Early in the morning on October 13, 2016, the US-based tugboat Nathan E. Stewart, heading south from Alaska through Heiltsuk territorial waters, missed its turn into Seaforth Channel and drove straight into the rocks off Athlone Island. The three-hundred-foot fuel barge it pushed was empty, but the tug carried more than two hundred thousand liters (fifty-three thousand gallons) of diesel and other industrial oils, which started to leak into the Pacific. Within hours, the tug was below water with an ever-growing fuel slick surrounding it.
The wreck sat beside one of the most ecologically abundant areas in the territory, Gale Passage, a place known to the Heiltsuk as Q’vúqvai. It is a narrow waterway between islands containing ancient village sites where, for millennia, people harvested seafood such as clams, crabs, and seaweed for the traditional herring-egg harvest. Though the size and scope of the leak were only a small fraction of what was envisaged for a supertanker accident, with all its attendant coastal devastation, the imperiling of Q’vúqvai was by all accounts a nightmare come true.
With barely any training, funds, or equipment—and without warning—residents of Bella Bella and Denny Island became the first responders, doing anything and everything in their power to contain the spill. It was a heroic, round-the-clock operation that lasted many weeks—one made more difficult by the delayed and largely confused response of the government and other outside agencies.
The Heiltsuk weren’t able to stop the diesel leak and its spread. Containment and absorbent booms proved ineffective, often breaking in rough weather and storms. A cluster of islands on the outer coast has been contaminated for an unknown period of time—a heavy blow to the community’s food sources, culture, and economy.
In spite of this tragedy—and perhaps in a small way because of it—the pendulum is swinging again toward more responsible decision-making for the coast. Successive governments at both the federal and the provincial levels have charted a slightly different course from their neoconservative predecessors. Between my travels and the time this book went to print, the Great Bear Rainforest agreement was ratified, in 2016, bringing additional protection to the region. Two of the more controversial pipeline-tanker initiatives slated for the coast—including Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project—have been canceled. In May 2018, a federal law known as the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, designed to restrict the largest ships carrying crude and other oils from plying the north coast of British Columbia, was passed in Canada’s House of Commons.
And in a dramatic turn of events, in December 2017, the provincial government aligned with many indigenous communities on the coast, and much of the general public, to ban the trophy hunting of grizzly bears across all of British Columbia. The lion’s share of responsibility for this shift in policy rests in the work of a core group of people, some of whom appear within these pages.
Not all individuals and communities on the coast, or across the province, support these changes. The cyclical nature of governments combined with deeply polarized politics nowadays means there are no firm guarantees that some of these decisions won’t be overturned. But optimism remains high among those who seek to maintain these changes.
Meanwhile, the world of Sasquatch research lost one of its pillars.
On January 18, 2018, wildlife biologist and Bigfoot-studies doyen John Bindernagel died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer.
In the years between his diagnosis and his death, Bindernagel tripled his efforts to get his research into the public domain, posting his video lectures on YouTube and appearing as a guest on TV and in podcasts. Up until his final days, he was meticulously filing and documenting eyewitness reports. In the end, he never realized his dream of encountering a Sasquatch at close range or seeing his theories vindicated by mainstream science.