This is something really heartbreaking and ugly (that I already knew to be true and exist out there intellectually, but had not come face to face with) is recently while trying to stand up for the last of the ancient forest watersheds on Vancouver Island… seeing forest defenders coming up against pro-corporate old growth logging tribal councils forced me to really take account of the fact that someone having indigenous blood does not necessarily mean they care about the earth nor their grandchildren’s future.

The woman in the picture below says their people are a “logging nation” (and she means industrial logging for export, for profit, just to be clear, as that is what she approves and profits from). She put out a statement on their website with a bunch of greenwashing propaganda about “protecting old growth” being part of her plan, yet the cut block you can see in the third pic below was approved by her, it is all ancient old growth, and the logging operation buried salmon habitat in fallen timber and destroyed that riparian zone for centuries to come. She is lying and cashing checks while spitting in the face of her grandchildren that will have to pay for her decisions in the loss of the salmon, floods, mudslides and the lack of spiritual nourishment those ancient forests could have provided them. People like her need to be called out for the cowards, criminals and profiteers that they are (no matter what their genetics are and how flowery their promises and words are) pictures speak louder than words.

Klee Benally (a Dine author and land defender) expressed this truth in his book “No Spiritual Surrender” by saying :

“THERE'S A MONOLITHIC ASSUMPTION ABOUT INDIGENOUS POLITICS. Particularly that we all care about the Earth. This assumption establishes Indigenous identity as a virtue. But there are Indigenous fascists, capitalists, conservatives, socialists, anarchists, nihilists, extractivists etc. Some spend more time than others (particularly academics) mired in arguments of what system is best for Indigenous "futurity" or "survivance." Largely ignoring that the origin of the assumption must be contended: the imposition of colonial politics. Anthropological and social assertions of Indigenous "politics" steeped in the stench of the progressivisms of modernity, have dominated how we think about social organizing today. Indigenous organizations measure their accomplishments based on how well they're recog-nized, funded, and included in colonial order.“

- Klee Benally (from No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred)

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Pictures of the clearcut block in Walbran Valley (which sparked the Couger Blockade to protect the rest) in third and fourth pics below by Ian Hinkle (he described his experience there by sayiing this:

“Have you ever sat and truly stared into the face of devastation? I did again, yesterday. Quietly, in a BC clearcut, sitting in the remnants of a logged watershed of old-growth. Heartbreaking.

Staring into what was once stunning & complex, a rich ecosystem of old growth forest that is gone forever.

Its future will be a tree farm. Someone will claim that it is still a forest, and someone else will attack me for misrepresenting what I saw on the ground. But the biodiversity is already gone. It will never be the same. I will never be the same.

Listening to the gurgling stream—now out of sight beneath piles of slash and cut trees. Stumps with hundreds of rings so tight many cannot even be counted. Broken trees scattered in all directions. We can hear the water but it is out of sight, strangled by the waste and piles of debris of the clear cut that took out the stream. The clean water is gone, like the moisture that recently existed within the deep layers of life and biodiversity that was once here. They logged right through the stream, as if rivers have no value, as if the slash and debris don’t present an even greater wildfire risk. As if fire season isn’t now a thing.

So much for an old-growth strategy.

So much for looking after the land.

Talk and log. I feel sick today, inside. Still shaking.”