Chapter VIII

Gumboot Diplomacy

By the summer of 1985 things were heating up for the Moresby campaign. Beban Logging, the local contractor to Western Forest Products (the new tree farm licence holder), was starting to feel the pressure of growing opposition to its logging plans. No longer content to sit back and scoff at our “feeble” attempts to have a portion of TFL 24 set aside for higher use, the industry people now felt threatened. They hired a media consultant and persuaded Jack Webster, a popular BCTV broadcaster in Vancouver, to take up the pro-logging cause. Not only did Webster find himself on the wrong side of this issue, he inadvertently helped to push it to a dramatic conclusion in a direction opposite from his intent.

Elizabeth May, an outspoken environmentalist from Cape Breton Island who later became the head of the Green Party of Canada, had unexpectedly been appointed as an aide to Tom McMillan, the newly appointed federal environment minister. Through her considerable powers of persuasion she arranged for McMillan to make a trip to South Moresby to see for himself what was at stake. I had already met Tom McMillan quite by accident at the 1985 Parks Canada Centennial Conference in Banff, Alberta, during a bit of a scuffle. Colleen McCrory, a fellow environmentalist and strong South Moresby supporter, was also attending the conference in Banff to lobby for the creation of more parks. After we’d listened to hours of self-absorbed and self-congratulatory speeches about Parks Canada’s past but with no apparent vision for the future, Colleen and I challenged each other to take the stage. Unannounced and definitely uninvited, we walked down the centre aisle of the Banff Conference Centre onto the stage and took command of the microphone just before the keynote speaker was to be introduced.

As I was making a hasty but impassioned plea to the delegates to do something truly significant to mark a hundred years of national parks in Canada by saving South Moresby, the federal environment minister entered the room and observed the commotion onstage. Up until this point, Parks Canada had never once supported the South Moresby Wilderness Proposal. They wanted to save only Hotspring Island and De la Beche Inlet, incredibly small areas bordering both sides of Juan Perez Sound with no commercial timber values. At planning team meetings they spoke of maintaining “the illusion of wilderness” in South Moresby as had been attempted in the pathetic logging leave strip that is now Pacific Rim National Park. We saw this as cowardice on the part of a federal agency that should have been the strongest supporter of the cause.

Just as Colleen McCrory and I were about to be unceremoniously dragged from the microphone, Tom McMillan appeared onstage, his presence stopping the embarrassing scuffle about to ensue. Fortunately, I had a copy of Islands at the Edge in hand. It was fresh off the press, and the moment seemed opportune to present it to Canada’s minister of the environment. Making the presentation suddenly legitimized my presence onstage and helped everyone save face, so security was held back for the moment.

“Honourable minister,” I began, “we beseech your help in protecting this area of national and international significance, because without your immediate intervention, South Moresby, portrayed through the words and images in this book, will be little more than a memory in the libraries of our nation.” McMillan seemed moved, and he diverged from his prepared speech to tell the Centennial Conference that he would make saving South Moresby a top priority of his office. He received a standing ovation.

Just a few months later I was to have my second encounter with Tom McMillan, who was an old school buddy of Brian Mulroney, Canada’s acting Conservative prime minister. As Tom disembarked his flight in Sandspit, the Islands’ only airport at the time and a logging community and hotbed of resentment to the Moresby cause, he was greeted by an angry crowd waving signs and shouting, “Tom McMillan and Thom Henley, go home!”

“You didn’t tell me you were walking me into a lynch mob,” McMillan said to me when I greeted him. He was visibly shaken.

“We never said this was going to be easy,” I replied. “It’s going to take courage and commitment.” We boarded a helicopter with Guujaaw and flew south into the proposed wilderness area with its shining islands, emerald mountains and primal forests. Tom was now enthralled and in a very spirited mood when we landed on Hotspring Island. We were alone on this paradise isle set like a jewel in the middle of Juan Perez Sound, and it was Guujaaw who suggested we enjoy one of the Islands’ geothermal pools for a soothing soak. None of us had brought along swimsuits, but no women were present so we saw no reason why underwear couldn’t suffice. It must have been the helicopter pilot who mentioned this incident to the Beban Logging team in Sandspit. The next morning Tom McMillan did a BCTV interview in Vancouver before flying back to Ottawa, and Jack Webster’s belligerent first question was, “So, Mr. Minister, I hear you were skinny-dipping with the hippies on Hotspring Island yesterday?”

“Actually, Jack, I was wearing underwear,” McMillan replied calmly. “I wouldn’t call that skinny-dipping—would you?”

“Not skinny-dipping,” Webster replied, somewhat embarrassed. “Next question.”

Jack Webster seemed annoyed that he had been set up to look unprofessional with a stupid question, but apart from this error in his usually stellar reporting he made a much more serious mistake. He and other members of the press had begun to imply that the Haida were being used as stooges by a well-funded and organized environmental movement in pursuit of its conservation goals. He could not have been more wrong, as anyone with background knowledge in the history of this struggle knew. The Haida had actually spearheaded the movement with the concerns of the Skidegate Band Council over logging Burnaby Island in 1973, and Guujaaw had built the cause every step of the way from that day forward. But now the insinuation that the Haida were not in control of their destiny on this issue forced the Haida Nation to take centre stage. It was a national and international stage more than a decade in the making and built by people from all walks of life, but for now it was the Haida’s stage. After ten years of sitting on the sidelines, attending one South Moresby planning team session after another while Lyell Island was being logged, the Haida were about to go back to their warrior roots and take a stand to stop it. I am convinced to this day that South Moresby would never have been saved without this action.

The logging of Lyell Island was massive and relentless for years. Images of expanding clear-cuts helped mobilize support across the country. Richard Krieger photo

For thousands of years the Haida gained a reputation as fierce and sometimes merciless warriors in raids and skirmishes against mainland tribes and between their own villages. Often referred to as the “Vikings of the North Pacific” by European explorers, the Haida are known to have traded and raided for slaves and bounty from Alaska to California and possibly farther. The first European explorers were dumbfounded to find potatoes, a food crop native to South America, growing on Langara Island. Many of Haida Gwaii’s neighbours were equally fierce in battle—the Tlingit, Tsimshian, Gitksan, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk and Nu’Chal’nuth. And yet, surprisingly, none of these Indigenous tribes ever sought a military solution to European colonizers stealing their lands. Against superior firepower it seemed more astute to settle differences in the feast house. Although genetically predisposed to battle, the Haida, in historical times, have also chosen the path of nonviolent but determined resistance.

Knowing the nature of your enemy and employing the element of surprise in battle have long been standard war strategies known to the Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest. Unlike the standoff at Oka in Eastern Canada, where the Mohawk stood in armed opposition to the RCMP and Canadian military in protecting a sacred burial site, the Gitksan once stood their ground over a fishing rights dispute on the Skeena River by pummelling heavily armed RCMP and federal Fisheries officers with marshmallows. Armed with nothing but puffed confectionery, the Gitksan made government authorities look ridiculous on national television. When asked by the press about the incident that came to be known as the Marshmallow War, the Gitksan simply replied, “We thought it was a pretty good strategy until we saw some of our young warriors eating all the ammunition.”

When the Haida took up the call from Buddy Richardson, president of the Haida Nation Council, to blockade the logging road on Lyell Island in the late autumn of 1985, they too confounded the authorities with a strategy that could not have been conceived in any conventional war room.

Far from orchestrating and financing the Haida blockade on Lyell Island, the environmental community was taken completely by surprise when Buddy Richardson made the announcement, as was I. All of the conservation groups supporting the Moresby cause were asked to stay back until there were no more Haida left to be arrested before they would be invited to join ranks. Only MP Svend Robinson from Burnaby disregarded that request, and he was the only non-Haida to be arrested. The Haida, as a united people, were asserting themselves for the first time in a very long time, and for most young Haida the blockade marked the beginning of the movement to protect South Moresby, even though the campaign had already been around for years.

Once in front of the Masset Courthouse, where Haida youth were routinely lined up facing charges of vandalism and drunk and disorderly conduct, I commented to Guujaaw, “You know, Guuj, when the first Haida is arrested for standing up for the land instead of this, it will change everything.” It did. The Lyell Island blockade became the overnight catalyst for reawakening the Haida Nation; it engaged young Haida feeling trapped in a cycle of poverty, unemployment and hopelessness and empowered them in a way that no youth program ever could.

As Guujaaw said about the battle lines he and I drew on the map in 1974, “Though easy to draw a line, holding the line is what counts.”

The blockade site was set up almost overnight as the Haida mobilized their war effort. Haida-owned fishing boats became the nation’s navy, moving people and supplies from the Skidegate command post to the front lines on Lyell where a cabin was erected to shelter blockaders from the autumn gales. The RCMP had to scramble and invest huge resources to catch up. They brought in a mobile command unit from Vancouver with high-tech capability to intercept all Haida communication between Skidegate and the blockade camp. But just as the Navajo were used by the US military in World War II to communicate secret messages that the Germans and Japanese could never decipher, so too did the Haida circumvent the entire RCMP surveillance system by relaying all messages in Haida—a language no Canadian official had ever bothered to learn in over two centuries of contact.

As more and more media found their way to the 1985 Lyell Island blockade, the South Moresby cause moved to the theatre of high drama, perfectly suited for television news. jeffrey gibbs photo

Seeing the mangled slopes of Talunkwan and Lyell islands rallied the Haida and people throughout the world to put a stop to the destruction in South Moresby. Richard Krieger photo

The Moresby cause had now moved to the theatre of high drama, which was perfectly suited for television news. A decade of lobbying, releasing news reports, producing magazines, attending meetings and publishing a book on the cause now paled in comparison as the campaign to save South Moresby entered every Canadian living room on the evening news. Over the course of cold, wet weeks, while Haida in gumboots held their ground in the ankle-deep mud of a wilderness logging road on the most remote body of land in the country, every Canadian could see it. Through the gruelling November gales, no Haida fist was raised in anger and no words were shouted in rage; the Haida Nation conducted itself with the dignity called for at a chief’s function. In spite of news hype that encouraged confrontation, the blockaders set the tone for a nonviolent response to a state that was fully armed and held the monopoly on violence.

Respected elders Nonnie Ethel Jones and Chinny Adolphus Marks from Massett, joined by Nonni Ada Yovanovich and Chini Watson Pryce from Skidegate, showed up at the blockade site the night before the first arrests. To the surprise of everyone, and over the objections of many, the four of them insisted they be the first to be arrested the next morning. Taught to always respect their elders, the young warriors had no choice but to blacken their faces in mourning and stand silently by.

“Please don’t put us in handcuffs,” Nonnie Ethel asked hereditary chief Alan Wilson, the First Nations RCMP constable assigned to the task. “Just put your arm out as if you’re leading Ada and I into the feast house,” she said.

Plank benches had been set across the logging road, and a small fire was built to keep the elders warm from the November chill. They were dressed in their finest ceremonial regalia but wearing gumboots in the mud for the arrest. Ada and Ethel, both devout Christian women, had their Bibles in their hands and were quietly praying when the orders were read to them that they were under arrest. They then solemnly rose and walked with Constable Alan Wilson through a line of Haida protesters, who were shaking rattles and singing a mourning song as the elders were led to the paddy wagon. Tears were flowing down the faces of the arresting constable and the young Haida lining the road. Later that evening the dramatic scene was broadcast nationwide.

Three of the elders who changed everything with their arrests at the 1985 Lyell Island blockade. From left to right: Ethel Jones, Watson Pryce and Ada Yovanovich are seen here relaxing at Ninstints after the Moresby battle was won.

I recall exactly where I was that evening as if it were the first news of the Kennedy assassination, or the hotel lobby in Istanbul where I sat with two Muslim clerics watching the second plane fly into the World Trade Center on a barely working television. There are moments in life indelibly etched with places and events.

I was sitting in a Victoria hotel room with Ethel Jones’s best friend, Nonnie Grace Dewitt (formerly Wilson), and several other Haida. We had been attending a rally on the grounds of the Parliament Buildings in support of the Haida blockade and had just returned to our hotel when the national news came on television. Grace was the mother of Alan Wilson, the RCMP constable who was seen arresting her best friend on national television, and she could not hold back her tears. I comforted her with the words, “It’s all over, Nonnie Grace, it’s all over now,” for I was fully aware of the transcending moment we had just witnessed. Peaceful senior citizens had been arrested on national television while holding their Bibles. Somehow I knew that iconic image would shame a nation into saving South Moresby.