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At the edge of an ancient rainforest in the early hours of the morning, a group of young people emerges from tents on a dusty logging road ready to face another day of confronting logging industry workers and police. In a nearby valley, ecologists trudge through thick salal bushes among towering douglas fir trees and yellow cedars estimated to be up to 2,000 years old, seeking out endangered northern goshawks, western screech owls, and marbled murrelets, documenting thousands of rare and at-risk species in the extraordinarily complex ecosystem they are trying to save.
A movement to protect old-growth forests has been growing on Vancouver Island. For a year now, hundreds of people have established a network of blockade camps in Pacheedaht and Ditidaht territory in a fight to save Fairy Creek (Ada'itsx), the last intact, unprotected, ancient, coastal, temperate rainforest on the southern part of Vancouver Island. So far, police say they’ve arrested 597 people who have been fending off logging operations run by a company called the Teal-Jones Group. On Monday, as the blockade marked its one-year anniversary on International Indigenous People’s Day, enforcement ramped up. Police have taken three blockade camps including the central Fairy Creek headquarters and tensions are running high.Teen Vogue spoke with Indigenous land defenders who have been a part of the blockades.
While their fight is focused on this forest, it’s also interwoven with issues of First Nations sovereignty, decolonization, and Indigenous futures. The Fairy Creek blockade is at odds with some Pacheedaht leadership, but the Land Defenders who spoke with Teen Vogue explained how their efforts are part of a decolonial impetus to holistically consider our ecological reality. For them, forests are animate relatives that have been diligently cared for by Indigenous people for thousands of years. These communities have specific ways to respectfully engage with their non-human relatives, and these Land Defenders have found theirs.
For Elder Bill Jones, a knowledge-holder of the Pacheedaht First Nation, the blockades are a challenge to what he describes as divide-and-conquer methods of colonialism.
Bill Jones’s niece, Kati George-Jim (xʷ is xʷ čaa,) said in a press release : “Indigenous peoples are forced into the extractivist economies because of the entrenchment of poverty, where the only way out of poverty is to surrender their inherent rights and responsibilities.”
The Pacheedaht First Nation has signed revenue-sharing agreements with the provincial government, first in 2017, and again more recently, effectively giving the green light to Teal-Jones. Chief Jeff Jones and Hereditary Chief Frank Queesto Jones have asked blockaders to leave. But there’s a dispute over the forest within the Pacheedaht, as Capital Daily reported earlier this year. Elder Bill Jones has challenged the legitimacy of Frank Queesto Jones’s hereditary title and welcomed blockaders as “guests” and “forest defenders,” while being a leader on the front lines of the protest. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the Pacheedaht First Nation for comment and will update this story if we hear back.)
Local First Nations have recently announced a deferral for logging in the area, but blockaders say the deferral falls short of what is needed to protect the forest and other at-risk areas in the region.
On May 18, 2021, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) made their first arrests at Fairy Creek. They have been joined by a militarized RCMP unit, or Emergency Response Team (ERT), known for their use of force in Wetsu’wet’en territory. According to a statement RCMP provided to Teen Vogue, they have at times “been working in partnership” with Teal-Jones contractors who have operated heavy machinery, which has been used to remove blockaders from logging roads leading towards Fairy Creek, often prior to protesters being arrested. Videos of police aggression toward Indigenous youth have circulated online. (RCMP has not responded to a request for comment on allegations of aggression toward Indigenous people.)
Every night, blockaders rebuild and lock themselves into contraptions like sleeping dragons (a device where you secure your arm into a tube that is embedded in a log or cemented into the earth), tree sits, and towering wooden tripods, all in an effort to block industry workers from reaching the ancient forest.
Aya Clappis is Afro-Indigiqueer of Somali and Nuu-chah-nulth descent. For them, climate justice is about collective liberation and the Fairy Creek struggle is part of the larger movements for both.
“We need the land back to be liberated the same way that we need systems of policing to be abolished to be free… and that's tied to Black liberation, that's tied to queer liberation,” Aya tells Teen Vogue. “It's really an all-encompassing thing because the systems that gave rise to climate change are all rooted in our various oppressions and oppression is this lasting trauma that, I think, has really not allowed us to act on climate justice.”
A key issue in the Fairy Creek fight is Indigenous sovereignty beyond a legal definition. In this situation, Aya says sovereignty would mean “the local community not being confined to the extractive colonial structure in place, which forces Pacheedaht and other Nuu-chah-nulth communities and Nations to rely on logging, to rely on extraction.… “True sovereignty would be the ability to live our ways of life, to practice our beliefs and our laws without infringement from the state and industry or any other outside body.”
Aya also hopes this is a chance to build two-way communication with local settler communities, saying this is “an opportunity for us, for once, to learn from each other, instead of there being a one-sided, assimilation approach.” They also believe there’s a chance for decolonial practice, with ways to break down the colonial systems that still exist.
“The heart of the matter is a colonial one and the police presence [at Fairy Creek] is evidence of that and ongoing proof of colonialism at work,” Aya said, arguing that, “as long as the people of the land are oppressed,” policies that keep the land and water alive will be suppressed.
Part of the effort against colonialism can be educational, Aya said. For people who want to support the cause, learning about Nuu-chah-nulth people and territory could alleviate the lack of knowledge settlers operate from.
“It is quite literally almost half this island, on the west coast,” Aya explained. “If people understood who we are, they could show up in a much better way. I think that they would understand that this struggle has been going on for a few hundred years now and that our people never accepted our conditions of colonialism. They never accepted the Indian Act.”
Though Frank Jones is currently recognized as Hereditary Chief by the Pacheedaht council, Victor Peter (19) is the Hereditary Pacheedaht Chief in Elder Bill Jones’s eyes. The leadership role is one he’s already taking on during this conflict and demonstrates his attachment to Nuu-chah-nulth lands. He can remember seeing the devastating effects of logging on forests when he was as young as four-years-old.
“Trees are pretty important unless you don't like breathing. Trees are here to make us breathe,” he tells Teen Vogue. “They’re worth more standing.”
Victor said the blockaders have been peaceful, supportive, and kind people. His favorite moment yet was a prayer walk where he and Elder Bill Jones lead about 120 supporters through a police line to a blockade named Waterfall Camp. He saw one officer with a hand on his gun during the walk and told Teen Vogue he wasn’t impressed with that.
Sage Barson, an 18-year-old Iroquois Mohawk Land Defender, has seen the impacts of resource extraction industries firsthand. She joined the Fairy Creek blockades to resist the ongoing extractive process. “In my community, we can't even go fishing anymore, because there's not enough salmon. The river runs dry now,” she told Teen Vogue. “That's how most Indigenous make their profits and one of the biggest resources that we have.”
“When settlers came on to this land, they stole our culture, our language, and it still continues to happen to this day,” she said. “Fairy Creek has been the only chance I've gotten in my life to have that community and that family, [to] have that space to do ceremony and to learn the practices and the teachings.”
Sage says that despite those opportunities her experience at the blockades has been bittersweet: “Dealing with colonization and police brutality and being on the front lines as an Indigenous youth, not having the support that we need, has also been really difficult,” she said.
“As an Indigenous person, we care about all living creatures,” Sage said. “I'm not just there for the trees. I'm there for the whole ecosystem that comes with the old-growth forest because we care about the trees, we care about the insects, the moss, the salmon... all the biodiversity that comes with those ecosystems.”
Raven Brascoupe (26), a Two-Spirit, Algonquin-Anishinaabe Land Defender, spoke about how awful it is seeing the logging that has been done around Fairy Creek. But there’s a bigger story: “That's just a small percent of what's happening in the entirety of the country. To have climate justice is to make sure that all of it is protected because we've lost so much,” they told Teen Vogue.
But just as the story is bigger than Fairy Creek, it’s also bigger than climate justice. For Raven, it’s a story of decolonization and exposing the trauma of colonization and genocide. They spoke about how Indigenous resistance happens against a historical backdrop of Indian agents and reservations, the ‘60s Scoop and residential schools, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit, and the criminalization of Indigenous culture.
“To educate about that part and everything that's going on today… I think that is what decolonization is,” Raven said, adding that a holistic perspective must also be historically informed. “Since time immemorial, we were the first people of this land. We've taken care of it for so long,” Raven said. “You get to colonization and within that 150 years, look at how much has absolutely been destroyed by the hands of men, by the hands of men and greed. ”
“Give the land back to the Indigenous of those particular parts of the land because we know how to protect it. We've done it for thousands and thousands of years,” Raven told Teen Vogue, advocating for a “Land Back” mentality. “Give that land back and there will be a restoration period and we're gonna make sure of it because we are land defenders and we have always been about the land and the protection of it.”
Editor's Note: A previous version of this report listed Sage Barson's age as 17. She is 18.
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