinex, a mining exploration company that was moving into its lands. I was in Thunder Bay with Jacob Ostaman and KI Chief Donny Morris when Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar came out. The two of them liked the movie for its obvious parallel to their fight to protect their forests from mining company exploitation. Chief Morris and the entire KI council had been jailed for six months over their protest and opposition to Platinex’s exploration activities. So when I was invited to meet with Cameron in May 2010 when he was attending the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues meeting in New York, I was thinking more of Chief Donny Morris and his Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug people’s courageous stand against Platinex than Cameron’s ten-foot-tall Na’vi people battling the mining company on Pandora.
We had heard that Cameron was focused on the Amazon rainforest, but several of us were determined to bring him to Canada to support our struggles. The meeting took place at his suite in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and it was, of course, a bit of a zoo with all sorts of people with all sorts of causes trying to meet with the famous director. I was part of the delegation of the Seventh Generation Fund, whom Cameron had contacted when he was challenged by a young Indigenous person to support our cause. I was let in and we ended up having a very good discussion about our economic and environmental struggles. The world has come to know Cameron as a deep sea explorer as well as a film director, and I must admit we were impressed by the man and his sincere wish to support our cause.
After several months of ongoing discussion, his intervention in Canada came the following spring in the form of a tour of the tar sands and onsite meetings with the Athabascan people in the region. I was invited along with a group of Indigenous and environmental activists, and I confess it was a little surreal when we toured the devastated landscape in a convoy of two helicopters.
The tar sands development had turned these Cree and Chipewyan lands into a hell on earth, and at least for a day, Cameron was able to bring international attention to the environmental devastation. My only regret was that, because of a scheduling problem, Chief Donny Morris was unable to accompany us. As someone who had already been jailed for protecting his land, he would have added something to the tour.
There is a personal coda to this story. In a subsequent email exchange with Cameron, I mentioned that my son Ska7cis was an engineer. Cameron was intrigued by the name, which means grizzly bear in our Secwepemc language, and asked me to ask my son if he could use it in one of the upcoming Avatar sequels. My son agreed, thinking it was good to make the Secwepemc language more well known, and Cameron assured him the character would be a powerful warrior. For Indigenous peoples in the Americas, James Cameron is a friend as well as a powerful voice for a new understanding in the world.