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By the time I catch up with Gary Johnsen, president of native-owned Iisaak Forest Resources Ltd., at a rustic-chic resto in Tofino called Shelter, the ancient Nuu-chah-nulth notion of hishuk ish ts'awalk—everything is one—seems lost in the bustle of Clayoquot Sound. The obvious disconnect is between Shelter's lychee-martini-sipping tourists, the ones staying at the $800-a-pop lodges, and the impoverished First Nations residents of Opitsaht, whose weather-worn houses can be spotted across the passage from our swank restaurant. The wealth chasm has been growing in the half-decade or so since the global jet-set discovered Mini-Maui on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
But I am more interested in another division, between the tree huggers who put Clayoquot on the map 15 years ago and the natives who stood by them on the blockades. Back then, greens and natives united to protect Clayoquot—one of the world's last great tracts of ancient temperate rain forest, with majestic, 1,000-year-old cedars—from the industrial logging that had turned much of the rest of Vancouver Island into a crazy quilt of shaved mountainsides and skinny, second-growth trees. Now, the First Nations and environmental NGOs have become entrenched, if reluctant, adversaries. I've come to find out why.
In the decade and a half since Clayoquot entered the national consciousness, the big lumber companies, Weyerhaeuser and Interfor, have packed up their chainsaws and left, tired of the hassle and unable to make a profit operating under the strict environmental rules imposed by a British Columbia government scientific panel in 1995, not to mention the spotlight effect of the area's designation in 2000 as a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Iisaak and another native-controlled logging company have taken their place. Bound by hishuk ish ts'awalk, the new enterprises aim to balance environmental stewardship with economic opportunities for the 2,500 people who constitute the five Nuu-chah-nulth tribes in and around Clayoquot. Should it succeed, Iisaak (pronounced E-sock) could just teach the Weyerhaeusers, Interfors, Canfors and others—the ones still operating in a boom-and-bust commodity business—that there is a better way to make a buck from Canada's forests.
Native-owned Iisaak Forest Resources leaves at least 30% of trees in place when it logs (Benoit Aquin)
That is, if the environmentalists will even let it try. Iisaak's founding nearly a decade ago was predicated on a written bargain between the First Nations and the environmental groups that turned B.C.'s 1993 War in the Woods into an international cause célèbre. The environmentalists promised to promote Iisaak and its products, while the company sought alternatives to harvesting in a series of untouched Clayoquot valleys that had thus far escaped the axe. In that agreement, the Nuu-chah-nulth use the term eehmiis—meaning very, very precious—to designate these intact areas. The environmentalists use the term "pristine." For a long time, while they stood together against industry, the enviros and the First Nations were able to set aside the fact that precious and pristine do not mean the same thing. Not any longer.
Logging in the virgin valleys is, Iisaak argues, the only way it can thrive. Hence the green-native pact started to come unstuck two years ago.
The Nuu-chah-nulth have, for years, been involved in treaty negotiations with the federal and B.C. governments. Control over their traditional territory in Clayoquot is on the table. In the meantime, land-use decisions in Clayoquot are made by a joint First Nations-provincial government body: the Clayoquot Sound Central Region Board. And, in 2006, that board earmarked the so-called pristines for logging.
Then, in March of this year, Ma-Mook-Coulson, a joint venture between the same five First Nations that own Iisaak and non-native-owned Coulson Forest Products of Port Alberni, B.C., began building a logging road into the Hesquiat Point Creek watershed at Clayoquot's northern edge—one of the pristines considered off limits by environmentalists. The threat of new blockades was temporarily lifted in late July, when the First Nations chiefs put their logging plans on hold and agreed to talk, inspired perhaps by Iisaak's name. It is the Nuu-chah-nulth word for respect. As I watch Johnsen slice into Shelter's grilled rib-eye, I wonder how long this tenuous détente can last. "Without a doubt, Iisaak cannot survive without ultimately getting access to some of the undeveloped watersheds," Johnsen says.
And as Iisaak goes, so goes the fate of the First Nations who own it: the Ahousaht, Tla-o-qui-aht, Toquaht, Ucluelet and Hesquiaht. Plagued by one of the world's highest suicide rates—there were 98 attempts among the Ahousaht alone in 2005, roughly one for every 10 members—the First Nations of Clayoquot live in cramped, often mouldy homes. The materials used in the prefab houses provided by Ottawa are no match for the penetrating moisture of the rain forest, a bitter irony considering the cedar that grows locally has natural antifungal properties. Unemployment on the reserves hovers around 70%. On the site of the Tofino fish packing plant that once provided steady jobs for natives and non-natives alike before it was closed for the sake of efficiency, developers are putting up waterfront condos that sell for as much as $2.4 million. "Thirty years ago, about 450 people in Ahousaht were employed in the fishing industry. Now it's dead," Johnsen says.
