Lead from the place of longest connection

Detail of the Ocean & Way of Life map produced by the Council of the Haida Nation in 2011

We’ve had a fantastic week of work and visiting here on Haida Gwaii. We were working with our friends from the Sahtu Renewable Resources Board, who came here to build relationships with each other, dive into some light conversations about the future and connect with local Haida Nation people, places and culture. It was a moving and transformative experience for all of us. One of the team’s staff Elders, in the closing circle talked about how inspired he was to be in a place where the historic and traditional Haida names are used. He talked about how that changes the way we think about land and animals, and it changes the conversation between settlers and Indigenous people of the region. It centres Indigenous knowledge and history and provides a container of governance that is clearly Indigenous-led. Shifting that perspective helps in the shift of decision-making power.

The idea that somehow First Nations can’t be trusted to lead in land use planning and governance over their own traditional territories is patently absurd, and yet many of the government negotiators of agreements between federal and provincial governments and First Nations often move from that assumption until is met head on at the negotiating table. What happens on Haida Gwaii is a prime example of what happens when that assumption is dashed. It doesn’t mean that an economy is destroyed – the biggest logging operations on Haida Gwaii are Haida logging companies. But it does mean that local people own the resources and the benefits and are the ones who are best positioned to talk about protection and stewardship because they are the ones who will live with the generational effects of long term damage.

If we can only imagine an economy where big multinational companies do the work of extracting resources, then we simply give away the benefit and reap very few of the rewards. Promises of jobs and economic prosperity are only ever seen in the short term gains like royalties paid and high salaries for a few jobs, and result in the ancient cycle of boom and bust resource town economies. Despite multinational companies reaping immense profits over time from fishing, mining, logging, and oil and gas, Canadian communities still have high levels of poverty, and dangerously underfunded health and education systems. The long-term benefits of prosperous communities, which should accrue to multi-generational social development, are eroded in favour of short term individual benefit from an injection of cash and a massive sucking out of profit to a concentrated tranche of billionaire owners and investors. Who pays for clean up in 50 or 100 years? And how are we to manage the restoration of healthy communities and landscapes over multiple generations if we sacrifice funding for social development to appease people and companies that demand the lowest possible taxation and royalty payments while a project walks away with billions in profit?

Typically in resource communities, the labour force is brought in from elsewhere and the population ebbs and flows with the activity around the mine, the plant, the refinery, the mill or the cannery. It’s natural for folks who arrive to be covered with the ongoing sustainability of the economic enterprise during their lifetimes, but Canada is lettered with communities full of infrastructure that are abandoned once the mine closes. The people who came in and built schools and stores and clinics and community centres, left once the major employer was gone, leaving ghost towns like Ocean Falls, Brittania Beach, and Field. Sometimes these towns try other reinvent themselves, but other times they just disappear, like many of the cannery towns on the coast.

But the people that remain are the First Nations. Those that were there before the companies arrived and those that are there long after. In in places like Haida Gwaii and the Central Coast, where the Great Bear Initiative was established, it is those Nations who have wrested control of the future of their places from those who would propagate another wave of exploitation, destruction and shirked responsibility. As Guujaw said the other night when we met with him, “When the province said we couldn’t manage our own territories, we said ‘we’re haywire as hell, but we couldn’t possibly wreck it worse than you did.'”

Resource development can be in the national interest, of course. More typically it is in the focused interest of investors and owners who live far from the place of activity. When that happens, we are not engaging in national building, we are engaging in the pursuit of rapidly developing wealth inequality. When we take a measured approach to resource development that slows the pace of what is happening so it can be done right it allows for economic benefits to accrue locally, it allows for long term infrastructure to be built and sustained even after the town transitions (Powell River, is my favourite current example) and it means that the damage that is done to the lands and waters can be mitigated up front and dealt with easier later, creating yet another round of local economic activity that restores the land and sea and positions it for whatever comes next, including dealing with climate change.

The story of Indigenous lands in Canada has largely been one of cleaning up from the destruction of a country that is founded on the idea of being hewers of wood and drawers of water. The hewers and the drawers leave, and First Nations are left to deal with the ecological, social, cultural and economic damage of exploitation and hit-and-run resource development.