Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia
How First Nations moved from the sidelines to the heart of Clayoquot Sound's emerging conservation economy
By the 1980s a war in the woods of epic proportions was set to explode in Clayoquot Sound. Early in the decade, the forest products company MacMillan Bloedel lit the fuse with a plan to log Meares Island, a central Sound landmark sacred to the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.
The Nuu-chah-nulth, beginning to negotiate a territorial treaty with Canada, sought a court injunction to protect the heart of their traditional territory. The B.C. Supreme Court agreed to halt the logging pending the outcome of treaty negotiations — protecting Meares Island and giving non-native activists a sense that conservation victories were possible in Clayoquot's unlogged valleys.
The Meares Island blockades of the early 1980s released a rising tide of public concern about industrial logging in Clayoquot Sound. That tide would crest during "Clayoquot Summer," a season of mass protests and arrests in1993 that brought the Sound to global attention as ground zero in the standoff between industrial resource extraction and defense of the natural world.
As the protests burgeoned, the First Nations of Clayoquot Sound found themselves sidelined in the dispute that their defense of Meares Island had helped to trigger. With no stake in the industrial economy, to be sure, they were also scarcely vested in the Sound's emerging economy of tourism and recreation.
During these volatile years, Ecotrust worked quietly with several of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations on subsistence and resource-access issues. The Hesquiaht Nation worked to restore a clam bed for traditional harvesting. The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations strove to reverse the decline of sockeye salmon in Kennedy Lake. The Ahousaht Nation began to develop tribal GIS mapping capabilities. Ecotrust assistance helped these native groups begin to level the playing field with the government and corporations concerned with resources in Nuu-chah-nulth territory.
A series of provincial decisions gradually shifted the terms of engagement around economic development in Clayoquot Sound. One of these decisions, an Interim Measures Agreement with five Nuu-chah-nulth nations, opened the door to joint management of resources at stake in the treaty negotiation process. Native influence over the fate of forests and rivers began to grow.
An independent Scientific Panel on Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound drafted new rules for forest practices guided by ecosystem integrity. In 1995, the provincial government adopted the panel's recommendations in their entirety.
The Science Panel's work meant an end to industrial logging in Clayoquot Sound — but not necessarily an end to logging itself. Ecotrust Canada mapped the panel's recommendations and concluded that close to 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) of forest could be open to conservation-based forestry in Clayoquot's forests, supporting many jobs as the local industry shifted to a carefully planned and value-adding enterprise. But this was not a scale at which the industrial forest products companies were organized to operate.
Under the Interim Measures Agreement, the Central Region Nuu-chah-nulth nations and MacMillan Bloedel began to explore a commercial joint venture that would honor the principles laid out by the scientific panel. In 1998, they formalized the partnership under the name Iisaak Forest Resources, Ltd. With a controlling majority interest owned by the Nuu-chah-nulth, Iisaak (a name meaning "respect" in the Nuu-chah-nulth language) represented a tectonic shift in Clayoquot Sound's forest economy.
In 1999, Iisaak joined in a Memorandum of Understanding with five Canadian and international conservation groups that offered tacit support to the conservation-based forestry approach. The Weyerhaeuser Company, which acquired MacMillan Bloedel that year, agreed to abide by the joint venture terms.
Ecotrust Canada and Shorebank Enterprise Pacific had recently opened a joint office in Ucluelet, and actively sought opportunities to deliver capital to value-added timber processing, ecological tourism, and small-scale manufacturing enterprises. In November 2000, just months after its crews felled the first carefully selected trees in newly designated Tree Farm License 57, Iisaak secured financing from the loan fund enabling the company to deliver its wood to value-added manufacturers, wood brokers, and others building the "green" market for certified sustainable wood products. With the blessing of the environmental community and support from a conservation-based lender, Iisaak was poised to fulfill possibilities few could have foreseen twenty years earlier.
A Native-controlled business partnership between former bitter opponents, local commitment to economic development compatible with ecological and cultural integrity, brightening prospects for a Nuu-chah-nulth treaty with the province and nation — all point toward history being made on the highly contested lands and waters of Clayoquot Sound.
For once, it is history being made in the favor of the people who, in their native languages, have always called those lands and waters home.