B.C.’s chief forester has cut back logging limits on Haida Gwaii, protecting goshawk nesting habitat and cedar for Indigenous cultural use, but critics are calling for a moratorium on harvesting some of the world’s most carbon-rich forests. 

The archipelago of more than 150 islands off B.C.’s northwest coast is home to ancient cedar, spruce and hemlock forests and many plants and animals not found anywhere else. Its incredible biodiversity has earned it the moniker “the Galapagos of the North.”

Decades of intensive logging on the archipelago decimated those forests and led to conflicts that ultimately resulted in the 1988 establishment of Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, a protected area of nearly 1,500 square kilometres. But beyond the boundaries of the conservation area and other protected areas on the islands, clearcut logging continues.

Read more: The battle for Haida Gwaii’s cedars

Lisa White-Kuuyang, a Haida weaver from Old Masset and long-time advocate for protecting old-growth forests on the islands, said continuing to clear cut Haida Gwaii forests threatens Haida culture and the sustainability of the archipelago’s unique ecosystem.

“The disrespectful devastation to the land is not acceptable,” she told The Narwhal.

Lisa White-Kuuyang stands beside a culturally modified cedar in a forest south of Old Massett, Haida Gwaii. Photo: Garth Lenz

Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist and professor at the University of British Columbia, agreed. 

“These super-rich carbon areas from Northern California to Alaska should be just de facto preserved if we have any hope at all of trying to meet our global carbon targets,” she said. “As soon as we start cutting these forests, it’s like we’re just blowing a big hole into our ability to meet any of that.” 

Last month’s decision by B.C.’s chief forester set the total annual allowable cut for the three main commercial logging areas on Haida Gwaii at 776,000 cubic metres, enough to fill 20,000 logging trucks. Those trees will come from 15 per cent of the archipelago and most of them will come from old-growth forests. The majority of the trees cut on Haida Gwaii are shipped by barge to mills on the Lower Mainland or directly overseas.

At least every 10 years, the chief forester must determine the annual allowable cut in all of the province’s timber supply areas and tree farm licences. The new limit on Haida Gwaii is 16 per cent less than what it was in 2012, the last time a limit was set for the region, and 56 per cent less than what it was a decade ago. 

No one from the Haida Gwaii Management Council was able to speak with The Narwhal about the decision prior to publication. The Ministry of Forests said it can’t provide comment until the final results of the election are determined.

Clearcut logging continues on Haida Gwaii outside the boundaries of protected areas. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

Economics trump cultural, environmental concerns in setting cedar limit

The decision to reduce the amount of logging that can take place is based on the recommendations of the Haida Gwaii Management Council, which is made up of two Haida members appointed by the Council of the Haida Nation, two representatives of the B.C. government and a chairperson chosen by the Haida and the province.

Before the Haida Gwaii Management Council made its recommendations to the chief forester, it conducted a five-year timber supply review and socioeconomic analysis. That work involved examining how much forest is available for harvesting in the three main commercial logging areas, projecting the environmental impacts of logging and assessing the contribution of the logging industry to the local economy. 

The council ultimately determined that an annual allowable cut of just over 800,000 cubic metres would be sustainable for the next decade. It also recommended that the annual limit for cedar be set at 183,000 cubic metres. 

B.C. has committed to reducing carbon emissions to 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, but logging isn’t being counted in the official tally. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

Cedar is the economic driver of the forestry industry on Haida Gwaii, but it also has many cultural uses. For instance, it is used to make totem poles, longhouses and dugout canoes. The council acknowledged the need for more data about “monumental” cedars, the large, old trees suitable for these cultural uses.

The council said the annual allowable cut of all tree species needed to be reduced to protect traditional Haida heritage features, like culturally modified trees and traditional trails, and to account for a projected increase in goshawk nesting sites. 

In May, the Haida Gwaii Management Council submitted its data and recommendations, including a 70-page rationale document, to the province.

The chief forester agreed with the council on most of its recommendations and noted that more information is needed about how many monumental cedars are in the harvestable area. 

Weighing the council’s recommendations against the economic implications of limiting cedar harvest, the province set a maximum allowable harvest amount of 250,000 cubic metres of the tree per year. That’s over 6,000 loaded logging trucks.

‘Haida Gwaii has some of the richest carbon stores in the world’

Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan, a Tsimshian researcher and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, said the allocation is based on short-term economics and ignores the long-term environmental and socioeconomic impact.

“There’s always a demand for the wood, but it’s up to us to put the brakes on to be more responsible for the land,” she said.

Simard said one of the underlying problems with the timber supply review — and forestry in general — is it assumes logging is economically and environmentally sustainable because replanted stands grow big enough to replace old-growth within 80 years.

But Simard said it can take centuries to replace old-growth on Haida Gwaii, which is home to a perfect combination of muskeg and old-growth forests that stores more carbon than most forest ecosystems. “Haida Gwaii has some of the richest carbon stores in the world.”

Simard explained that young cedars rely on mature trees because they need shade to grow, so planting them in open cutblocks doesn’t allow them to meet their ecological needs. “They’re pretty much doomed for failure,” she said. 

“Thinking that you can just mow down a forest and then just put in a bunch of nursery-grown seedlings to replace it is offensive,” Ryan added. “It’s like going into a grocery store and buying all the groceries without another delivery on the way.”

Ryan and Simard also said the review made assumptions about future forest growth that are inconsistent with climate change projections. “With climate change, the second-growth forests will likely severely underperform relative to primary forests,” they wrote in a letter to the council submitted during a public consultation period, explaining that replanted coastal stands are already suffering from the effects of climate change.

And as the forest is clear cut, the wildlife that relies on the ecosystem is increasingly threatened. 

“I have great concerns over what [logging] is doing cumulatively to the biodiversity and species that live here,” White-Kuuyang said. “We have unique bears here, goshawks, ermine, owls and salmon. Salmon are a huge, huge concern culturally and even economically, providing food for our people.”

The goshawk, stads k’un, is the national bird of Haida Gwaii. Photo: Martha de Jong-Lantink / Flickr

Ryan said the situation is already dire. “You can’t have salmon without a forest and you can’t have a forest without salmon. There’s an interdependent relationship between these species in this ecosystem — and it’s been severed.”

The management council discussed the loss of biodiversity in its rationale document, but said it could not recommend reducing the allowable cut to protect habitat for species that don’t have management strategies in place. 

Ryan and Simard urged the council to put a moratorium on clearcutting to allow time to fully study the long-term environmental and socioeconomic implications of continuing to log on Haida Gwaii and recommended that the archipelago be proposed as a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

Restoring, healing Haida Gwaii forests: ‘That tree is called our Elder sister’

For White-Kuuyang, the value of cedar is not monetary. “That tree is called our Elder sister,” she said. “That’s the respect that’s given for providing us with clothing, basketry and different things that helped enable our ancestors to survive here.” 

She said the connection to cedar and the forest is inextricably intertwined with Haida culture. “If any kind of harvesting is done, it should be done respectfully, like our ancestors did it. They used wood for everything — for their homes, totem poles, clothing, heating, storage — but yet the land was in perfect shape because they selected single trees and let the rest of the forest grow.”

She said Haida Gwaii still has a chance to stop before all the forest is gone, and she and other concerned citizens have been researching solutions like creating a UNESCO biosphere in which sustainable logging could still play a role, or setting up the islands as an Indigenous Protected Conservation Area.

Cedar is used for many cultural purposes on Haida Gwaii, including making totem poles. Photo: Grath Lenz

“That could really, truly be something that would give our people some hope and some employment through guardianship, through stewardship, through restoration, through science. And that would provide healing, not only for the land, but for the people.”

In 2014, the federal government committed to protecting 17 per cent of land and inland water and a further 10 per cent of marine ecosystems. Ryan and Simard said protecting Haida Gwaii could help the government meet those targets. 

“The forests of the Pacific Maritime region, including Haida Gwaii, stand out as among the most productive, carbon rich and biodiverse of the world, and there is a global expectation that Canada is committed to protecting these ecosystems to mitigate global change now and for the future,” they wrote in their letter. 

The first step, White-Kuuyang said, is simple.

“In order to restore and heal, first of all, they have to stop the damage.”

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.

Dinners in Roberta Olson’s restaurant begin with a taste of k’aaw.

The dried herring roe on kelp is a traditional food for the Haida people, an Indigenous nation that has called Canada’s Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People) archipelago home for at least 12,000 years. As the roe crunches between your molars, the flavour and sensations combine in a wholly unfamiliar way; imagine chewing pop rocks that taste like the sea.

The restaurant, known as Keenawaii’s Kitchen (in reference to Olson’s Haida name), is run out of the living room of her home, its furniture rearranged to accommodate groups of 20 or so hungry patrons. Surrounded by traditional Haida art, facing windows that boast nearly 180-degree views of the Hecate Strait from the town of Skidegate, diners feast on a hearty chowder made from halibut, along with bites of fresh and dried salmon, clams, and herring. For dessert, wild berry pie is accompanied by nettle tea.

Once upon a time, any of the dishes on Olson’s menu could have been made using only animals and plants harvested from Haida Gwaii and from the seas surrounding it. Now, the k’aaw she serves to provide patrons a taste of traditional Haida cuisine have to be imported from Bella Bella, a town some 280 kilometres (174 miles) away on the Canadian mainland.

The Haida have a saying: G̱andlaay iinang ad sG̱uuluu G̱ihl — the water is bubbling with herring. But it’s become a linguistic relic from a different time.

The kelp forests that once provided a place for herring to deposit their eggs have all but disappeared.

Roberta Olson serves traditional Haida dishes in her restaurant, Keenawaii’s Kitchen, but increasingly, she and her suppliers are having to venture beyond the bays of Haida Gwaii to source ingredients. Photo: Roberta Olson

Historically, sea urchins coexisted with kelp, which provided shelter and sustenance for the urchins and scores of other creatures. But the local extirpation of sea otters has allowed urchins to become overpopulated, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Photo: Ryan Miller

Throughout the archipelago, what was once a lush underwater ecosystem is now an urchin barren: spiky balls as far as the eye can see.

Historically, sea urchins coexisted with the kelp, which provided shelter and sustenance for the urchins and dozens of other creatures, including sea otters, abalone, herring, starfish, rockfish, salmon, and more. Sea lions followed the herring, and orcas followed the salmon.

But the fur trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries decimated wild sea otter (Enhydra lutris) populations, and with no otters around to eat them, sea urchin populations exploded. The invertebrates gobbled up everything in sight, clearing the area of the kelp forests on which the entire ecosystem hinged.

Two species of canopy kelp that have especially benefited from urchin removal include bull kelp and giant kelp, and many species of understory (shorter) kelp are benefitting as well. Photo: Ryan Miller

Conventional wisdom holds that sea otter recovery would help to correct the imbalance, allowing the ecosystem to return to its original state — not unlike the stories told about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. And that could set the stage for the return of herring, and abalone, and other foods the Haida have relied on for thousands of years.

Thanks to modern protections and conservation efforts, otter populations along the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island have begun to recover. While there are no plans to reintroduce otters to the archipelago, with ongoing protection, it seems only a matter of time until they find their way back on their own. Locals say they’ve already seen a few lone individuals floating around the islands.

The prospect of otters returning to Haida Gwaii has some on edge, though. After all, the voracious mammals and fishermen here rely on many of the same food resources, including abalone and the overpopulated urchins.

Urchin barrens like this one, which are devoid of much of the biodiversity for which kelp forests are known, have become commonplace around Haida Gwaii since the local extirpation of sea otters. Photo: Lynn Lee

Sea otters are voracious predators that compete for many of the same food resources that local Haida fishermen target and some people in the local community are anxious about their return. Photo: Matthew Maran

Rather than wait to see what happens when sea otters return, scientists and officials from the Haida Nation, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, together with researchers from academic institutions and non-profit organizations as well as representatives from the commercial fishing sector, are now working within the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Marine Conservation Area Reserve, and Haida Heritage Site.

As equal co-managers of Gwaii Haanas (Islands of Beauty), which are part of the larger archipelago, it’s a remarkable example of cooperation, especially considering that the Haida Nation and the Canadian government have never completed a formal treaty.

Together, the researchers are studying the role played by each member of this coastal community — urchins, abalone, kelp, and so on — in order to create a mathematical model for the entire ecosystem. By doing so, they will be better able to anticipate and make policy decisions around what the eventual recovery of otters might mean — for plants, animals, and people alike.

This information will be critical, says Florida State University biologist Dan Okamoto, a scientific collaborator on the study, particularly when the interests of one set of stakeholders, like tour operators who stand to benefit from the eventual return of the charismatic otters, come into conflict with those of another, like commercial urchin fishermen.

Haida culture considers human communities a part of a complete ecosystem, rather than separate from or superimposed onto the natural world. That’s why their traditions are inextricably bound to this place, to the wildlife communities that call it home, and to the rapidly disappearing food resources the ecosystem provides. For the Haida, kelp forest recovery isn’t just about biodiversity conservation. It is also about cultural conservation, about Chiix̱uu Tll iinasdll (nurturing seafood to grow).

Map: James Davidson

If there is to be a future for the Haida Gwaii archipelago, one with a sustainable food harvest as well as a healthy sea otter population, it will require people to be actively involved in the management of the land- and sea-scape, as the Haida have been for thousands of years, says biologist Dan McNeill.

On a cool autumn morning last year, McNeill, scuba tanks on his back and hammer in hand, slipped into the cold water that flows past G̱aysiigas Gwaay (Murchison Island), one of approximately two hundred islands that comprise Haida Gwaii.

McNeill, whose Haida name is Gwiisihlga, is a shellfish specialist for Haida Fisheries and one of several scientists tasked with gathering the data that will feed into the kelp ecosystem model. On this particular day, the task was relatively simple.

Dipping beneath the surface, he swam a couple dozen feet toward the bottom, where multicoloured urchins blanketed the seafloor. Once there, he began harvesting the urchins that seemed likely to contain large enough chii, the edible gonads referred to by the Japanese name uni, to be worth hauling back to shore. The truth is, most of the urchins McNeill saw on that day weren’t worth the trouble.

Ben Penna, a Haida Fisheries Program science diver, cracks an urchin. The Haida Nation, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Parks Canada, commercial urchin fishers and many partners are working to restore kelp forests by removing at least 75 per cent of the sea urchins along three kilometres of the Gaysiigas Gwaay (Murchison Island) shoreline. Photo: Ryan Miller

“When you go down into the barrens,” says marine ecologist Lynn Lee, who is technical lead for the kelp forest restoration study, “only [those] in the first few meters are any good for the market — right against the kelp line in the shallows.” This is because urchins tend to avoid the shallowest areas, where breaking waves would thrash them about, and that leaves only a narrow strip of kelp to grow unencumbered.

After collecting a small haul, McNeill and the rest of the team he supervises began systematically dispatching the unmarketable urchins with a hammer, leaving their shattered corpses behind to serve as food for fish and other invertebrates, their nutrients reclaimed by the ecosystem.

They would go on to kill hundreds of the spiky invertebrates that day. “I think well over a half million urchins have been removed from the research site now,” McNeill says. “And there’s easily another hundred thousand [remaining].”

What might have looked like a malicious act was, in fact, the team’s effort to make up for the absence of otters here, albeit on a relatively small, experimental scale.

“We don’t have sea otters in Gwaii Haanas right now,” says Lee. “[But] what if we could mimic the effects of sea otters eating urchins? If we decrease the urchin population to the same degree that otters would, then we expect that the kelp spores will survive, and a kelp forest will start to grow.”

And that could, in turn, bolster the local population of endangered northern (or pinto) abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana) and other species that rely on kelp forest habitats to survive. In other words, if McNeill and his team can make an otter-sized dent in the urchin population, the ecosystem could perhaps begin to right itself.

Guuding.ngaay (red urchin roe) is a traditional food of the Haida people. During the urchin-removal project, researchers distributed roe to communities on Haida Gwaii a number of times. Photo: C. Houston

K’aaw (herring roe) is an important food for Haida people and many Indigenous communities along British Columbia’s north and central coast. Photo: Parks Canada

Lee’s idea is based in large part on her previous research. Several years ago, as part of her PhD work at Simon Fraser University, she compared otter-free areas with sites where the predators had been reintroduced. She discovered that otter predation suppressed urchin populations enough to benefit the abalone. Even though some of the mollusks inevitably wound up down otter gullets, the indirect and long-term effects on abalone outweighed the immediate ones, thanks to the critical habitat that the predators helped to restore.

This idea is supported by the team’s recent urchin-smashing experiment.

Six months after it began, Lee, McNeill, and the rest of the team returned to re-survey the treatment area, which spans some 20 hectares along 3 kilometres of Gwaii Haanas coastline. There, they saw bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) — an annual species that can grow up to 10 inches per day — already beginning to recolonize the area, hundreds of individual kelp spikes sprouting from the seafloor.

The control site, which did not get the urchin-cull treatment, was unchanged: a vast urchin barren, nary a kelp to be found.

While Lee isn’t willing to make sweeping conclusions yet — the data has not yet been fully tallied — her hunch is that fish abundance had also increased, as other ocean dwellers began to take advantage of the recovering habitat. “It was pretty amazing to see the change,” she says. “The ecosystem response has been phenomenally quick, faster than I had thought.”

On a calm summer day, three months after that follow-up survey, Okamoto, the Florida State biologist, and his graduate student Nathan Spindel are sorting urchins aboard a floating laboratory in a sheltered bay in the Bischofs, a string of islands about 20 minutes by boat from Murchison Island. Spindel places each animal, collected from the seafloor earlier that day, into its own tank, and after giving the creature time to acclimate to its new surroundings, seals the tank shut.

A boat sits on a quiet bay along the Haida Gwaii coastline. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

Small sensors inside the tanks monitor the amount of dissolved oxygen in the seawater and send the information to a laptop computer nearby. As the urchins breathe, the concentration of oxygen inside the tank drops. By monitoring the rate at which the oxygen level decreases, Spindel can get a rough estimate of the urchin’s metabolic rate, a proxy for its overall wellbeing.

While the findings haven’t been formally published yet, early results are consistent with the researchers’ expectations. Well-fed urchins collected near the kelp line in the control site have higher metabolic rates than those collected from the barrens. It’s an adaptation, Spindel says: By slowing their metabolism, urchins can survive longer in a barren, where food is scarce.

Later, Okamoto uses a special Japanese tool he picked up online designed for cracking urchins apart so that he can have a look at their reproductive organs. Large and butter-coloured, the gonads from these urchins are in prime condition — and they taste delicious. By contrast, the gonads of urchins collected from the barrens are smaller and darker.

“Long ago, our people knew how to harvest and knew how to keep balance so that the ecosystem still had all parts intact.”

— Barbara Wilson, Haida elder

Spindel thinks of urchins in a barren as a zombie army. “They can persist in a barren state for decades,” he says. They may find enough food to scrape by, but without adequate nourishment, their gonads won’t develop enough to be capable of reproduction, let alone to be worth placing atop a ball of rice and dunking into soy sauce. If the ultimate purpose of all biological life is to survive and reproduce, zombie urchins have only succeeded halfway.

Spindel will go on to subject urchins collected from the area where the cull was conducted to the same tests inside the sealed tanks. The shallow-zone urchins, living near the kelp line, were once again perfectly healthy, Lee tells me later. And those collected from deeper areas, where fresh bull kelp had begun to grow, showed signs that their condition was beginning to improve. In other words, the early evidence suggests that the animals are indeed responding to the intervention.

This means, at least in principle, that while the return of otters would likely result in a smaller urchin population, the overall community would have fewer zombies. They would have larger gonads, better for the long-term prospects of the urchin population.

Commercial urchin divers wrap up a day working to restore the kelp forest ecosystem off Haida Gwaii by collecting sea urchins and distributing their roe to local communities. Photo: C. Houston

Marine ecologist Lynn Lee displays a variety of sea urchins that currently overpopulate the seafloor around Haida Gwaii. She and her team are exploring how the return of sea otters might influence this out-of-balance ecosystem. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

Leandre Vigneault attaches a numbered tag to a northern abalone. The tag will enable researchers to identify and assess the wellbeing of this individual in response to changes in the health of the kelp forest ecosystem over time. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

This is potentially good news for creatures like abalone that also depend on intact kelp forests. While Spindel keeps his eyes on the urchin experiment, nearby Leandre Vigneault is focused on several sacks of abalone that divers collected earlier in the day from both the experimental and the control sites. He uses a small electric grinder to harmlessly carve out two spots in the outer layer of each mollusk’s shell, just large enough for a pair of tiny numbered tags. Having done this particular task several summers in a row, his speed and efficiency minimizes the stress to the animals, though “they do seem to have moods,” he says. Some are remarkably tolerant of the vibrations from the tool, while others twist their bodies around in a futile attempt to escape.

As he epoxies the tags onto each shell, the numbers are recorded in a logbook, along with the abalones’ sex, weight, and other data. Later, the mollusks will be returned to the locations where they were collected, and next summer, Okamoto will use their tags to identify the individuals he’s able to re-capture, and assess their wellbeing.

By doing this season after season, he’ll be able to determine whether the abalone in the experimental site, where the urchin population has been artificially reduced, are more likely to survive, how mobile they are, and whether they are more likely to reproduce than abalone in the control site. If so, then the results of this study would bolster Lee’s earlier findings, that by chowing down on urchins, otters can play a positive — if indirect — role in the recovery of northern abalone.

While that would be good news from a research and conservation perspective, convincing fishermen of the benefits of otters is a taller order.

“From our fishery point of view, the biggest threat to the sustainability of red sea urchin [harvest] is sea otters,” says Mike Featherstone, President of the Pacific Urchin Harvesters’ Association, which is also a partner on the kelp forest recovery project. As evidence, he points to areas where otters have begun to recover. Crab traps sit useless on Alaska docks because otters have eaten up all the crabs, he says. If otters return to Haida Gwaii, he fears the same could happen there, for urchins and abalone. “There will be no commercial fishing, and there will be no recreational fishing,” he says.

A red Irish lord hides on the seabed with quillback rockfish and copper rockfish behind in a bull kelp forest. Photo: Alex Mustard

The trouble with that complaint, many experts argue, is that these fisheries have only ever been commercially profitable because of the extirpation of sea otters nearly two centuries ago. In 2003, researchers discovered that large red sea urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) in coastal British Columbia could be more than a hundred years old. This means that the modern commercial urchin fishery relies upon populations that grew as a direct result of the reduction in predation by otters.

“Since the extirpation of the sea otters, the foods that we share with them have become commercialized,” says Haida elder Barbara Wilson, whose recent Master’s thesis at Simon Fraser University focused on employing traditional teachings to develop climate change adaptation strategies on Haida Gwaii.

The fur trade may have turned the kelp forest ecosystem on its side, but the commercial fisheries that grew up in its place have continued to exploit it, taking advantage of its altered, otter-less state. That exploitation may, at one time, have appeared sustainable but what does a sustainable harvest even mean in an already-altered ecosystem?

Gwaii Haanas is place where land, sea and people are intertwined. The area is protected from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of the mountains thanks to its status as a Haida Heritage Site, National Park Reserve and National Marine Conservation Area Reserve. Photo: S. Fung

Fast forward two hundred years and even the 36-year-old McNeill has noticed the decreasing availability of traditional foods since he was a child. “There’s hardly anything left. This is not sustainable as it once was.”

Indeed, while abalone populations initially increased alongside urchin populations when otters were removed, they later crashed as a consequence of habitat loss and overharvest. And the lack of local k’aaw for Roberta Olson’s dinners owes at least as much to the impact of the herring fishery over the last few decades as it does to the much earlier slaughter of otters.

The Haida have another saying: Chiix̱was gen gaguu gataa daanaay guu ga taa iijii — when the tide is out, the table is set. But now, as Roberta Olson and others have learned, the table can no longer be set simply by wading a few meters past the beach.

To achieve biodiversity conservation alongside food cultivation goals, says Wilson, will require merging traditional Haida knowledge with modern scientific evidence. “Long ago, our people knew how to harvest and knew how to keep balance so that the ecosystem still had all parts intact.” Indeed, Haida communities found a way to coexist with otters while still harvesting enough urchins and abalone to feed pre-contact populations, which likely numbered more than 10,000 people.

That balance meant the exclusion of otters from traditional food-gathering areas. The Haida hunted the marine mammals from canoes using bows and arrows or harpoons. By keeping certain areas free of otters, more food resources became available to Haida people.

The Haida people once coexisted with sea otters, but that balance has since been thrown off. The question is whether it can be regained when otters return to Haida Gwaii. Photo: Pascal Kobeh

In Gwaii Haanas urchin barrens, kelp is scarce. As a result, urchins here tend to contain too little roe to be marketable. Photo: Lynn Lee

“There was a management regime up and down the coast by all the nations. They didn’t just get rid of them,” says Wilson referring to the otters. The ancient, pre-fur trade coastline was like a patchwork quilt. In areas kept free of otters through hunting, humans had the chance to partake of the invertebrate bounty. Other areas, further from human communities, would have been available to the otters as a refuge from hunting pressure.

“They realized that balance is important, and that’s the thing that’s missing now,” she says.

As human communities moved around, the otter-exclusion zones would have shifted accordingly, allowing each exploited area the chance to recover. It wasn’t until the Haida began to supply fur traders with otter pelts that the balance Wilson speaks of began to wobble: The hunting pressure on otters intensified, and the decreasing Haida population began shifting from small, temporary villages into larger, permanent communities.

“With the return of sea otters, there’s going to be competition with commercial [fisheries],” says Wilson, as well as with the 2,500 or so Haida still remaining in their ancestral homeland, who continue to turn to the sea for food.

The picturesque Haida Gwaii coastline. Photo: Gregory Gould

If that day comes, perhaps the Haida Nation together with the Canadian government could permit the Haida people to resume their traditional otter hunting practices, in a limited, scientifically-informed manner, as some Native Alaskan communities are now allowed to do, Wilson says. “Let’s look at what our ancestors did and see what we can reinstate so we can live together again,” she says, and ensure that the Haida culture will live on for generations to come.

For his part, McNeill is trying to introduce young people in Haida Gwaii to traditionally important foods. “That’s why we’re bringing urchins into the community, into the schools, going around to the elders, handing them out,” he says. For McNeill, that’s only half the job.

“It’s one thing receiving and eating,” he says. “But it’s another thing being out there on the water, harvesting, paying your respect to the critter. All of that stuff is critically important for our culture to keep going.”

This story originally appeared on bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

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.

On islands known for their monumental works of art, the monumental trees that make that art possible are getting harder and harder to find.

Centuries old red and yellow cedar trees, the essential raw materials that make Haida poles, canoes, bentwood boxes, masks, intricately woven hats and so much more possible, are being logged at a steady clip.

And once again on Haida Gwaii, there are renewed calls to slow that old-growth logging before it’s too late.

This summer, The Narwhal travelled to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago that made international headlines in the 1980s when members of the Haida Nation blockaded a logging road on Lyell Island — a dispute that catalyzed similar fights for Indigenous rights and forest protection elsewhere in British Columbia.

In the ensuing decades, half of Haida Gwaii’s forests would be protected, a level of conservation unrivalled in most jurisdictions around the world. But the flipside of that protection was to concentrate logging on a smaller land base, allowing the assault on cedar, the tree that the Haida co-evolved with over thousands of years, to continue.

“We really rely on monumental cedars,” says Gwaliga Hart, a Haida artist and carver. “It’s greatly shaped who we are today and really is going to be the thing that defines who we are into the future as well. We don’t want to lose it.”

A stump from an ancient cedar tree at a Husby Forest Products logging operation at St’aala Kun — the site of an occupation blocking old-growth logging on Haida Gwaii last year. Photo: Garth Lenz

A lot of telephone poles

In 1862, a smallpox epidemic wrought devastation on Haida Gwaii, part of a wave of introduced diseases that killed an estimated 19,000 Haida people, leaving only several hundred survivors.

The advent of industrial forestry a century later advanced swiftly, much like that epidemic, wiping away ancient forests and cedar trees that the Haida had worked with for generations.

The protests at Lyell Island, ensuing court cases, and emerging efforts between Haida and non-Indigenous residents on the islands, solidified opposition to that onslaught and united much of the population in efforts to protect more forests and to try to ensure that local communities benefitted from what logging remained.

Since 2012, under a new co-management committee consisting of both Haida members and members of the provincial government, logging rates on the islands have been held to around 930,000 cubic metres of “timber” per year. For the decade prior to that, the “allowable annual cut” was nearly twice that rate.

Timber is the word typically used by the forest industry to describe trees destined for the chopping block and conversion to building materials.

One cubic metre of timber is equivalent to about one telephone pole’s worth of wood. If that many poles were spaced an average distance apart like you see on most city streets, you could run 930,000 poles from Vancouver to Halifax and back and then do it all over again.

A barge loaded with old-growth logs is towed up Masset Inlet. Many of the logs are from ancient cedar trees and will be processed in Vancouver. Most of the hemlock and spruce logs will be shipped overseas as raw, unprocessed logs. Photo: Garth Lenz

While logging rates have fallen dramatically on Haida Gwaii, one thing remains largely unchanged from the years since industrial forestry began. Virtually every tree logged on the islands is taken away by barge.

If those trees are spruce or hemlock, many end up in the holds of ocean freighters and are shipped overseas for processing, never to enter a mill in B.C., let alone be processed on Haida Gwaii.

If they are prized cedar trees, they are barged off the islands to be turned into lumber, fence posts, panels, shakes or shingles in distant sawmills in the Greater Vancouver area — an ongoing irritant for island residents who for decades have grappled with their islands being a fibre basket mined by others.

“If they were doing it sustainably, using the logs in place on-island, having a mill for value-added products or something of benefit to the Haida Nation, that would be a different thing entirely,” says Steven Lloyd, a health care worker who moved to the islands from Vancouver eight years ago and who frequently watches those barges moving up Masset Inlet, the body of water that cleaves deep into Graham Island, the large island on the north of the archipelago.

The blockade at St’aala Kun

With a new annual allowable cut for the islands expected soon, the speculation is that logging rates could be halved again. For some island residents and Haida Nation members like Lisa White it can’t come soon enough.

White is a Haida member who runs an art store in Old Masset. She is part of a family of renowned artists and was among a group of protesters who mounted an occupation at St’aala Kun or Collison Point last year, blocking old-growth logging at the remote site about a 45-minute boat ride from White’s community.

Husby Forest Products, the company whose logging operations were targeted, went to B.C. Supreme Court seeking an injunction against the protesters. According to court documents, the protesters allegedly included three women “armed” respectively with a knife, a rifle and an axe.

In his ruling, Justice Jasvinder Bill Basran noted that while there might be legitimate concerns about aggressive logging of cedar trees, those concerns needed to be addressed through other means, not via “a blockade involving the use of weapons.” If the Council of the Haida Nation had concerns (the council had not organized the protests and was an intervenor in the case), the judge said it needed to seek remedies through the courts.

The blockade ended. But opposition to the logging remains. In many peoples’ minds, the unprotected half of the islands is being logged in a manner that bears no resemblance to the way the Haida themselves worked in the forests for thousands of years.

“I think a whole new approach is needed,” White told The Narwhal. “I think we need to revisit the land-use plan and look at how the Haida used the forest. They used the trees for everything, but they never disrespected the forest. Everything needed respect.”

Disrespecting the land

A year after the blockade, The Narwhal walked with White through an unlogged forest about a 20-minute drive south from her store.

White eventually stopped at a younger cedar tree. A prominent strip of the tree’s bark had been peeled away, exposing the lighter wood underneath. It was one of countless cedars in the forest and others nearby that had portions of their durable, stringy bark harvested for use in weaving and other Haida artworks.

Trees just like this commonly fall in logging operations with comparatively little outcry because they lack the height and grandeur of the old cedar trees that are the raw material for poles and other Haida artworks.

“You need young trees like this for harvesting cedar bark. But they’re not protected because they have to be this big,” White says stretching her arms wide.

A searchable database maintained by the provincial government supports White’s assertions that cedar trees, in particular, are being deliberately targeted for logging on Haida Gwaii.

If all the trees on the islands are considered, just over one-third of them are red cedar trees. Yet in numerous logging operations on the islands, the amount of cedar being logged vastly outpaces the average.

Husby Forest Products has been most aggressive in that regard, and its logging of cedar trees in particular has triggered tensions between members of the Haida Nation and the Delta-based logging company for years. In the last decade alone, 56 per cent of all the trees the company logged were red cedar, and in some years nearly three in every four trees that fell were the iconic species. The Council of the Haida Nation attempted unsuccessfully in B.C. Supreme Court last year to halt Husby’s logging at St’aala Kun on grounds that the company had logged past its legally entitled limits and was on track to take down another 2,700 large cedars. 

The provincial government itself isn’t far behind in earning the Haida’s enmity. BC Timber Sales is a B.C. government agency that auctions blocks of timber. Companies making the highest bids then win the rights to log the trees, in exchange for paying the provincial government the bid price. In block after block auctioned by the provincial agency, the amount of cedar logged has averaged 45 pent  in the most recent ten years.

By contrast, Taan Forest, a company owned by the Haida Nation, logged less than the average. While the company is still engaged in the same kind of clear-cut logging operations that have galvanized protests on the islands over the decades, the average amount of cedar trees it logged over the past decade was 28 per cent.

Jeremy Calhoun, a forester with the Council of the Haida Nation, measures a monumental cedar tree in a forest south of Old Massett. Photo: Garth Lenz

Jeremey Calhoun, a forester with the Council of the Haida Nation, says that due to outcries on the islands, the provincial government’s chief forester tried in 2012 to dampen the amount of cedar being logged by telling the companies they should avoid logging more cedar than was there. The move was made, Calhoun said, “to help ensure a continued supply of high economic value timber in the future.”

With evidence in the intervening years that Husby and others failed to do that, a new order came down known as a “hard partition”, that will require companies to hold the line and log no more cedar trees than the average.

But it’s questionable just how tough and effective the new “hard” rule will be. For one, the new rules imposed by Chief Forester Diane Nicholls will not apply to the provincial government’s own BC Timber Sales. And they will not apply to portions of the land that the Haida-owned Taan Forest holds logging rights to either. Logging companies will also still be able to exceed the ceiling on cedar logging over several years, just so long as at the end of five years they are at or below the threshold. And five years, at current logging rates, is a long time.

“What’s happening to the land — the disrespect of the land — is the thing,” White says, explaining her desire for an end to all old-growth logging on the archipelago. “The Haida never clear-cut. They single-cut.”

Canoes in the forest

Dale Lore is a former mayor of Port Clements, a small community at the south end of Masset Inlet, in the heart of Graham Island. For 30 years, he built logging roads for MacMillan Bloedel, a company that dominated logging operations on Haida Gwaii, Vancouver Island and elsewhere on B.C.’s coast before becoming a ghost, just like the millions of old-growth trees it had cut.

On a sunny June day, Lore drives his pickup truck up to one of the highest points of land on Graham Island. The entire journey is along a road he built from Juskatla, where MacMillan Bloedel once had a base of operations, to an outlook nearly 1,000 metres above the Queen Charlotte lowlands to the north and the Skidegate plateau to the south. The road was built, because much of the valley bottom old-growth forests were logged, Lore says, leaving MacMillan Bloedel little choice but to move up or move out.

Looking down below, Lore said that 94 per cent of the original old-growth forest to the south on Graham Island is gone. To the north, perhaps half remains, and anything that is not protected — including St’aala Kun — is getting hit hard.

To give a sense of what is at risk of being lost elsewhere on the archipelago, Lore takes visitors to a ridge about 800 metres from the Yakoun river.

In the cool, shaded old-growth forest with its towering trees Lore points to some of the known  50 red cedar trees in this tract of forest alone that were carefully selected and individually cut down by Haida people. In eight cases, beside or near the stumps of those trees are old logs of a length and mass ideally suited to large ocean-going Haida canoes or smaller vessels used for trips nearer shore. In the other 42 cases, the canoe-length logs were gone, but it was clear that the felled trees were used as the stock for canoes because between the ancient stumps and the top portions of the felled trees were empty spaces of canoe length.

“The canoe was the tricycle, the bicycle, the sportscar, the touring sedan, the fishing boat, the war vessel, the trading vessel. It was everything,” Lore says. “You had all these different canoes and you literally needed 30 to 40 canoes per village.”

In another tract of forest, a log with the rough shape and length of a canoe sits adjacent to a stump cut sometime in the latter half of the mid-19th century. The initial, rudimentary shaping of the canoe’s bow and stern is evident along with the flattening of the top of the log in preparation for its hollowing out.

Dale Lore stands beside a moss-covered, partially shaped Haida canoe in the forest near the Yakoun River. The canoe was being shaped in the woods and work likely stopped in 1862, the year of the great smallpox epidemic. Photo: Garth Lenz

The partially carved canoe log and others like it resting in the quiet woods are a powerful sign of all that was lost when the 1862 smallpox epidemic swept through and likely killed the canoe’s carvers. But it also symbolizes something else, Gwaliga Hart says, and that is just how intelligently the Haida people used forests over the course of thousands of years, taking only what was needed, when it was needed and adding value to it right then and there.

“It’s the industrialization of things, the outside pressures and demands and the market prices defined by off-island economies, that have really been the driving force of how fast logging operations are happening here,” Hart says. 

‘It’s like Kindergarten CSI’

As part of a precedent-setting co-management regime on Haida Gwaii, rules were created to protect trees that are so intimately intertwined with Haida culture.

The most important of those rules applies to “monumental” cedar, the centuries-old giants that are the perfect trees from which to make poles and massive canoes. Any such trees found in forests that might be logged are to be left standing in islands of unlogged forest.

Other rules are in place to limit the logging of other very large cedar trees that do not meet the “monumental” definition, but that are big enough to be ideal candidates for use by Haida craftsmen and artists. Or, when the logging of such trees does take place, that Haida artists are given first rights to use those trees.

In the forests at St’aala Kun, Calhoun and three other men who have done monitoring work for the Council of the Haida Nation — Sean Brennan, Gerry Morigeau and Jonas Prevost — showed The Narwhal some of the ways those rules are being broken.

Jonas Prevost stands on a pile of massive cedar logs at a Husby Forest Products logging operation that triggered protests at St’aala Kun last year. Photo: Garth Lenz

In one unlogged old-growth forest, numerous massive cedar trees all seemed to fall magically along a proposed road right-of-way that Husby Forest Products proposed to clear. Large, monumental cedar had not been identified as such. Others had been measured and initially identified as monumental, then ordered remeasured and found to have magically fallen just below the critical benchmark measurement. Still others showed signs of the numbers spray-painted on their trunks being rubbed out to obscure their true size.

Morigeau chuckled grimly while walking through the forest, saying it didn’t take much detective work to figure out what was going on. “It’s like kindergarten CSI,” he said.

Gerry Morigeau inspects a monumental cedar in an old-growth forest at St’aala Kun, where Husby Forest Products has proposed building a logging road. Photo: Garth Lenz

Prevost called it “blatant disregard” for the rules, adding: “They’re going out of their way to change their numbers and change their evidence.”

Brennan, who has done pre-logging surveys for both the Council of the Haida Nation and logging companies said cedar is clearly driving logging company profits and the companies want to log as much of it as possible with the fewest restrictions. 

If a surveyor comes back having marked an entire cedar stand for protection or flagged too many as monumental, he or she will hear about it, Brennan says. 

“There’s often a request from somebody higher up, whoever’s overseeing the operations: ‘Go back in and take a closer look, because you guys are finding too much stuff.’ It’s capitalism 101.”

‘In the cover of darkness with guns’

Later, after driving down a network of hot, dusty logging roads, Calhoun pulled a pickup truck up to a giant pile of extremely large cedar logs that had been left by Husby at the side of the road. About the same time that Lisa White and others were protesting at St’aala Kun last year, Calhoun and others discovered that many large cedar trees had not been identified before logging commenced and were now down.

Sean Brennan, a Haida artist who also is trained to survey proposed logging blocks and identify cedar trees that should be protected, walks through a small stand of monumental cedar trees near St’aala Kun. Photo: Garth Lenz

The logs are now in a weird limbo land. Haida artisans can pay Husby the cost of logging the trees plus a mark-up through a “cultural access program” administered by the provincial forests ministry. Or, if no expressions of interest are forthcoming, Husby will presumably barge them away.

“Tell me if you’ve ever heard of anything more colonial than that,” Morigeau says.

Back in the truck, Morigeau says that despite the successful fights to conserve extensive tracts of Haida Gwaii, eradication of old-growth forests continues.

“If we didn’t allow this old-growth cedar to leave these islands, without some form of processing, I think there would be entrepreneurs lining up and saying: ‘What can we do for you?’ I’ve watched the forest industry here. The amount of jobs per volume has just dwindled to almost nothing,” Morigeau says. “I think it’s time to put the brakes on and just reassess why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you go anywhere else in the world where they’re logging thousand-year-old old-growth forests, they’re doing it in the cover of darkness with guns.”

The Narwhal contacted Husby vice-president Rob Sandberg by phone and later submitted several written questions regarding the company’s cedar logging and allegations that it had misidentified monumental cedar trees. The company declined to provide answers.

‘We could have become loggers’

Around the time Lisa White was protesting at St’aala Kun, her brother and Haida artist and carver Christian White was looking for a suitable cedar log for his current project — a peace pole commissioned by the Council of the Haida Nation that will be delivered across Hecate Strait, the body of water separating Haida Gwaii and the mainland, for raising in Heiltsuk territory.

He searched a long time.

Accomplished Haida carver Christian White works on a reconciliation pole at his workshop in Old Massett. White says the monumental cedar logs needed to make great works of Haida art are harder and harder to find. Photo: Garth Lenz

To make a monumental work of art, you need a monumental tree. Trees suitable for poles must be old. Their trunks must be large in circumference and the trunks can’t twist. Lastly, only trees whose first branches are far above the ground will do because branches produce knots. To meet those standards, a cedar must grow for hundreds of years if not a thousand or more.

After eight months looking, White thought he had what he wanted. But the log was later damaged. Eventually, the company whose logging operations his sister and others had protested against, took him to see some large cedar trees that it had cut down.

“Husby took us to where the monumentals were. I looked at several along the road in piles. I was able to get a good look at it and give it my approval,”

The pole that White and his brother Derek are working on is 10 metres long, and is being carved in the round, meaning that there are designs all around the pole, which necessitates turning it frequently to complete the work and ensure a balancing of elements.

The big, old trees aren’t there like they used to be, White says.

“Canoe and pole trees take anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years to reach this size. That’s why it’s so important for the Council of the Haida Nation to protect these trees.”

If enough of those trees are preserved and parceled out to Haida artists as needed, multiple generations can make a good living producing art, White says. He ought to know. He’s been carving for 45 years, and in that time he’s probably only gone through about 20 cedar logs.

“We could have become loggers,” he says, putting his hammer and chisel down for a moment. “But we went back to the carving art. And we made a good living, I guess.”

Poles at the museum in Skidegate on Haida Gwaii. Photo: Grath Lenz

Lose the trees, lose the culture

Two days after speaking with White at his woodshop in Old Massett, an exhibit opened at the Haida Gwaii museum in Skidegate. The new exhibit chronicled just a fraction of the 12,000 Haida artifacts known to be housed in museums around the world, works of art that Christian White and others are actively trying to repatriate to their homeland. Untold numbers more likely reside in private hands.

The exhibit’s central display is 1,300 photographs papering the walls in one room and depicting artworks, many of which were taken from, or sold under duress by, Haida people during or after the great epidemics.

Nika Collison, director and curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum, stands in front of a wall of photographs depicting some of the more than 12,000 works of Haida art that are known to be in museum collections around the world and that the Haida want back. Photo: Garth Lenz

The photographs capture the details of a finely woven hat of yellow cedar bark, an intricately rendered bear’s face outlined in white buttons and sewn onto a red and black cloth jacket, a necklace of burnished blue stone, a sculpture of two Haida in a canoe carved from fine-grained argillite, a black sedimentary rock found on the islands, and much, much more.

At some point it becomes too much to take in, which in the mind of the museum director and curator, Nika Collison, is intentional.

“It’s overwhelming. And that’s the point,” Collison says. “It’s a drop in the bucket. Thirteen hundred individual pieces. And we know of over 12,000. Think about that.”

One element common to many of the pictures on the wall is that they were carved, shaped or woven using cedar wood or bark. The association between the Haida and cedar goes back 6,500 years, Collison says, adding that no one should take losing that association lightly.

“If we don’t have our trees,” Collison says, “we’d be like everybody else.”

This article was produced in partnership with the Small Change Fund.

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 grizzly bears of Glendale Cove are the stars that draw international visitors to Knight Inlet Lodge. They are also the catalyst for one of the more than 100 successful First Nations businesses launched with the help of Coast Funds, an Indigenous-led conservation finance organization created through the 2006 Great Bear Rainforest agreements.

“It is 100 per cent First Nations owned and it opened up our eyes to opportunities beyond resource extraction and shone a light on the opportunities and benefits of ecotourism,” Dallas Smith, president of Nanwakolas Council and Knight Inlet Lodge, told The Narwhal.

The former fishing lodge was bought two years ago from Dean and Kathy Wyatt by Nanwakolas — representing the Da’naxda’xw Awaetlala, Mamalilikulla, Tlowitsis, Wei Wai Kum and K’omoks First Nations — with a $6-million investment from Coast Funds, which allocates funds across the Indigenous communities of the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii.

“It was a fair chunk of change and one of the great things is it has shown First Nations can work together in ecotourism opportunities when we pool our assets and those of Coast Funds,” Smith said.

The success of the ecolodge can be measured in occupancy rates of 90 to 95 per cent, with the majority of visitors coming from markets such as Europe and Australia.

The Great Bear Rainforest covers 6.4 million hectares on British Columbia’s north and central coast — equivalent in size to Ireland. The land is home to 26 First Nations. The 2006 agreements outlined forest practices for the area, including protecting 70 per cent of old-growth forest.

Map: Coast Funds

Coast Funds was established with funding that came through First Nations’ reconciliation agreements with B.C. and Canada, in combination with funding raised through private donations.

In addition to financial help, Coast Funds has provided help with business management and scientific training so community members can learn more about the bears and other wildlife populations.

Knight Inlet Lodge now offers 13 wildlife viewing opportunities with seven bear viewing stands, an array of small boats that take visitors up spawning channels for a closer look at the bears and 52 wildlife cameras — down from 57 as five were destroyed by wolves or bears.

As much effort is put into bear monitoring and gaining a better understanding of bear life cycles, diet and migration routes as is put into offering a good experience for customers, Smith said.

“We make sure that we are not having an impact on bear health and there are not too many boats crowding into the same inlet. You are not even allowed to sneak a cookie into the boat,” Smith said.

Four Guardian Watchmen have been trained for Knight Inlet, with another three in training, and the monitoring program is a model for managing the surrounding territories. Indigenous-led guardian programs empower communities to manage ancestral lands according to traditional laws and values.

Guardian Watchmen are the eyes and ears on the lands and waters of the Great Bear Rainforest. Pictured here are members of the Coastal Stewardship Network — one of the first projects for which Coast Funds’ board approved funding. Photo: Alishia Boulette

Knight Inlet is an example of the achievements of the conservation finance funds, which promote community well-being and Indigenous-led sustainable development and stewardship, Brodie Guy, Coast Funds executive director, told The Narwhal.

Over the last decade, more than 1,000 permanent jobs have been created, 100 businesses have been developed or expanded and 14 regional monitoring and Guardian Watchmen programs, operating across 2.5 million hectares, have been created or expanded, according to a Coast Funds report released this week.

Funding approved for 353 projects has attracted more than $286 million in new investment to the region between 2008 and 2018 and every dollar spent by Coast Funds leverages three or four dollars, according to the report.

“We are demonstrating that conservation finance, led by Indigenous people, is the key to protecting the world’s most precious ecosystems, such as the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii,” Guy said.

One key is that funding is allocated across the communities, rather than one big pot, so it avoids the gold rush mentality or competition between First Nations, Guy told The Narwhal.

“It’s completely up to the nation based on their vision for moving forward and their stewardship of the land and water in this period of — hopefully — decolonization,” he said.

Spirit Bear Lodge in Klemtu sponsors the Súa youth cultural program to support cultural reconnection with Kitasoo/Xai’xais traditions. The lodge is owned-and-operated by the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation and employs 10 per cent of the local population. Photo: Súa youth cultural program

Fisheries technicians from Lax Kw’alaams Fisheries Stewardship program hold up a red rock crab while conducting Dungeness biosampling as part of surveys occurring year-round in Stumaun Bay and Big Bay. First Nations have conducted 222 species research and habitat restoration initiatives with support from Coast Funds. Photo: Lax Kw’alaams fisheries stewardship program.

Initiatives include more than 220 species research and habitat restoration programs, 71 projects involving access to traditional foods and 50 protecting cultural assets.

The larger projects range from a renovated grocery store in remote Rivers Inlet to a unique sustainable scallop project and, so far, of the more than 100 businesses started or expanded, only four have failed, Guy said.

Most are community owned and the low failure rate demonstrates the strategic, strong and smart leadership of First Nations applying for projects, he said.

“We are moving away from a totally extractive economy with publicly traded companies coming into the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii and extracting value and leaving little value there,” Guy said, underlining that a new way of doing business has taken root.

“We are shifting from an extractive and exploitative model of development to one that has benefits for everyone. It’s not just Indigenous people that are benefitting. It’s everyone of the Central Coast,” he said.

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.