Dear Leslie,

How do I deal with the frustration and anger that comes with having family members and friends who continue to fly and pursue other behaviours that worsen the climate crisis? They know better, yet they don’t act differently.

— Frustrated Climate Activist

Dear Frustrated Climate Activist,

Your anger and frustration are deeply relatable — and they’re happening for good reason. Your values and relationships are colliding, creating a painful rupture where you most long for shared ground. And your anger may be compounded by grief for the loss of species, cultures and futures you know could be better protected if more people, like your loved ones, would take action.

That gap also creates a lopsided moral load. You’re actively confronting the difficult realities of our warming world and responding with care, while you perceive some of the people you’re most connected to turning away from that responsibility. 

Living with that tension doesn’t just hurt — it eventually exhausts the nervous system and erodes our capacity to stay connected.

Before we go further, it may help to widen the perspective. It’s possible your family and friends hold a different view of what personal climate responsibility looks like. All of us participate in some activities that worsen the climate crisis, even if we’re trying to mitigate our impact (or create a positive impact) in other ways. It sounds like people in your life have decided they can’t give up flying right now, but maybe for them, positive action looks like voting for climate-forward policies, reducing consumption or supporting initiatives you don’t see. Or maybe they care about the climate crisis but haven’t yet figured out what meaningful action looks like for them. Begin with curiosity about where they are and how they understand their responsibility. 

But let’s say your family and friends claim to care, but truly are not engaging in any way — you see them strolling past the most critical issues with eyes averted. In that case, their failure to take any form of action may feel like a personal betrayal.

Here’s the hard truth: You can’t carry both the planet and your loved ones on your back. What’s appropriate in the relationships you’re talking about — people you want to stay close with — is emotional detachment without emotional withdrawal. That means choosing where your responsibility for others ends and your boundaries begin. You can continue to love imperfect people while also sustaining a fierce allegiance to caring for the climate. 

You’re not required to be the climate conscience of every encounter and every conversation. 

Try selective honesty. When you’re moved to speak, you might say something like this: “I struggle with [name the specific behaviour], because it hurts to see people I love act like climate impacts don’t matter.” Then step back and let the silence do the work. You may not get the response you hope for, but you’ll know you spoke up for what matters most to you, and it’s up to you to understand when that’s enough. 

People aren’t always moved to change immediately. Your words may land more deeply than you realize in the moment. 

Letting go of the constant urge to convince isn’t giving up. It’s choosing to invest your energy where it can be amplified — for instance, in a like-minded community, an action group or connections with other people who do share your priorities.

This is our work: staying human in a burning world without burning ourselves out. Try to find places where your clarity and commitment are shared — that in turn will make it easier to engage in other places where they are not. Let your love for the living world be fed by relationships that give your nervous system a place to rest.

Holding this with you,

Leslie

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.

SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch one million more of these satellites as orbital data centres for artificial intelligence computing power.

A few years ago, we wrote a paper predicting what the night sky would look like with 65,000 satellites from four planned megaconstellations: SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper (now Leo), the U.K.’s OneWeb and China’s Guowang. We calibrated our models to observations of real Starlink satellites and came up with a startling prediction: One in 15 visible points in the night sky would be a satellite, not a star.

A million satellites would be so much worse.

The human eye can see fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. If we permit SpaceX to launch these satellites, we will see more satellites than stars — for large portions of the night and the year, throughout the world. This will severely damage the night sky for everyone on Earth.

SpaceX’s proposal also completely fails to account for atmospheric pollution, collision risk or how to develop the technology needed to disperse waste heat from orbital data centres.

Predicting the night sky

SpaceX has filed its million-satellite proposal to the United States Federal Communications Commission and has only provided bare-bones information about these new satellites so far.

We do know that the proposed constellation will have satellites in much higher orbits, making them visible for longer periods of the night.

We decided to build an updated simulation, using the website of astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. This includes a set of orbits consistent with the limited information in SpaceX’s filing.

We used the observed brightness of Starlink satellites as a reference, scaling the brightness model by considering size jumps between Starlink V1, V2 and predictions for V3, and assuming even higher complexity and power requirements.

There are many factors we don’t know anything about, so there is some uncertainty in the brightness we predict.

These representations show the estimated brightness of the night sky on the summer solstice at the fiftieth latitude under different SpaceX satellite scenarios. The more satellites SpaceX launches into orbit, the brighter the sky becomes. Source: Lawler et al. (2022)

In the figure above, each grey circle shows a simulation of the full night sky, as seen from latitude 50 degrees north at midnight on the summer solstice.

The left circle shows the night sky with SpaceX’s orbital data centres, and the right shows the night sky with 42,000 Starlink satellites for comparison.

The coloured points show the positions and brightness of satellites in the sky, with blue the faintest and yellow the brightest. Below each all-sky simulation we list the number of sunlit satellites in the sky and the number of naked-eye visible satellites, with tens of thousands predicted for SpaceX’s orbital data centres.

Each of our simulations shows there will be more visible satellites than stars for large portions of the night and the year.

The human eye can see fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

It is hard to overstate this. Should a million new satellites be launched, in the orbits and with the sizes proposed, the stars we are able to see at night would be completely overwhelmed by artificial satellites — throughout the world.

This does not even account for additional large satellite system proposals filed to the International Telecommunication Union in recent years by numerous national governments.

A satellite crematorium

SpaceX’s proposal is that these new satellites will operate as orbital data centres.

Data centres on the ground are drawing increasing criticism for the huge amounts of water and electricity they use. In an impressive feat of greenwashing, SpaceX suggests that launching data centres into orbit is better for the environment. This is only true if you ignore all the consequences of satellite launch, orbital operations and re-entry.

We can already measure atmospheric pollution from “re-entries” when satellites fall back to Earth. We know that multiple satellites are falling every day and that if they do not fully burn up on re-entry, debris falls on the ground with risk for injury and death.

Increasing densities of satellites also drive up collision risks in orbit. And using the atmosphere as a satellite crematorium is changing the atmosphere in ways we don’t yet understand.

Practically, it is not at all clear whether the proposed orbital data centres are feasible any time soon. To operate data centres in orbit, they would need to disperse huge amounts of waste heat. Despite the greenwashing, this is actually very hard to do in space as they would have to manage the intense radiation from the sun, while cooling the satellite by radiation.

SpaceX should know this well: one of the first brightness mitigations they tested for Starlink was “darksat,” a Starlink satellite they effectively just painted black. The satellite overheated and the electronics fried.

A slap in the face for astronomers

SpaceX has done a lot of engineering work to make its Starlink satellites fainter. They are still too bright for research astronomy, but thanks to new coatings, their brightness has not increased dramatically even as SpaceX has launched larger and larger satellites.

SpaceX’s proposal for one million artificial intelligence data centre satellites with enormous power requirements does not include any discussion of the co-ordination agreement for dark and quiet skies required by the United States Federal Communications Commission.

It feels like a slap in the face after many astronomers have spent years working with SpaceX on ways to mitigate their Starlink megaconstellation and save the night sky.

Astronomers and dark sky advocates scrambled to submit comments on SpaceX’s proposal during the four-week public comment period. Photo: Katherine K. Y. Cheng / The Narwhal

Orbital space is a finite resource

The SpaceX filing does not include exact orbits, the size or shape of satellites or the casualty risk from de-orbiting (other than a vague promise that it won’t exceed 0.01 per cent per satellite). It doesn’t even include any information on how the company plans to develop the technology that does not currently exist but is needed to make this plan work.

Despite how shockingly little information SpaceX provided, the commission accepted SpaceX’s filing and opened the comment period within four days. Astronomers and dark sky advocates worldwide scrambled to write and submit comments in the short four weeks that the comment period was open.

The scientific process is slow and careful and it often takes months or years to publish a peer-reviewed result. Companies like SpaceX have stated repeatedly that their method is to “move fast and break things.” They are now close to breaking the atmosphere, the night sky and anything on the ground or in space that their satellites and rockets fall on or crash into.

Earth’s orbital space is a finite resource. There is an evolving set of international guidelines for operating in outer space, grounded in a set of high-level international rules. Yet, those rules and guidelines are inadequate.

One corporation based in one country should not be allowed to ruin orbit, the night sky and the atmosphere for everyone else in the world.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Arctic has been in the news a lot lately. Between the increased geopolitical interest in Greenland, claims over sovereignty, resource exploitation and the devastating impacts of climate change, the region has become a sentinel for global change.

But away from these headlines, a quieter crisis is unfolding that threatens Canada’s role in global environmental science, law and policy: the dismantling of research teams at the department responsible for Canada’s environmental policies and programs. The federal government’s plan to reduce the public service by 15 per cent over three years means that more than 800 positions at Environment and Climate Change Canada will be cut.

As an environmental scientist who has been involved in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program since 2016 and an interdisciplinary legal scholar focused on water governance in Canada, we have seen how science can shape policy. For decades, Environment and Climate Change Canada research scientists have been integral to the work of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a working group that provides advice and assessments to the Arctic Council.

This intergovernmental group comprised of Indigenous Peoples, Arctic states and non-Arctic states with observer status is the major platform for protecting the environment and coordinating sustainable development initiatives in the Arctic.

Scientists at Environment and Climate Change Canada have played a leading role in more than 20 international reports on persistent organic pollutants and mercury. In fact, department researchers have acted as the largest group of chapter leads in these global assessments since the 1990s.

Budget cuts at the department raise concerns about how governments will develop effective policies and laws that rely upon scientific research.

The risks from budget cuts

Many of the scientists who lead projects on the long-term trends of toxins in Arctic wildlife face cuts or might lose their jobs entirely. Department scientists are often the ones to identify and assess “chemicals of emerging Arctic concern” — newly discovered chemical threats to human and environmental health that scientists are only just beginning to understand.

Losing the scientists who lead and interpret contaminant data in Arctic wildlife will take much more from Canada than scientific expertise; we risk losing our ability to understand and effectively react to chemical threats and their potential environmental and health impacts.

Data collection for unique monitoring datasets spanning up to 50 years is at risk of being discontinued. Even more concerning is the potential loss of national tissue archives if monitoring and research projects are cut. Contaminant data in Canadian wildlife have been instrumental to the listing of toxins under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty to control the global production and use of particularly hazardous chemicals.

Similarly, monitoring for mercury in Arctic air and biota is an important part of the rationale for the Minamata Convention, a global treaty designed to protect human and environmental health from mercury contamination.

In many ways, these global agreements exist because Canadian data, produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists, proved that chemicals used thousands of kilometres away end up in the bodies of Arctic wildlife and Indigenous Peoples who rely on healthy wildlife for food security and cultural identity and practices.

These international treaties set out the norms, legal principles and regulatory schemes that have been incorporated into Canadian law. They support the risk assessment and management of many toxic chemicals under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Losing these samples and monitoring programs would set back Canadian and global contaminant research and reinforce criticisms that Canada is a laggard in environmental law and policy.

Risk for Indigenous communities

Budget cuts could also intimately impact the daily lives of those living in the Arctic and raise questions of environmental justice. Indigenous communities in the Arctic face higher exposure to many toxins than other Canadians due to their reliance on foods like fish, belugas and seals.

Despite global efforts, blood mercury levels in many Inuit communities remain higher than the general Canadian population. Furthermore, concentrations of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals,” are consistently higher in these communities than in the south.

Arctic research cutbacks could reduce Canada’s ability to measure environmental contaminants. That could put northern Indigenous communities, which rely on the land for food, at greater risk of exposure to toxins. Photo: Michael Code / The Narwhal

Without ongoing research, we risk creating a vacuum in environmental governance and law. Current legislation, like the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, aims to protect vulnerable populations and uphold the right to a healthy environment and environmental justice. But we cannot uphold these rights if we stop measuring how contaminants are impacting the health of the environment, food and water of the populations most affected by these chemicals.

Across Canada, the cuts undermine effective chemical management. Canada’s chemical management plan depends heavily on the expert assessment of government scientists. This expert-based risk assessment has enabled the discovery and monitoring of new chemical risks with comparatively few bureaucratic hurdles. However, it also means that the proposed cuts are particularly devastating to this program.

If we remove the scientists the regulatory system depends on, the system breaks. This means that these proposed cuts could not only cost jobs and reduce scientific excellence in Canada, but also leave the health of Canadians and our environment less protected.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

With a metre of snow piled in front of my house, the plants beneath it aren’t exactly top of mind. The heath and New England aster, goldenrod and milkweed are tucked away for the winter but will re-emerge in all their glory come spring. They’ve only been there for a few years now, gradually overtaking the sod that covered our yard when we moved in. We let it go wild, and wild it has gone.

Should I be worried about contravening a city bylaw limiting grass and weeds to 20 centimetres high? Maybe — if you stuck a school ruler in our garden in full bloom, you’d likely never find it again. But the regulation doesn’t seem to be heavily enforced, at least by my eye, nor is it clear on what constitutes a weed. I hope the species we’re growing, which are refuges and resources for pollinators, would be exempt.

But there are certainly some dandelions lingering among the plants — bees like them too, you know! — and you’ll definitely find clover, a great nitrogen fixer but also considered a weed by many. But enough about my garden, because I certainly don’t want to encourage a neighbour to complain and a bylaw officer to come knocking — or mowing.

Because that’s exactly what’s happening in other Ontario municipalities.

Despite the biodiversity crisis we find ourselves in as a nation — and around the world — diverse, natural gardens are being extinguished by some people’s preference for their neighbours’ lawn to be tidy and uniform.

What it’s like to run the 4,000-km migration route of the endangered monarch butterfly

In Burlington, the Barnes family saw their naturalized garden — which included many of the same species I have, and more — razed by the city after repeated warnings and threats of fines if they didn’t trim it back themselves.

According to the city, the Barnes’ garden didn’t warrant the title of a naturalized space that would be immune to the 20-centimetre rule (apparently this is a commonly agreed-upon height for plants), despite it being popular with bees and butterflies. Much of the city’s argument, according to recent reporting on the case by the Toronto Star, appears to rest on the perceived lack of maintenance in the Barnes’ garden.

So the city threatened a $10,000-a-day fine, on top of a flat $100,000 fee, until the plants were trimmed. 

Now, the City of Burlington is taking Karen Barnes to court in March for up to $400,000 of those fines, after city crews destroyed the garden she carefully cultivated — several times. 

The Barneses aren’t alone in their fight.

As the Toronto Star reported, Mississauga resident Wolf Ruck won a years-long battle earlier this month, when a judge ruled the city’s bylaw specifying grass height and weed-control requirements are unconstitutional. It also meant Ruck was not on the hook for the city’s costs after it mowed down his naturalized garden, just as Burlington did to the Barnes’ garden. The bylaw, the judge found, was an infringement upon Ruck’s right to freedom of expression. And there are several other examples of bylaws across the province restricting garden growth — and cases where residents crossed their city’s limit.

Yet, most of us don’t live under the rule of a homeowner association — a type of community organization common in the U.S., and less so in Canada, that collects dues from its members (residents in these communities don’t have an option to forgo membership) and can dictate everything from the colour you paint your house to shed size to garden aesthetics. 

Here, if my next-door neighbour wants to paint their house hot pink, they can do it and I can live with it. They’re not harming anyone. So why are garden choices still not a homeowner’s alone?

Beyond the subjective matter of aesthetic preferences, native plants — and many so-called “weeds” — store planet-warming carbon dioxide, provide pollen for insects at the foundation of our food systems and require less water and maintenance than a lawn. It’s why a lot of cities, Burlington and Mississauga included, have planted their own pollinator gardens.

Portrait of a bee

Cracking down on people who want to let their own garden grow naturally is a waste of time for municipal staff, and money for taxpayers. Court cases aren’t cheap and neither are staff hours.

On her fundraising page for the upcoming court case, Barnes says her family has been “targeted and harassed for daring to have a yard that looks ‘different’ from the norm.” 

If aesthetics are the primary concern here, I’d point out that cities already allow (and build) unsightly infrastructure that has promised benefits beyond its appearance. For instance, the paved parking pads that are cropping up around cities. If anyone wants to argue parking pads provide a more necessary function than a naturalized garden, I’d wager you don’t need your car as much as a bee needs pollen.

So let them have it. Let people have their gardens, however they prefer them, and let nature reclaim a tiny fraction of the space it has lost to cities. I’d say we owe it that much.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When a crisis strikes, rumours and conspiracy theories often spread faster than emergency officials can respond and issue corrections.

In Canada, social media posts have falsely claimed wildfires were intentionally set, that evacuation orders were government overreach or that smoke maps were being manipulated. In several communities, people delayed leaving because they were unsure which information to trust.

This wasn’t just online noise. It directly shaped how Canadians responded to real danger. When misinformation delays evacuations, fragments compliance or undermines confidence in official warnings, it reduces the state’s ability to protect lives and critical infrastructure.

At that point, misinformation is no longer merely a communications problem, but a national security risk. Emergency response systems depend on public trust to function. When that trust erodes, response capacity weakens and preventable harm increases.

It isn’t arson: untangling climate misinformation around Canada’s raging wildfires

Canada is entering an era where climate misinformation is becoming a public safety threat. As wildfires, floods and droughts grow more frequent, emergency systems rely on one fragile assumption: that people believe the information they receive. When that assumption fails, the entire chain of crisis communication begins to break down. We are already seeing early signs of that failure.

This dynamic extends far beyond acute disasters. It also affects long-running climate policy and adaptation efforts. When trust in institutions erodes and misinformation becomes easier to absorb than scientific evidence, public support for proactive climate action collapses.

Recent research by colleagues and me on how people perceive droughts shows that members of the public often rely on lived experiences, memories, identity and social and institutional cues — such as environmental concerns, perceived familiarity and trust — to decide whether they are experiencing a drought, even when official information suggests otherwise.

These complex cognitive dynamics create predictable vulnerabilities. Evidence from Canada and abroad documents how false narratives during climate emergencies reduce protective behaviour, amplify confusion and weaken institutional authority.

Tackling misinformation

Canada has invested billions of dollars in physical resiliency, firefighting capacity, flood resiliency and energy reliability. In addition, the Canadian government also recently joined the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change to investigate false narratives and strengthen response capacity.

These are much needed steps in the right direction. But Canada still approaches misinformation as secondary rather than a key component of climate-risk management.

That leaves responsibility for effective messaging fragmented across public safety, environment, emergency management and digital policy, with no single entity accountable for monitoring, anticipating or responding to information threats during crises. The cost of this fragmentation is slower response, weaker coordination and greater risk to public safety.

Firefighters’ shirts hang on a laundry line in Argenta, B.C., after the local volunteer crew suppressed a fire that started on the mountainside above the community during a lightning storm. Misinformation around fires has hampered responses to them, and the public’s safety when they occur. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Canada also continues to rely heavily on outdated communication mediums like radio, TV and static government websites, while climate misinformation is optimized for the social media environment. False content often circulates quickly online digitally, with emotional resonance and repetition giving it an advantage over verified information.

Research on misinformation dynamics shows how platforms systematically amplify sensational claims and how false claims travel farther and faster than verified updates.

Governments typically attempt to correct misinformation during emergencies when emotions are high, timelines are compressed and false narratives are already circulating. By then, correction is reactive and often ineffective.

Trust cannot be built in the middle of a crisis. It is long-term public infrastructure that must be maintained through transparency, consistency and modern communication systems before disasters occur.

How BC Wildfire Service is fighting misinformation with compassion

Proactive preparedness

Canada needs to shift from reactive correction to proactive preparedness. With wildfire season only months ahead, this is the window when preparation matters most. Waiting for the next crisis to expose the same weaknesses is not resilience, but repetition.

We cannot afford another round of reacting under pressure and then reflecting afterwards on steps that should have been taken earlier. That shift requires systemic planning:

• Proactive public preparedness: Federal and provincial emergency agencies should treat public understanding of alerts, evacuation systems and climate risks as a standing responsibility, not an emergency add-on. This information must be communicated well before disaster strikes, through the platforms people actually use, with clear expectations about where authoritative information will come from.
• Institutional coordination: Responsibility for tackling climate misinformation currently falls between departments. A federal-provincial coordination mechanism, linked to emergency management rather than political communications, would allow early detection of misinformation patterns and faster response, just as meteorological or hydrological risks are monitored today.
• Partnerships with trusted messengers: Community leaders, educators, health professionals and local organizations often have more credibility than institutions during crises. These relationships should be formalized in emergency planning, not improvised under pressure. During recent wildfires, community-run pages and volunteers were among the most effective at countering false claims.

We cannot eliminate every rumour or every bit of misinformation. But without strengthening public trust and information integrity as core components of climate infrastructure, emergencies will become harder to manage and more dangerous.

Climate resilience is not only about physical systems. It is also about whether people believe the warnings meant to protect them. Canada’s long-term security depends on taking that reality seriously.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

My dad was known as “the bear guy” in Peace River. He often got the call to advise on what to do with “problem bears” reported by the public. Now and then they’d get a call from a farmer about a grizzly bear, but for the most part the culprit was a black bear that had wandered into town or was nosing through somebody’s trash bins. “Problem bear” or “nuisance bear” were the terms commonly used by wildlife managers to describe bears that showed no fear of people, fed on anthropogenic food sources and edged close enough to threaten a person’s perception of safety. Perception being the key word there, my dad would later grumble. It was a tricky thing to assess and manage, because everyone’s perception of risk was different. Some people tolerated a bear wandering through their backyard. Others viewed the bear as a threat to their children’s safety. For everyone, the distance or threshold between the bear and their circle of comfort, the perception of a situation going from harmless to dangerous, could be markedly different. There was no clear line, no border drawn in the sand, that signalled to bears: You shall not pass. 

Reports of problem bears were most frequent from late April, when bears crawled out of hibernation, through the spring and summer months, and into October, when they entered hyperphagia, a state of extreme hunger. Most of the calls to conservation officers about “problem bears” were regarding black bears, hands-down, owing to the fact that the grizzly population in northwestern Alberta was significantly less and, for the most part, tended to avoid people. The expression “problem bear” almost always refers to a black bear, even today.

“There’s a goddamned bear breaking into my shed!”

“There’s a bear prowling the riverbank. I’m scared for the safety of my kids.”

“There’s a bear up in a tree behind my house. I threw rocks at it, but it won’t budge.”

“Human safety is always our number one concern,” my dad would say. “But it’s about keeping the bear safe, too.”

One evening, our community made the national news when a black bear waltzed right through the automatic doors of the IGA grocery store and beelined for the bakery. Brendan and I laughed when we watched the footage captured by the store’s security camera: the bear strolling through those doors as if he’d done it a thousand times before, eventually chased out by the store manager with an industrial broom. The story made for a comedic segment on the six o’clock news, as no one was harmed, the bear included. My brother and I were excited, even proud, that the news of the bear had put our small town on the map. Maybe it was a problem bear, but it was our problem bear. For my dad, it was just business as usual.

Another day, another nuisance bear.

Black Bear details journalist Trina Moyles’s abiding fascination with the bears she grew up in close proximity to, and traces her relationship to these animals, the natural world of Canada’s North and her brother, an oilsands worker. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

In the 1990s, wildlife managers relied on a bear management concept called “mutual avoidance,” a term that was coined and popularized by Stephen Herrero, a behavioural ecologist and author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, a book published in 1985 that became, and remains today, widely influential. “Mutual avoidance is a desirable end state,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. He called for a “standoff between bears and people rather than the petting, feeding and garbage eating that have characterized the past.” Herrero argued that a century of tolerating, and in some cases even encouraging, bears feeding on anthropogenic food sources had created a legacy of food-conditioned and habituated bears. Bear Attacks was one of the first books to draw a connection between food habituation and fatal maulings, arguing that a food- habituated bear is a dangerous bear. His logic was sound: Close the garbage dumps, clean up unmanaged food sources, and scare away food-habituated bears through persistent negative, or adverse, conditioning. My dad agreed.

“While we’d been trained to deter problem bears, and to protect ourselves against predatory wildlife attacks, there were quiet, embedded risks to growing up in northern Alberta. There were other predatory forces we wouldn’t see coming — and no soundtrack to indicate an incoming threat.”

He and his colleagues used negative conditioning to send problem bears a message, loud and clear: You aren’t welcome here. Mostly, they’d rely on non-lethal methods, driving bears off by vehicle, honking the horn or turning on a loud siren. They’d fire off a round of cracker shells at the bear, or shoot them with rubber bullets.

“We aim for the fat on the bear’s rump,” my dad told me. “The rubber slug will certainly sting and send them a message, but it won’t cause any harm to the bear.”

Some of the problem bears would be captured in culvert traps, a live bear trap designed like an open culvert: long enough for a bear to worm in, pull on bait at the back of the trap — typically a beaver carcass or roadkill — and trigger the door to slam behind them. Biologists would tranquilize the bear and take its physiological measurements: body weight, length, sex and general health. They’d age the bear by examining its teeth, the wear on its canines and incisors, looking for the presence of yellow dentine, which would indicate an older bear. Sometimes my dad would extract a tooth with pliers and send it for analysis in Edmonton. Under a microscope, a lab technician would count the number of rings on a tooth root, like the growth rings on a tree stump, to determine the bear’s age. The problem bear would receive a bright yellow or orange ID ear tag. Some would get a radio collar, so biologists could follow its whereabouts like a prisoner released on parole. The problem bears entered the system as numbers, so repeat offenders could be identified.

Most wildlife managers had a three-strikes-you’re-out policy. For bears that didn’t get the memo on mutual avoidance, their story ended with a lead bullet. “Put down” was the common expression, or “cull,” like kill made soft, or “euthanized,” as though the bear were akin to our family’s dog, Sage, whom we said goodbye to on the operating table at the veterinary clinic. “Destroyed” was another word used by wildlife managers, and as a child I imagined them blowing up the bear into ten thousand tiny pieces the same way they detonated the Death Star in Star Wars.

Bears that remained afraid of people and avoided areas used by humans would have the best chance at survival, my dad reminded us. 

The calls from the public about problem bears wore on him, however. 

“Who’s really the problem here — bears or people?” he’d complain.

”Problem bears” are what wildlife managers call bears who have grown habituated to people through anthropogenic (human-supplied) food sources. In the town where Trina Moyles grew up, these bears were occasionally grizzlies, but mostly black bears. Photo: Trina Moyles

Bears were just being bears, he’d say, drawn by their noses to unmanaged food sources, including unsecured garbage bins, or cooking oil dumped behind a restaurant in town, or an apple tree, or raspberry bushes in somebody’s backyard. Or maybe someone left their barbecue wide open, or forgot a bag of dog food out on the front steps of their house. Or perhaps it was a bear just passing through town, using the paved walking trail as a corridor to travel. In cases where bears would refuse to budge from people’s backyards, sometimes they’d discover small cubs clinging to the upper branches of nearby trees, which the mothers guarded from below.

At the root of every problem bear, my dad would say, is a human problem. The idea of a “bad bear” was solely a human construct. The bear was just trying to pack on enough pounds to survive the winter. If it discovered a human-made food source, that was our fault, not the bear’s.

But for all the resources that went into dealing with these so-called problem bears in town, the bears that actually killed people seemingly appeared out of thin air, like a sleight of hand. Their victims never saw it coming. These black bear attacks, although incredibly rare, mostly happened in remote areas where human activity encroached on their habitat.

‘When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch’

When I was in Grade 10, my forestry class was preparing for a two-week field course outside Swan Hills, Alta., an area located to the south of Peace River where there’s a high density of grizzly bears and black bears. My dad came to my high school to give a presentation on bear safety, specifically, how to protect ourselves from or avoid bear attacks. I’d grown up listening to these cautionary stories and instructions, but somehow the repeated telling felt as visceral as the first. He told us a story about 63-year-old Cree trapper Bella Twin, who, in 1953, encountered and defended herself against one of the world’s largest recorded grizzly bears in this same region and astonishingly put down the bear with a .22 rifle, a firearm meant for hunting small game like grouse and rabbits. I shivered in awe of Bella’s bravery, and my classmates’ eyes were wide with admiration. Even the boys nodded with respect. I was proud of my father, standing in front of our class like a bear guru of sorts. 

We were instructed to respond differently in a close encounter with a grizzly bear versus a black bear. The two species had, behaviourally speaking, evolved differently. Whereas black bears evolved in trees, often fleeing and climbing to safety in frightening encounters, grizzly bears evolved on treeless plains where they had to stand their ground and fight back in defence situations. If it was a defensive grizzly bear attack, a mother protecting her cubs, for example, he advised us to play dead, which would potentially defuse the attack. “You’ve got to convince her that you’re not a threat,” he said. Often, in defensive grizzly attacks, bears would eventually leave after initially wounding or impairing a person. 

“Cover the back of your neck with your hands,” he told us. “Try to stay on your stomach. The bear will likely try to flip you over, but if you can, stay on your stomach and protect your vital organs.”

If it was a black bear attack, he said, “you’ve gotta fight with everything you’ve got.”

Grizzly bears and black bears evolved differently and protect themselves differently in conflict situations. Moyles was instructed to play dead or to lie on her stomach to protect her organs if confronted with a grizzly attack. With a black bear, her father told her she should “fight with everything you’ve got.” Photo: Trina Moyles

We learned of a 10-year-old girl from Williams Lake, B.C., who fought off a black bear with an axe and a pot of boiling water, which she flung in the bear’s face.

Black bear attacks in North America occur more frequently than grizzly bear attacks, he explained, but when grizzlies do attack, it often results in serious injury or death. There were other key differences between grizzly bears and black bears.

He pointed to research from Herrero’s Bear Attacks that found the majority of fatal grizzly bear attacks occurred in national parks, where bears had become food-habituated and accustomed to people. On the flip side, nearly all the fatal black bear attacks took place in rural, remote areas — not so different from Peace River or the Swan Hills. Although these incidents were extremely rare, Herrero found that black bears would stalk and attack their victims in broad daylight, whereas the majority of grizzly bear attacks occurred at night. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that grizzly bears, as their habitat has shrunk in size and fragmented, have adapted to become more nocturnal. In over half the accounts, black bears preyed on people of smaller stature, their victims often women or children. There was an assumption that grizzlies were more dangerous than black bears, but just because black bears tended to be smaller didn’t mean they were any less deadly. “[Black bears] can bite through live trees thicker than a man’s arm,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. “They can kill a full-grown steer with a bite to the neck.”

Bears aren’t as deadly as you’ve been taught

“If a black bear is stalking you, you’re probably not going to see it coming,” my dad told us. “When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch. They’re on. They’re focused.” 

A collective hush fell over the room, all eyes glued to my father.

No doubt he was thinking of the tragic bear attacks that had occurred only a few years earlier at Liard River Hot Springs, a remote campground in northern British Columbia. On August 14, 1997, an adult black bear stalked a woman named Patti McConnell and her 13-year-old son, Kelly, near the upper hot springs pool. The bear attacked McConnell and then turned on her son, who had attempted to beat the bear off his mother with a stick. When Ray Kitchen, a 56-year-old trucker, heard their screams, he went running to intervene, but the bear charged and knocked him over. As people heard the attacks, they fled from the hot springs for the parking lot, and in the ensuing panic the bear mauled a fourth victim, a 28-year-old man. Eventually, two bystanders came running with rifles. They shot the bear, but both Patti McConnell and Kitchen died from their wounds. 

Though there‘s a perception that grizzly bears are more dangerous than black bears, there are more attacks by black bears in North America than grizzlies, and black bears will often stalk their prey in daylight. Photo: Trina Moyles

My classmates and I had learned about the gruesome attacks, right down to the goriest details, on the television news. It made the front page of the newspapers with headlines that read: DEADLIEST ATTACK IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY. Reader’s Digest published a story called “Rogue Bear on the Rampage” that depicted the 13-year-old boy watching the bear “engulf his mother’s almost naked body.” The story read like a thriller novel; it was impossible to tear your eyes away from the sensational account. “[Kelly’s mother] lay beside him, her skin ashen, her eyes open and unblinking,” the article read. “The animal’s foul, rancid breath made Kelly want to vomit. He closed his eyes. He knew he was about to die.”

There was something unsettling about the way people leaned in to the bear attack story, some kind of twisted desire to consume every last gruesome detail. We were drawn to the blood lust of bear attacks with a magnetic intensity. It was hard to look away from the onslaught of headlines, but then again, we were kids growing up in a culture obsessed with violence inflicted by predators of all kinds — from wrestlers bashing one another over the head with folding chairs to movies about serial killers and rapists. Bears were just another bad guy.

But when it comes to bears, a fatal, predatory attack is never personal. It’s not evil or malicious, or premeditated. It’s about the animal’s attempt to survive and evolve. The media’s obsession with bear attacks generates sales and dollars, but more often than not, it fails to bring us any closer to understanding them as a species.

Recent grizzly attacks have B.C. and Alberta on edge, but experts say hunting bears is unlikely to help

The detail about the woman’s “almost naked body” reminded me of the opening scene in Spielberg’s cult classic Jaws, a movie we worshipped as kids, that opens with a young woman with long blond hair running along a beach, giggling and taking off her clothes. A drunken suitor follows behind, slurring, “What’s your name again?” “Chrissie!” she says. “Where are we going?” “Swimming!” she responds. As she pulls off her sweater, revealing her breasts, the man says with a laugh, “I’m definitely coming!” Chrissie swims elegantly out into the calm ocean waters as the guy drunkenly struggles out of his clothes and passes out on the beach. 

The point of view changes to that of the great white shark, lurking beneath Chrissie, rising up toward her. The camera zooms in on her naked body, a perfect Barbie replica, and the theme music, the two single notes produced by a tuba that Jaws would become world-famous for — duh duh, duh duh, duh duh — warns us that she’s about to get attacked. The Reader’s Digest story about the Liard River Hot Springs bear attack used similar stylistic tactics, only the rogue predator on a killing spree was a black bear instead of a shark. And the “almost naked” woman was an actual human victim. 

At the root of my discomfort about the sensationalized story was not only the conscious fear of being attacked by a wild predator, but an unconscious one too, which began to take up space in my body. The fear of what it meant to be a girl on the brink of adolescence in the North. 

Learning survival strategies for a different kind of threat

Growing up, I wore my brother Brendan’s hand-me-down clothes — grunge jeans that hung off my sapling frame and baggy Nirvana T-shirts — with pride. I cut my long blond hair into a mushroom cut, a popular hairstyle in the early 1990s, just like he did. We rocked out to the same music: the Offspring, Pennywise, NOFX. I remember sitting with my brother in the back seat of our parents’ Dodge van, drumming on the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats, Green Day full blast on the stereo, gleefully bellowing the lyrics: WELCOME TO PAR–A–DISE!

On the weekends, he played in hockey tournaments and I religiously attended, even travelling with the team to away games. The ice was my brother’s preferred habitat, the place where he seemed the happiest, where he came alive. My mom said she used to take him to the arena where they lived at the time, in Brooks, Alta., when he was a baby, and his eyes would follow the game, watching the players zip back and forth. By the time Brendan could walk, he could skate.

For me, the hockey arena was a different kind of wilderness. The other players’ younger siblings and I would scurry up and down the side ramps, chasing rogue pucks that flew over the glass, and search beneath the bleachers for sticky quarters to buy scorching hot Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and bags of hickory sticks from the vending machines. They called us “rink rats.” We were scavengers of sorts, allowed to freely roam the arena. But when my brother set foot on the ice, I would rush back to the bleachers where my parents sat and watch him like a hawk. I’d perch behind his team in the players’ box, cheering until my lungs were hoarse. As they played, the scent of the boys’ damp, sweat-saturated hockey gear — gloves, pads, socks, uniforms — filtered up toward us. I secretly loved that smell, even when, after games, my brother grabbed me and playfully threatened to zip me up in his equipment bag. 

Brendan’s dream — like many other boys’ dreams in Canadian towns and cities — was to play on a team for the National Hockey League. Somehow, when we were kids, it didn’t seem so far out of reach. We were of a generation force-fed those inspirational slogans printed on laminated posters tacked up on the walls: IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT. Brendan was always one of the strongest players, and our family organized our lives around his great love and his dream of playing in the NHL. 

While I had begun to struggle with a growing sense of my body as an object of appraisal, never quite measuring up, my brother had to contend with his own perceived shortcomings: He was always one of the smallest guys in his class and on his hockey team. Over the years of playing minor hockey in Peace River, coaches often told him, “Too bad you aren’t bigger.” That he wasn’t an “alpha male” — a term that seemed to imply being physically big and dominant-spirited — weighed on him. 

Our coming of age in a resource town in northern Alberta would require different survival strategies. I would learn how to avoid getting unwanted attention from boys or men. I would learn how to fawn and please, but also how to physically fend off an attack and defuse threats — not only from bears, but from boys and men. Defensive tactics of a different kind. Even then I sensed that the cultural onus seemed to be on us, as girls, to protect ourselves from harm.

“I would learn how to fawn and please, but also how to physically fend off an attack and defuse threats,” writes Moyles of her early adolescent experiences in northern Alberta. ”Not only from bears, but from boys and men.” Photo: Markus Lenzin

And so, at 13, I signed up for a self-defence course. I learned how to hit an attacker in the “vital areas,” jabbing the eyes, striking the nose, jaw or temple. How to carry car keys between my knuckles when walking to my vehicle at night. I didn’t even have my learner’s permit yet, but that was a trick I’d carry with me long into adulthood.

When he was 15, Brendan started getting “fucking smashed,” as he liked to say, with his hockey teammates on the weekends. He tried to hide it from my parents; alcoholism ran on both sides of our family, our mother always warned us. She spoke often of her childhood, growing up with an alcoholic father whose own father, a Ukrainian immigrant, had struggled with substance abuse. But booze flowed like the river in the North. The only way to drink was to drink hard. Get blackout drunk. “If you can’t remember what happened, you know it was a good night,” the saying went.

Brendan gifted me with a mickey of lemon gin, hidden in a small wooden chest he’d made in his Grade 11 industrial arts class, the summer I was 14 years old. My first sip of alcohol triggered cringe and disgust, followed by a warmth that rocked my body like ocean swell. I tasted relief in alcohol. I swam in the sea of disembodiment. The fear and anxiety that was gradually accumulating in my girl body found release. 

We drank religiously every weekend in the bleachers at Friday night hockey games, at bush parties, in gravel pits and next to the gravesite of Twelve Foot Davis, a legendary trapper who’d improbably struck it rich on a 12-foot-wide gold mining claim during the Klondike gold rush. We got high, standing atop a large cement pad where Twelve Foot’s remains were entombed, overlooking the Peace River Valley, the lights of town glittering down below. We gathered around stacks of burning pallets, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” blasting out of one of the hockey gods’ vehicles. Boys on shrooms and cocaine dared one another to jump over the dancing flames. Someone emptied a jerry can of fuel on the fire and it exploded. We waterfall-chugged and drank until we couldn’t walk. We drank until the red and blue lights flickered through the bush and the RCMP extinguished the flames and shut down the party and everyone drove home drunk.While we’d been trained to deter problem bears, and to protect ourselves against predatory wildlife attacks, there were quiet, embedded risks to growing up in northern Alberta. There were other predatory forces we wouldn’t see coming — and no soundtrack to indicate an incoming threat. 

Out of the shadows: confronting sexual violence in tree-planting

It was my intoxicated classmate at the bush party, stumbling into the back seat of one of the hockey gods’ trucks. The next week at school, they wouldn’t call her a victim, they’d call her a slut. 

Don’t be a Chrissie — she had it coming.

“Bear spray is more effective than a gun,” my dad had informed my classmates and me in his presentation before our field trip to Swan Hills. “It’s faster and safer.”

How many of my female classmates were also thinking what I was thinking? 

Maybe it could work on guys, too.

As teenagers, we had a significantly greater chance of dying from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose, or operating vehicles or ATVs while drunk, than of being mauled by a bear. Yet, in some ways, we were better equipped to fend off predatory wildlife than we were to cope with social pressures and substance abuse. As my brother and I began to prioritize partying on the weekends, we inherently spent less time with our family on the land, camping, canoeing and hunting. We were just teens in a small northern town, doing what teens do. Experimenting beyond the boundaries of our family culture, moving toward independent social behaviour. But there were consequences to our actions; too many of our peers died — far too young.

We toasted our lost friends like fallen comrades, pressed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s to our lip, and taunted one another on, drink, drink, drink, drink.

On that Grade 10 field trip to Swan Hills, we didn’t encounter a single bear.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Though his father is a famous carver, it’s not lost on writer Julian Brave NoiseCat that their Secwépemc and St’at’imc ancestors were best-known for their intricate weaving. In his new book We Survived the Night, he pays tribute to their traditions by braiding memoir and on-the-ground reporting into the arc of a Coyote Story — legends of the trickster forefather of the Interior Salish peoples. In his 2024 documentary Sugarcane, co-directed with Emily Kassie, NoiseCat investigated the history of the St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school near Williams Lake, B.C. where his father was rescued from an incinerator as a newborn baby, and mapped the intergenerational impacts of residential school on his family and community of Canim Lake.

We Survived the Night widens the lens, looking at the ways colonialism has disrupted Indigenous lives, pushing many nations to the brink of annihilation and erasure — as well as the resilience and power of people who continue, like Coyote, to persist in survival, mischief and resistance. His reporting takes him to communities across the continent, from the unrecognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina to the Nuxalk Nation in coastal B.C. to the Tlingit waters in Sitka, Alaska, where he reported the excerpt below.

– Michelle Cyca, bureau chief of conservation and fellowships

This is an excerpt from the chapter “Red Herring” in We Survived The Night, published Oct. 14, 2025 by Random House Canada.

Down at the docks, I clambered aboard a Depression-era vessel named Ellie IV captained by Steve Johnson. Ellie IV is outfitted with a skiff, but the skiff’s motor was broken. So, when Steve’s crew went out to pull trees loaded down with herring eggs, they had to row like the old times. Steve is on the water about 270 days per year. He set 73 trees in 2022, yielding thousands of pounds of eggs to feed many Tlingit. Steve pointed the bow north, and we motored out of town past Daxeit Mountain. But the herring were nowhere to be found. So, when we reached Nakwasina Bay, Steve gave up on fish eggs and started looking for seals instead.

At Nakwasina, a mountain named Anaahootz towers over the site of Steve’s ancestral summer village. In the alpine, Steve says you can still see breakwaters built by Tlingit ancestors during the Great Floods. On the shoreline, you can see where rocks were leveled for canoe landings and houses. After the creation of the Tongass National Forest in 1907, the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian were displaced from villages and harvesting spots across southeast Alaska, like this one. Because they were considered “trespassers,” their dwellings and structures were sometimes even burned.

But the Tlingit way is coming back. Steve tries to live how his grandfathers and grandfathers’ grandfathers lived. “I think our way of life is better than the Western way,” he told me. “A lot of it is difference in worldview. Western culture is focused on giving status for what you are or what you own. Native culture is focused on what you give back and give away.” He continued, “Humans aren’t supposed to be super capitalistic and hoarding. Most civilizations are based on helping each other.”

Puttering around his ancestral bay, Steve couldn’t find herring, seal, or any of the other plenties of the past. Just a few generations ago there were many successful harvesters. But it’s all dwindling: fish, fisherfolk and fish-based civilization. With neither fish nor seal in sight, Steve turned Ellie IV around and offered a poem instead.

The red herring,

does he cross the mighty Bering? 

Nobody knows what he sees,

but his eggs taste good

to you and me.

Oh, the mighty herring

he cannot fight.

He only lives

because of flight!

Everything in the sea

waits to eat thee,

but he is still, oh so free.

Come with me

and cut a tree

and herring eggs

there will be.

The Tlingit see fewer herring in the sea; 2022 was a better year than the ones immediately prior, but according to harvesters, things look precarious. More whales and sea lions have started journeying up to Alaska from California. They eat a lot of herring. So do hatchery salmon. There was a diesel spill north of Sitka during the herring spawn. It’s unclear how that impacted the fish. And it’s also unclear what effect climate change is having.

What is certain is that commercial fishermen pluck thousands of tons of herring out of the sea, killing them for their roe before they spawn. Historically, everywhere else the commercial sac roe fishery has gone in Southeast Alaska, the herring have been brought to the brink. Sitka is one of the only places where enough fish remain to support a commercial fishery.

Native harvesters say the surviving herring don’t act like their ancestors. Perhaps this is because fewer fish make it past age five. Or perhaps it’s because the fish have to dodge a high-octane fleet before they spawn. Or maybe there’s something else happening out in the warming, plastic-filled Pacific that harvesters and scientists don’t yet see. Whatever the reason, the herring have become less predictable, making local and traditional knowledge less valuable while the harvest becomes more challenging and expensive. With gas prices soaring, subsistence isn’t so cheap. Which all made the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, the activist Herring Protectors and the Tlingit wonder why, in 2022, the Department of Fish and Game authorized the largest-to-date herring catch of more than 45,000 tons.

As commercial herring fishery looms, W̱SÁNEĆ hereditary chiefs try to protect ‘last gasp’ of the fish in Salish Sea

And I was wondering the same thing. Because I came to Alaska to see how the Tlingit were cultivating and protecting herring. But what I witnessed was less straightforward. At the Board of Fish meeting, the number of voices for herring conservation vastly outnumbered those for herring commerce. But Louise Brady’s Herring Protectors and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska were fighting a losing battle.

For one, the Board of Fish does not base its decisions on the number of people who testify at meetings. It bases them on aerial surveys as well as the number of fish projected in population models. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicted a large spring herring run. Activists pointed out that herring were not consistently surveyed by fish and game until the last half century and that by then the fish had already been decimated. This meant that, in their view  the view of a people whose oral histories and management of fish populations stretch back centuries and even millennia, rather than decades — the department’s baselines were far too low. And here was a fundamental problem. Activists and regulators were telling completely different stories based on different facts and philosophies. State regulators said they were managing the fish well, that the industry was being responsible and that as a consequence there were more fish in Sitka Sound and that those fish could be safely caught in higher numbers than ever before. Activists and tribal leaders, in contrast, said that the state was managing herring irresponsibly, that the industry had brought fish populations to the brink across Southeast Alaska and that the commercial fishery needed to be curtailed if not shut down in Sitka Sound. Each side relied on its own body of knowledge and each side was working from its own belief system about the proper relationship between people and fish. And so the Board of Fish was presented with two diametrically opposed perspectives.

To bridge this yawning divide, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska suggested amendments to the department’s management practices to protect older male herring, who Tribal Knowledge Keepers say lead the schools to their spawning grounds. They also suggested that rules governing the commercial herring take in Sitka be made more conservative to match the rest of Southeast Alaska. Neither recommendation was seriously entertained by the Board of Fish. But that was not the Herring Protectors’ and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s only problem. Nor was it their most significant.

The greater issue the allied activists and tribal leaders faced was that they were less practiced at influencing the Board of Fish and more divided than the commercial herring industry. While activists and tribal leaders agreed herring needed to be conserved, they disagreed on almost everything else. At times, Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors seemed to argue that the commercial herring fishery should not just be curtailed, but completely shut down. Moreover, they believed the state fundamentally did not have the right to manage herring in the first place. According to the Herring Protectors, herring should still be under the management of the Kiks.ádi, who stewarded the fish for millennia. The Sitka Tribe of Alaska agreed with the Herring Protectors on the importance of Tlingit knowledge and the need to conserve fish, but they did not want to shut down the commercial fishery, merely reel it in. And while the tribe had filed a lawsuit claiming the state failed to effectively manage the herring fishery for subsistence use, they did not go so far as to question the authority of the Board of Fish.

Meanwhile, the commercial herring industry was more unified politically and economically than ever before. Most commercial fishermen had recently formed an informal co-op to fish together and split profits, a move that largely marked the end of the every-man-for-himself days of the herring season. These commercial fishermen and the fish processors who buy their fish had grown so cocksure that they even filed proposals with the Board of Fish to regulate the subsistence herring fishery more aggressively via a permit system for harvesters, and to deregulate the commercial fishery by opening herring spawning areas previously closed to their boats. With stunning bravado, they filed a proposal to do away with a regulation requiring the Board of Fish to balance commercial and subsistence interests in its management of the herring fishery. While activists and tribal leaders sought to curtail the commercial herring fishery, the industry sought to curtail the infinitesimally smaller subsistence herring harvest. The industry group filing these proposals even called itself the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance. It was shockingly bold. And it worked. 

As the Board of Fish neared a decision, three of its members approached the Sitka Tribe’s leadership, offering an off-the-record hotel room meeting at which Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors were not welcome. The tribe was under the impression they would be meeting with a friendly group of seiners. But that was at best a misunderstanding and at worst a bait and switch. Because when tribal leaders showed up at the Hotel Captain Cook, they came face-to-face with the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance. And they could not walk away. Because the Board of Fish members present made it clear that if the two parties did not come to a compromise then and there, their obstinance would influence the board’s votes.

After that meeting, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska abandoned their proposals and the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance abandoned theirs. The status quo would remain. And the Herring Protectors could do nothing but protest.

While tribal leaders, industry executives and state regulators were focused on the Board of Fish, harvesters confided in me that they were equally concerned about a stealthier threat: the herring egg thief.

One subsistence harvester said about half of his 73 trees were stolen. Paulette didn’t set quite that many but lost a similar portion. A third harvester netted only about 25 or 30 bags of eggs and was unable to fill his freezer. A fourth said he had to set more branches than ever before to provide. “Theft is becoming more of a problem,” that last harvester told me. “People don’t want to do the work.”

Herring lay their eggs on the branches of trees that have been submerged, like this one in Howe Sound, B.C. Tlingit fishermen have reported their trees — and herring eggs — are being poached for their value. Photo: Amy Romer / IndigiNews

Everyone had a theory of whodunit. Maybe it was one of the out-of-towners who didn’t have eggs to harvest in their own bays? Maybe it was a harvester who had promised to fill too many freezers? Maybe it was someone dealing eggs?

I was told a freezer box of herring eggs could fetch as much as US $600 on the black market. At least one herring egg dealer has faced years of jail time. And one harvester was accused of making his living off the trade.

Or maybe, said others, it wasn’t a Native but a spiteful seiner? A couple of commercial fishing boats had distributed eggs on branches to community members one weekend in an effort to repair race relations. But when had those guys learned to set trees?

No, no, said others. Those trees were set directly in the flow of treated sewage that drains into Sitka Sound. Those eggs weren’t stolen. They were shitty!

Paulette’s honey, Andrew, recorded a suspicious figure unloading a boat in the middle of the night. His footage looked like one of those grainy Bigfoot videos. He showed it to a few trusted friends—ones who had been ruled out in the townwide game of Herring-Egg-Thief Clue. But none of them could make out the man or his boat.

Meanwhile, I kept waiting around for someone to be transformed into an owl. That is the traditional Tlingit sentence for greedy harvesters, after all. But no one has gone poof! and hooted off just yet. The Tlingit Grinch remains at large.

On her way into Sitka’s Totem Park, Louise drove past the blue house in the Presbyterian settlement where her great-grandfather Peter Simpson once lived. She had just lost her fight at the Board of Fish and she needed to figure out her next move. “When I’m feeling tired, I remember everyone who fought for us to live as we are intended to live,” she said. “This is a really sacred place because this is where our people died.”

Squamish Nation celebrates return of herring harvest

Totem park sits on a point that juts into Sitka Sound beside Ḵaasda Héen, more commonly known by its English name, Indian River. The small park has a trail lined with about 20 poles and house posts from multiple Tlingit clans as well as the Kaigani Haida, but none from the Kiks.ádi. About half are replicas carved by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Over the years, the replicas have been restored, recarved and replaced. But long before Totem park was a public space full of other clans’ poles, it was the site of the Kiks.ádi’s last stand against the Russians.

In 1799, the Russians built a fort at Starrigavan Bay on the north side of Sitka. There, they abused Kiks.ádi women and tried to turn Kiks.ádi men into servants, like they had with the Unangax̂ (Aleuts). Conflict was brewing when, according to Tlingit oral history, the Russians tricked an unwitting Kiks.ádi aristocrat into eating human flesh — an unthinkable taboo. To protect their home, dignity and pride, Louise’s forebears formed an alliance with some of the other Tlingit clans and took revenge on the Russians, burning their fort to the ground and killing about 150 people — 20 Russians and 130 of their Unangax̂ allies.

After the Kiks.ádi chased the Russians out of Sitka in 1802, a shaman named Stoonook predicted Alexander Baranov, the first governor of Russian America, would return with his fleet for retribution. The Kiks.ádi built Shísgi Noow (Young Second-Growth Fort) from over a thousand second-growth spruce logs. The fort comprised fourteen buildings and had an angled palisade designed to deflect cannonballs away from the structures and into Ḵaasda Héen. Gunports were carved into the walls and a trench was dug all the way around. The point was chosen because its surrounding shallow waters would help keep Russian ships and their guns at a distance. The clan moved all seven of their clan houses inside the fortification. And they sent messengers to the neighboring clans who fought with them in 1802 requesting military assistance.

The shaman Stoonook was correct and as summer turned to fall in 1804, the Russians sailed out from the Russian American capital in Kodiak. The first Russian vessel to arrive in Sitka was the Neva captained by Yuri Lisyansky. The Kiks.ádi and the Russians scouted out each other’s forces and positions, intermittently meeting to negotiate. Both sides, it seems, were at least half-heartedly trying to avoid conflict. But they were also biding their time. The Russians needed more ships and men if they were going to take Shísgi Noow. The Kiks.ádi needed neighboring clans to come to their aid if they were going to drive out the Russians. According to Lisyansky’s journal, the Kiks.ádi met with the Russians. Their head men performed a chiefly dance demonstrating their status, ferocity and physical prowess. The next day, three Russian ships outfitted for war plus 250 Unangax̂ kayaks arrived to join up with the Neva.

With not one other clan answering the Kiks.ádi’s call to arms, the Indigenous Sitkans prepared for war alone. According to lore, most of their gunpowder was hidden on a nearby island. So, before they could engage in battle, a canoe full of young high-caste Kiks.ádi men, all future clan leaders, paddled out to retrieve the munitions. They were brash and traveled without cover of darkness. And on their way back, they were spotted by the Russians. A firefight ensued. Accounts differ, but either a Russian round or the spark of a Kiks.ádi musket ignited the gunpowder. The canoe blew up, killing all aboard.

With clan opposites nowhere to be found and future clan leaders dead, a warrior named K’alyaan prepared the remaining Kiks.ádi force of about 800 for what he believed would be his last stand. K’alyaan wore a helmet made of cedar gnarl carved into an effigy of a raven. He painted his face and right hand black in the “Fallen Raven” style, signifying he intended to fight to the death. He carried a dagger, but his main weapon was a blacksmith’s hammer taken from the first Russian killed near Starrigavan in 1802.

The Unangax̂ towed one of the Russian ships to the mouth of Ḵaasda Héen. The ship opened fire. Then the Russians sent in a landing party fronted by the Unangax̂ as cannon fodder. The Kiks.ádi split their forces. One group emerged from the fortress howling like sea lions: “HU-HU-HUUU!” They met their attackers head-on. Another emerged from the forest at their flank. Meanwhile, K’alyaan hid on a log floating downriver and then snuck up from behind, attacking the enemy with his hammer. His helmet, considered sacred clan property by the Kiks.ádi, has a notch cut into its beak by a Russian axe. The outflanked Russians and Unangax̂, their guns and other metal weapons gleaming in the sun, looked like a school of herring out on the water to the Kiks.ádi defenders. As the Kiks.ádi closed in, the attackers fled for their lives. Most of the men in the landing force were either killed or wounded, including Baranov, who was hit in the right arm by a ricocheting Tlingit bullet. That night, the Kiks.ádi women stripped the bodies of their enemies and left them naked on the shoreline. The white men gleamed like slain fish, according to Kiks.ádi tradition.

With Baranov incapacitated, Captain Lisyansky took charge of the Russian forces. The captain, however, was in the middle of Russia’s first circumnavigation of the globe. Wary of another defeat, Lisyansky took a more cautious approach heavy on siege tactics: bombardment, negotiations and waiting. The battle went on for days. Every so often, as the Russians and Kiks.ádi traded shots from afar, the defenders scampered out of Shísgi Noow, collected cannonballs that had glanced off their fortress and fired them right back at the fleet. But as their ammunition dwindled, the Kiks.ádi knew they could not hold out. They convened a council to discuss options while continuing to negotiate with Lisyansky. A few days into the battle, the two sides reached agreement. That night, the warriors inside the fort sang one last song. “It was an extremely sad song from the heart of everyone in the fort. It expressed their pain and anguish at the outcome of this great battle,” recalled Kiks.ádi historian Herb Hope. “The song ended with a loud drumroll and a wail of anguish.”

The next morning, Lisyansky sent in a landing party. When they entered Shísgi Noow, the fort was almost completely abandoned. The Kiks.ádi had left behind a few cannons, a couple dozen canoes, as well as dried salmon and herring roe. With the clan gone, a conspiracy of ravens had taken up residence. It was as though the clan had gone poof! and transformed into one of their crests.

Lisyansky had been played. The negotiations were a ruse. For days, the Kiks.ádi had been evacuating Shísgi Noow under cover of trees and night. Elders and young children went first, according to oral histories, followed by mothers with infants. Adult men formed a rear guard as the clan marched north past Nakwasina Bay, where Steve Johnson still harvests herring eggs.

At Point Craven in the Peril Strait across from Angoon, the Kiks.ádi set up a new settlement called Cháatl Káa Noow (Halibut Man Fort). This location, according to Kiks.ádi oral sources, was chosen to blockade Sitka and give the clan a base from which they could return to the sound to fish and harvest. The Kiks.ádi did not begin to resettle in Sitka until 1821. By then the Russians had built their own impregnable fortress, renamed Sitka “Novo Arkhangelsk” (New Archangel) and designated the Kiks.ádi homeland the capital of Russian America. When the original Sitkans returned, the Russians kept a cannon trained on their village at all times.

But in the long run, it was the clan houses and not the Russian American outpost that remained. In 1867, the Russians sold Alaska to the United States for US $7.2 million — even though the Russians never signed treaties with Alaska Natives like the Tlingit to legally acquire that vast territory. In the 1980s and 1990s, Louise’s father, Bill Brady, helped another Kiks.ádi, Herb Hope, retrace the route of their clan’s survival march across Baranov Island. And in 2019, archaeologists rediscovered Shísgi Noow.

As Louise walked the land where her ancestors fought and died for their clan’s survival, she came upon fresh eagle down on the forest floor, the kind Kiks.ádi leaders wear in their headdresses and blow onto the ground as a blessing at the beginning of their chiefly dances — another sign of her connection to this place, her clan and their past. Louise’s situation was like that of the Kiks.ádi Ravens after the Battle of Sitka. She threw herself into the Herring Protectors’ fight at the Board of Fish. But her strategy didn’t align with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s. Like the clans in 1804, their forces were divided and, partially as a result, defeated.

Louise gave up studying the Board of Fish and the thousands of ways to influence it. “The Board of Fish is really soulless,” she told me. “It’s numbers and it’s formulas.” She was retreating from the Board of Fish process, which she views as inherently colonial. “We’ve been trying for a long time not to rock the canoe,” Louise said. “And where has that gotten us?” According to Louise, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has no right to govern herring. She believes the fish fared better under the jurisdiction of clans like the Kiks.ádi. And when you take a regional, multigenerational view — an Indigenous view — that is likely true. Rather than spending time debating the wonky details of proposals, models and formulas, Louise wants to focus her energy on bringing back ancient clan governance. “The koo.éex’ is our policy. The ceremony is our policy. The coming together as allies is our policy,” she said. To achieve this end, Louise said she was pondering more confrontational tactics, to take the fight directly to the fleet in future herring seasons, like K’alyaan with the Russians some 220 years ago.

From the shores of Ḵaasda Héen, Louise and I looked out at the sound where the Russian fleet once anchored. Louise remembers when herring spawn was so thick here, you could stick a paddle in the water and it would stand up on its own. “Our ancestors didn’t die in vain,” she said. “When I said, ‘I am a Herring Lady’ and ‘I am Kiks.ádi’ for the first time, I didn’t know what that meant.” 

As the Herring Woman mulled her next move, it felt like she was determined to walk the path of a martyr. And I wondered if that was the only way to save these fish. Then an eagle, Louise’s clan opposite, called out, its high-pitched whistling cry carrying across the water out into the vast Pacific.

In We Survived The Night, Julian Brave NoiseCat combines memoir, oral history and reporting — including from Tlingit territory in Alaska — to weave a contemporary portrait of Indigenous life and resistance.

Excerpted from We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning by Julian Brave NoiseCat. Copyright © 2025 Julian Brave NoiseCat. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

We all eat and drink. And some time later, the excess must come out the other end. But where do you “go” in Toronto, especially if you’re in the city’s parks? 

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the lack of public washrooms in the city. Cafés and libraries were closed and so were their washrooms. More businesses put up door or window signs stating their washrooms are for customers only. When nature called the options for excreta depended on sex. For women it usually meant holding it. Men had it easier due to their plumbing — with a bush or the side of a building offering enough cover. 

“Clean washrooms make parks accessible and inviting for immigrants,” my colleague at University of Toronto, Ambika Tenneti, said. Her PhD research looked at strategies to engage newcomers in urban forests. In other words: how to increase the connections between people and nature for new Canadians. “In my focus groups the women said we need more washrooms for females. The lines are too long. In multi-generational families, the women often have to take the children or the elders to the washrooms. Men don’t have to do that. There is never a lineup for the men’s toilets. Clean washrooms also make the parks feel safe for immigrants.”

Public washrooms in the city’s parks are maintained by Toronto’s Parks and Recreation division. Some of the washrooms are seasonal, opening from spring to fall each year. Some of the washrooms are more than 50 years old, are not winterized and thus closed to prevent frost damage to pipes and wiring. Where are people supposed to “go” in the winter when the bladder or the belly needs relief?

Toronto has hundreds of parks for people to enjoy. But for some, a lack of adequate washroom facilities is a barrier to accessing the city’s green spaces. Photo: Kamran Jebreili / The Associated Press

The lack of public washrooms was emphasized in a report by Toronto Public Space Committee. This volunteer collective of people are “passionate about public space,” including public washrooms. In 2021 the group published “Gotta Go TO: A Public Washroom Strategy for Toronto.” The report called for the city to invest in public washrooms, not just for health and hygiene reasons but as a basic civic service. 

The same year the city launched the Park Washroom Enhancement Program, with the goal of upgrading or rebuilding 125 park washrooms over a decade. This work is now underway, but it can’t come soon enough — or in enough places. The new washrooms will be open year-round. What a relief it will be for park users. “Washrooms are one of the top five priorities when planning a hike,” said Laura Strachan, the board chair of Let’s Hike T.O., a “hiking community in Toronto open to everyone with a focus on people of colour, newcomers and young adults.” 

“We could do longer hikes and have more events in the parks all year if there were open washrooms,” Strachan said. “Now we have to limit our hikes to five kilometres. We could increase it to 12 kilometres or more if there were washrooms. You can tell where the good spots are for washrooms in the parks because you see the used toilet paper or Kleenex there. It’s gross.”

Public washrooms in Toronto have always been a delicate subject. Toronto the Good — an old moniker from when the city was stuffy, monochromatic and presumably godly — didn’t plan for where to expel the excreta. The first public washroom opened in the city in 1896. It was for men only. Women had to fight to get a public washroom. There was a brief interest in building more public washrooms but this ended in the 1920s, thanks to NIMBYism — or “not in my backyard” enthusiasts — from businesses and residents, and lack of interest from politicians. 

Park People, a non-profit agency that advocates for public parks in Canada, noted in its 2023 Canadian City Park Report that public washrooms were the top amenity its survey respondents said they would like to see more of in parks.

In Toronto, Park People partnered with the city to launch the InTO the Ravines program in 2020. This aims to get more under-served communities to know, enjoy and therefore protect the ravines — the wondrous necklace of green river valleys in the city. Whether it’s picnics for a birthday party, barbecues with friends or guided winter walks along the nature trails, it is easier for community groups to like and appreciate the ravines when the public washrooms are open, clean and safe.

“You have to strategize before you even go out to the park. Don’t drink a lot before you go. When organizing events, it becomes even more complex as the group of people literally have nowhere to ‘go,’ ” said Minaz Asani-Kanji, a co-founder of Good Futures Collective, a consulting group that specializes in environmental and community-led research.

How to have your period in the woods

In 2012, Canada signed a UN agreement that affirmed access to washrooms was a basic human right. The UN has since clarified that the right applies in public spaces including parks. The City of Toronto is doing a series of public consultations to review its Parkland Strategy — the long-term planning process for the city’s parks. The review includes community engagement sessions to gather feedback from various users of the parks. I went to one held by Black Environmental Initiative, a non-profit agency.

“I am not surprised that toilets came up in the conversations,” Muzamil Gadain, the project leader at Black Environmental Initiative, said. “It’s one of the most pressing issues that people have with the parks and their facilities.”

Washrooms need to be functional, but the design does not have to be Toronto’s usual brand — utilitarian and about as graceful as a pig on ice skates. Thankfully, the city seems to be coming around to this. Toronto Public Space Committee recently picked three top designs in its TO the Loo!: Toronto Toilet Design Challenge. The designs ranged from the elegant to pop-art inspired. Public washrooms in parks can be both useful and beautiful. Most importantly they must be open, year-round.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Cowichan Tribes v. Canada decision has sent shockwaves through the legal and political landscape. The landmark ruling found that the Quw’utsun (Cowichan) Nation has Aboriginal Title to Tl’uqtinus, their village site on Lulu Island located at the mouth of the Fraser River — 780 acres of privately owned land in what is now part of Richmond, B.C. 

After the decision was released in August, B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma wrote, “This ruling could have significant unintended consequences for fee simple private property rights in B.C. that must be reconsidered by a higher court.” She added, “Our government is committed to protecting and upholding private property rights, while advancing the critical work of reconciliation.” John Rustad, leader of the BC Conservative Party, ratcheted up the hysteria, texting supporters, “A shocking B.C. court ruling puts YOUR property rights at risk.” 

The political tremors stemming from the Cowichan decision are not surprising given the profound value we place on private property rights. But nor should we be surprised by the declaration of Quw’utsun’s title to their territory. The nation has tirelessly exercised its Indigenous Title, as grounded in its own laws, both prior to and after colonial settlement. At the same time, the nation has continuously fought for the recognition of Aboriginal Title, a more truncated understanding of Indigenous “property” legible within the Canadian legal system and protected by the Canadian Constitution.

Instead of viewing the Cowichan decision as a grave threat to private property, it’s worth assessing how we have arrived at a point when First Nations must go to the courts to establish their interest in land they never ceded. We need to consider how the endless denials of Indigenous Title, rather than a meaningful and lasting engagement, have produced this contentious moment in B.C.’s land politics.

The long, failed history of denying Indigenous Title in B.C.

The historical record is filled with acknowledgements of Indigenous Title and numerous failed attempts to deny it. In 1861, James Douglas, then governor of the colony of Vancouver Island, wrote to E.B. Lytton, secretary of state for the colonies in London, explaining, “As the native Indian population of Vancouver Island have distinct ideas of property in land, and mutually recognized their several exclusive and possessory rights in certain districts, they would not fail to regard the occupation of such portions of the colony by the white settlers, unless with the full consent of the proprietary tribes, as national wrongs.” Reflective of his broader land policies, Douglas acknowledged that Indigenous nations had a proprietary interest in land, which in other correspondence he described as “Indian title.” For much of his tenure, he was consistent in arguing such title must be extinguished through treaties prior to the active colonization of Indigenous territory.

B.C. Conservative Party leader John Rustad has fanned the flames of hysteria following the Cowichan decision, declaring that it puts property rights across the province at risk. Photo: Chad Hipolito / The Canadian Press

After Douglas retired, Joseph Trutch took the helm of land and Indigenous policy and quickly worked to bury the previous governor’s acknowledgement of Indigenous Title. In 1870, the Aborigines Protection Society — an international human rights organization founded to advocate for the rights of Indigenous people under colonization — wrote to the B.C. governor, Anthony Musgrave, to critique the colony’s handling of Indigenous issues. Trutch was charged with writing the official governmental response. As part of the public record, he wrote, “But the title of the Indians in the fee of the public lands, or of any portion thereof, has never been acknowledged by government, but, on the contrary, is distinctly denied.” Trutch’s words ring hollow when set beside Douglas’s prior remarks, but he was successful in placing a cone of silence over the title question. 

Despite Trutch’s fervent denials, First Nations in B.C. never doubted they held unextinguished title to their territories. Emerging from an Indigenous delegation that traveled to England in 1906 to present their grievances to the Crown, and gatherings centred on the land question throughout the province, Cowichan Tribes drafted the Cowichan Petition in 1909, a remarkable document that built a legal and political argument for the recognition of their title and associated land rights. From its outset, the petition stresses “from time immemorial the Cowichan Tribe of Indians have been the possessors and occupants of the territory including [the] Cowichan Valley containing a large area situated within the territorial limits of the said province of British Columbia.” The petition continued: “The lands belonging to and claimed by the said Cowichan Tribe as aforesaid were never ceded to or purchased by the Crown nor was the Indian title otherwise extinguished.” Upon being delivered to the Crown, the Cowichan Petition spurred other Indigenous nations that had long been advocating for their rights to draft their own petitions, including the Nisg̱a’a in 1913 — momentum that persists to this day. 

The petition, penned 116 years before the recent Cowichan decision, underscores just how long the Quw’utsun Nation has been organizing in support of its title.

Two years after the Cowichan Petition was drafted, Indigenous leadership from the B.C. coast converged in Victoria to make their title case directly to Premier Richard McBride, a long-time vocal critic of any policy that might acknowledge Indigenous interests in land. The goal of the delegation was to push for a legal test case on their title to go to the courts. 

Channelling Trutch 40 years earlier, and anticipating Rustad more than a century later, McBride responded to the Indigenous delegation, stating, “the Indians had no title to the unsurrendered lands, and, as a consequence the government would not take the question to the courts, feeling that there was no proper question for submission.” Yet, much like conservative leaders that came before and after him, he was unsuccessful in burying the matter of Indigenous Title. 

The momentum behind the drive to recognize Indigenous Title was significantly stalled in 1927 when the federal government introduced Section 141 into the Indian Act. The legislation banned lawyers from offering legal representation to Indigenous people without permission from the Department of Indian Affairs, who were clearly not forthcoming with approvals. But even this draconian act of limiting the right of legal representation afforded to all others within Canada was not enough to end Indigenous Title claims.

When the legal blackout was lifted in 1951, the movement for Indigenous Title recognition gathered steam again. In 1973, the Calder case, brought by Frank Calder of the Nisg̱a’a Nation, represented the first recognition of Aboriginal Title by the Supreme Court of Canada. As John Borrows, a leading scholar of Indigenous law at the University of Toronto, explains, “While the court declined to grant a declaration of title due to a technicality, six members of the court concluded that Aboriginal Title was a ‘historic’ right protected by their ‘original’ occupation of land prior to European arrival.” Three judges argued that the Nisg̱a’a Title was extinguished through B.C. joining Confederation and in light of colonial settlement, and three argued that it had never been extinguished, opening the legal door for the broader acknowledgement we are now navigating. But the political reaction in B.C. was to deny, deny, deny, even in the face of subsequent losses in the courts and the ongoing activism of Indigenous nations. In 1989, Jack Weisgerber, then B.C. Minister of Native Affairs, claimed, “Aboriginal Title was extinguished — if it ever existed — by actions of the colonial government and by the Government of Canada.” 

Kʼalii Xkʼalaan (Portland Inlet) in Nisg̱a’a territory, where the First Nation first drafted a petition in 1913 to advocate for its title. In 1973, Nisg̱a’a politician Frank Calder won the first recognition of Aboriginal Title in the Supreme Court of Canada. Photo: Marty Clemens / The Narwhal

The intransigence of the B.C. government only provoked more Indigenous activism, with blockades, often on logging roads, growing across the province in the late 1980s and 1990s. As Dene scholar Glen Coulthard writes, “If history has shown us anything, it is this: if you want those in power to respond swiftly to Indigenous Peoples’ political struggles, start by placing Indigenous bodies (with a few logs and tires thrown in for good measure) between settlers and their money.” The blockades certainly caught the government’s attention. To facilitate access to land and resources, the B.C. government grudgingly began to acknowledge the presence of Aboriginal Title and agreed to launch the B.C. treaty process in 1993.

Government laid groundwork for Cowichan decision through inaction, denials

The fight over title continued in the courts, at treaty tables and on the land, but in the early 2000s, the matter of private land became a flashpoint. In 2002, the B.C. government launched a referendum on the treaty and land claim process. The first question put to the public asked whether they thought private property should be expropriated for treaty settlements. 

Nearly 85 per cent of respondents voted no to what was widely criticized as a leading and inflammatory question. However, a much more complicated political and legal process was already underway on Vancouver Island. In 1887, the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company was granted more than 800,000 hectares of private land located along the southeastern seaboard of the island as payment for the 117-kilometre railway between the company’s two namesake cities. 

Locked out: how a 19th century land grant is still undermining First Nations rights on Vancouver Island

When Quw’utsun Nation leaders penned their petition in 1909, they were likely unaware that most of their land was already enclosed in the land grant to the E&N Railway Co. But in the late 1990s, under the B.C. Treaty Process, the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group, which represented the Quw’utsun Nation in the treaty negotiations, learned that most of their territory was off the table for negotiation, as it was so-called private forest land. 

In 2003, TimberWest, one of the principal owners of these private forest lands, sought to overturn limits placed on pesticide use on private land. Cowichan Tribes First Nation, one of the communities comprising the broader Quw’utsun Nation, exercised its rights and title in limiting the use of pesticides in its territory, noting the disruptive impacts on land-based spiritual and cultural practices. TimberWest, arguing against the presence the First Nation’s rights and title, highlighted that the lands at issue “form part of the E&N Railway lands, which unlike most fee simple lands in British Columbia were created by a grant from the federal Crown in 1884.” Not only did they have the date of the land grant wrong, but they also lost their extinguishment argument: the Environmental Appeal Board sided with Cowichan Tribes, arguing that “limiting Aboriginal people to challenging only the original grant of fee simple, rather than any subsequent Crown‐authorized use of the private land, would be contrary to the purpose of section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which is to effect a reconciliation of pre‐existing aboriginal interests with those of broader Canadian society.”

In other words, Cowichan Tribes’ rights and title to private land were viewed as unextinguished by the E&N land grants, and moreover, those rights had enough force, even in the context of private property rights, to allow the First Nation to limit industrial use of pesticides within parts of their territory. This case, and arguments supporting the presence of Aboriginal Title in the context of private land, were an outgrowth of the 1909 Cowichan Petition and anticipated, albeit in a different context, the recent Cowichan decision. 

In Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island, home to the Hul’qumi’num-speaking First Nations, the surrounding forests are privately owned as a result of the E&N land grant — the largest concentration of private forests in B.C. Photo: Mike Glendale / The Narwhal

Ironically, the Canadian government itself may have set the Cowichan decision in motion. The Quw’utsun Nation is represented by the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group, which brings together five (formerly six) First Nations together in the pursuit of a modern treaty, three of which were involved in the Tl’uqtinus case. All five nations are impacted by the E&N land grants; over 85 per cent of their territories are enclosed as private property by the E&N land grant. Frustrated by Canada’s refusal to engage with the issue of private land at the treaty table, the group submitted an appeal in 2007 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking redress; the commission has yet to rule on the case. In response, the Canadian government argued the international commission did not need to hear the case, as a domestic remedy was available to the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group: the nations could seek a declaration of Aboriginal Title through the Canadian legal system. 

Quw’utsun did just that, although not on lands enclosed by the E&N land grants: they pursued their case on Lulu Island at the mouth of Fraser River. The provincial government might want to pause and recognize that the federal government essentially laid out a legal pathway for the First Nation, which it pursued and then won. 

The Cowichan decision is the result of more than a century of Quw’utsun’s articulations of their title to land that was never ceded or surrendered, as eloquently articulated in their 1909 petition. While public outrage at the recent declaration of Aboriginal Title to private land on Lulu Island is being directed at Quw’utsun, the blame should be placed at the feet of the various colonial, provincial and federal governments that have sought to bury the issue of Indigenous Title over and over again. 

Rustad, in particular, seems intent on keeping this tradition going, arguing, “It’s not that we don’t need to address title … but Indigenous Rights and private property rights cannot co-exist. … Do we protect those private property rights under the foundation of society?”

But repeating tired mantras about the extinguishment of Indigenous Rights and Title doesn’t make the words true. It didn’t work a century ago, and it doesn’t work now; these arguments have lost time and again in the courts, even as they fan the flames of outrage. 

If Canadians are alarmed and angry by the recent court decision, they should look to those Canadian leaders who still deny the presence of Indigenous Title, despite knowing they are on shaky ground. Even in 1872, Trutch privately wrote to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, warning him against settling the title question: “If you now commence to buy out Indian title to the lands of B.C. you would go back of all that has been done here for 30 years past and would be equitably bound to compensate the tribes who inhabited the districts now settled and farmed by white people equally with those in the more remote and uncultivated portions,” he wrote. One hundred and fifty-three years later, Canada is finally starting to reckon with its debts. 

On Vancouver Island, residents are paying voluntary rent to First Nations

John Borrows writes, “Aboriginal Title in British Columbia is a prior and senior right to lands. … Indigenous law created Aboriginal Title as an independent legal interest prior to Canada and the province coming into existence.” Recognizing this flips current narratives and should invite a much more honest nation-to-nation dialogue. As legal scholars Sarah Morales, of the Quw’utsun nation, and Estair Van Wagner have argued: “The court’s decision is a chance for a new beginning grounded in an honest reckoning about how property rights were created, and how they can be reshaped to justly and honestly improve how we live together on these lands.”

This is a moment in which creativity is required. Despite private property being treated as sacrosanct it’s worth remembering that such property has always been encumbered by laws and regulations, yet our political imagination closes when we consider the presence of Indigenous Title. We could follow the Trutches of the world and wish away the thorny title question and compound the problem. Or, we can open our imagination and consider how to breathe life and jurisdiction into Cowichan’s title even if it coexists with an Amazon distribution facility on Lulu Island.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

If you’ve been watching the Toronto Blue Jays on this historic World Series run, you’ve probably seen the Government of Ontario’s advertisements about mining in the Ring of Fire.

As I tuned in from the bandwagon the other night, blue jerseys gave way to coveralls, headlamps shining through tunnels and a Canadian flag waving in front of a forest and lake with a highway hugging its shore; all as a narrator laid out the economic potential of minerals underground far, far from these places. 

Taken at face value, the ads might have you thinking roads in the Ring of Fire are paved (because that’s what you see), mine shafts are dug (because that’s what you see) and mills are processing ore (because that’s what you see). 

One small problem: that’s not really the case. I don’t know much about baseball, but I do know that actual mining in the Ring of Fire is much further away — and much more complicated — than those ads portray. 

So why are the commercials about mining in the highly coveted and highly undeveloped region on Treaty 9 territory, some 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, Ont., framed as a project that’s already underway?

It’s a clever marketing play. 

Millions of World Series viewers seeing the landscape, supposedly already altered by roads and mines, may make a more comfortable leap to accepting more roads, mines and more development in general. 

If the ads on the Blue Jays broadcast showed the sprawling peatlands, scattered with trees, lakes and rivers that actually make up the Ring of Fire, it might feel a bit harder to sever: the first cut is the deepest.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been pushing for a mining boom, especially in the far-north Ring of Fire region, shown here. Advertisements paid for by the province have aired during World Series broadcasts, showing workers in tunnels and developed mines and roads, but it’s not the Ring of Fire they’re showing. Photo: Casa Di Media

The Ring of Fire, as it’s come to be known, is said to hold massive amounts of the minerals needed for things like electric vehicle batteries. Just how much has been debated, with many critics suggesting the province’s estimate of $90-billion worth is overstated. The province has also said mining in the region will add $22 billion to Ontario’s economy over three decades. (Since taxpayers shelled out for them: the Globe and Mail found Ring of Fire ads took up more time than any other spots, aside from Rogers itself, and could have cost up to $150,000 per spot — more if we go to game 7.)

Despite a slew of mining claims and exploration work as companies have taken interest in the region over the past couple decades, there is no mine actually in operation there yet. The most advanced proposal is Wyloo Metals’ Eagle’s Nest nickel, platinum and copper project. At a press conference on Oct. 29, announcing a community partnership agreement with Webequie First Nation, Greg Rickford, the provincial minister charged with Indigenous affairs and economic development and partnerships in the Ring of Fire, hinted at just how far along mining development is: “Later today, I’m meeting with Wyloo, and the question to them is going to be, how ready are you now to proceed with at least the preliminary activities associated with mine construction.” That doesn’t exactly sound like the ting of shovels hitting the ground. 

The day before the press conference, Neskantaga First Nation, a nearby community of roughly 400 people, requested the federal government undertake an impact assessment of the Eagle’s Nest project. In an Oct. 28 letter to federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin, Neskantaga Chief Gary Quisess said the mine “is likely to cause severe adverse effects in areas of federal jurisdiction, particularly on Indigenous peoples including our First Nation, fish and fish habitat, as well as migratory birds.”

The Ontario government’s ads mention Indigenous economic prosperity, but not First Nations’ constitutional rights — which is no small issue, and already a flashpoint. 

This summer, people from both Neskantaga and Attawapiskat First Nation gathered along the Attawapiskat River at one of the points that would be crossed by a road to the Ring of Fire. They reached the area by boat, setting up a camp to protest the region’s development without proper First Nations consultation.

The province has various agreements signed with some First Nations and faces massive opposition from others. Those agreements concern roads going to the region, which Webequie and Marten Falls First Nations support, not necessarily because of access to the mining district, but because of the way road access could improve quality of life for their communities. 

Broken trust and Bill 5: First Nations rally against Doug Ford’s controversial mining bill

In September, the province also made splashy announcements about a $62-million investment to ready the “gateway to the Ring of Fire,” in Geraldton, Ont. The money was for upgrading existing roads, but Rickford noted in a press release, “This is more than a roadworks project — it’s a signal that Geraldton is a gateway to one of Ontario’s greatest assets in the face of economic threats from the United States, and that our government is serious about supporting the communities that anchor the North.”

These exaggerations play into the public’s perception of these massive projects with massive impacts that are not yet realized.

But being hyperbolic about progress on its pet projects is a Ford government hallmark. It has also been criticized for talking up the construction starts on Highway 413 — the proposed 60-kilometre highway running through the Greenbelt, north and west of Toronto. Those starts include an embankment for a future highway connection to the 401 and resurfacing existing roads near the proposed route, but that’s not exactly building a highway — and it hasn’t happened without criticism. 

Like the Ring of Fire ads, it wields the influence of the sunk cost fallacy. The further we get into building costly roads and mines into the remote region, the harder it is to step away and take that loss. But the promotions obscure the fact that we haven’t gotten that far, and Ontario’s pitch for economic prosperity is still well out of the strike zone.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

With Ontario’s contentious Bill 5 enacted, special economic zones could be coming to Canada for the first time. Touted by Premier Doug Ford as a sure-fire way to “unleash” the economy, the bill has sparked growing public resistance over its implications for Indigenous Rights, the environment, labour standards and democratic accountability. The global track record of special economic zones suggests these fears are well-founded.

First introduced at Shannon Airport in the Republic of Ireland in 1959 and now found in roughly 120 countries, special economic zones are designated areas where developers receive incentives like tax breaks, reduced regulation or legal exemptions. 

But while they’re pitched as a silver bullet for barriers to investment and job creation, special economic zones often bring heavy costs. In Mexico, lax oversight in the maquiladoras (special factory zones) led to hazardous waste and pollution that harmed surrounding communities. In China, rapid industrial expansion at the Shenzhen industrial hub significantly worsened water quality. In India, special economic zones are linked to land grabs, displacement of farmers and rural instability. 

Ontario drafts special economic zone rules around ‘the opinion of the minister’

Along the Mekong River — in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – special economic zones have been connected to wage theft, forced overtime, dismissal of pregnant workers and even human trafficking. Globally, when it comes to working conditions, common concerns associated with special economic zones include long hours and inadequate health and safety standards. The International Labour Organization notes findings of persistent violations of basic protections, including freedom of association, collective bargaining and gender equality. 

These are important cautionary tales: special economic zones offer short-term gains for developers, all too often at the expense of long-term public well-being.

Bill 5 opens the door to these same risks here in Ontario. Under the Special Economic Zones Act, the government can exempt “trusted proponents” or designated projects from provincial laws including municipal by-laws, environmental safeguards and labour protections. This threatens healthy wetlands, watersheds, peatlands and endangered species across the province. Indigenous communities who rely on these ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable. 

Even more alarming is a little-noticed clause: “certain causes of action are extinguished.” In plain terms, people harmed by activities in a special economic zone would be blocked from seeking justice in court. Consider a scenario in which a community finds itself stuck in the middle of a special economic zone and is unable to seek compensation if residents are harmed by contaminated drinking water.

Bill 5 also legislates away respect for Indigenous Rights. The bill itself was developed and passed without meaningful consultation and it fails to acknowledge the right of Indigenous Peoples to free, prior and informed consent. 

Not incidentally, Ford has singled out the so-called Ring of Fire in northern Ontario as among the first areas to be designated as a special economic zone. But for many Indigenous Peoples, this region is not a resource frontier — it’s sacred land, rich in biodiversity and cultural value.

Ring of Fire road could improve quality of life, but lead to cultural and environmental change: report

As Tlingit political columnist Rose LeMay puts it puts it, “Nothing says colonization better than special economic zones.” It’s worth asking: how would residents of Ford’s own Etobicoke North riding react to being dumped into a regulation-free zone without consultation?

If the pursuit of economic growth undermines labour rights, tramples environmental safeguards and sidelines Indigenous communities, we are setting ourselves up for long-term problems. That’s not prosperity — it’s a regulatory race to the bottom.

Responsible development requires clear standards, meaningful community input and true partnerships that respect the people and ecosystems of Ontario. It builds shared prosperity for all, not just for developers.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.