Love Letters & Hate Mail

September 2005: Representatives from the Wet’suweetin and Gitxsan First Nations drum in support of the Tahltan Elders who went to jail in order to protest the Sacred Headwaters. (Photo by James Dennis 3rd)

Today brings the latest installment in the long-running battle between the Tahltan Nation of Northern British Columbia and mining corporations intent on the large-scale, toxic extraction of gold and copper in their traditional territory. What’s at stake here includes the traditional hunting and fishing grounds on which these indigenous people still rely to feed their families.

Despite a court injunction against the natives, the road blockade was on again this week, and police arrested great-grandmother Lillian Moyer of the Iskut Band of the Tahltan Nation for blocking the road and refusing to allow the mining equipment to enter in defiance of the court order

Today’s reports come to us from the Iskut Band press release, the Vancouver Province, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The last piece, by Joel Connelly, includes some sharp and refreshing analysis of the scorched earth politics of BC’s mining industry.

News Release: Grandmother arrested at Iskut blockade
Monday September 11, 2006 12:40 PM

Iskut, B.C. (September 10, 2006) Lillian Moyer, a 67-year-old grandmother, was arrested yesterday at a First Nations road blockade near the Village of Iskut in northern B.C. For two months, the blockade has been preventing Vancouver mining company bcMetals from conducting exploration for a copper-gold mine in the Todagin Plateau area south of Dease Lake.

Community members allege that following the arrest, bcMetals heavy equipment leaked oil into trout-bearing Coyote Creek. They intend to hold the company accountable for the spill under Canadas Fisheries Act.

“Todays oil spill is our worst nightmare coming true,” said Rhoda Quock, a spokesperson with the Iskut elders group Klabona Keepers. “It shows what happens to our lands when development is rammed through without proper
consultation.”

Lillian Moyer, who lives in Telegraph Creek, chose to be arrested on behalf of the Iskut people after RCMP informed blockaders that if arrested, they would be denied access to their fall hunting grounds.

“I am being arrested today for the people of Iskut, for the people of Telegraph Creek, and especially for our grandchildren,” Moyer told supporters. This is from my heart. I believe my ancestors are speaking through me.”

Over 100 people were present at the blockade, including hereditary leaders of the Gitxsan and Wetsuweten First Nations who traveled to Iskut to show their support.

“We are here to support the Tahltan because the rivers that flow from here connect our people, and what happens in these headwaters affect everyone,” said hereditary Wetsuweten leader Alphonse Gagnon.

The Todagin Plateau is a traditional-use area of the Iskut people and home to one of the worlds largest populations of stone sheep. Last fall, nine elders and six others were arrested at the same location for blocking Fortune Minerals access to the Sacred Headwaters the shared birthplace of the Skeena, Nass and Stikine-Iskut Rivers.*

New northern mine worries native

Great-grandmother arrested for joining blockade to stop ‘threat’
Ethan Baron
The Province
Monday, September 11, 2006

A native great-grandmother has been arrested in a bid to stop B.C.‘s first new metal mine in 10 years.

BCMetals Corp. believes the Red Chris mine in northern B.C. contains almost a million tonnes of copper and 1.2 million ounces of gold.

But Tahltan elder Lillian Moyer, 67, who was arrested Saturday, says the proposed open-pit operation south of Dease Lake would violate sacred ground, threaten traditional hunting land and ruin fisheries.

“The land means so much to our people,” Moyer said yesterday. “We don’t want to see any development up there because it is sacred land. I am doing what I can, with great feelings in my heart, to stick up for our rights and for the land, for the future generations of young children.”

Members of the Tahltan set up a road blockade June 16 to keep BCMetals from driving heavy equipment through a fish-spawning creek. On Sept. 1, the company’s application in B.C. Supreme Court for an injunction to remove the protesters was granted.

Moyer said she visited the blockade Friday night and learned that anyone arrested for violating the injunction would be prohibited from entering traditional hunting grounds on the Todagin Plateau, the site of the planned mine.

“I was listening to all this and I said, ‘This doesn’t sound right. Why are we being threatened about our own traditional land that we want to protect?’”

Natives spend a month a year camped on the plateau, hunting, Moyer said.

BCMetals president and CEO Ian Smith has said that “the Red Chris mine has received all necessary environmental approvals from federal and provincial authorities.”

On July 4, the company said it had temporarily suspended movement of equipment to explore the Red Chris site because trout were spawning at a creek crossing on the access road.

On Saturday, when equipment crossed the creek after RCMP arrested Moyer, oil spilled into the creek.

“[This] oil spill is our worst nightmare coming true,” said Rhoda Quock, chief of the Iskut band, part of the Tahltan Nation. “It shows what happens to our lands when development is rammed through.”

BCMetals said the spill amounted to less than a half-litre of grease and other hydrocarbons, which washed off the drilling rig and escaped catchment booms.

The Iskut also worry that toxic copper dust will blow from the mine to their community 18 kilometres away, and that leachate from waste ore will contaminate drinking water and fish-bearing streams.

BCMetals expects the mine will produce 50,000 tonnes of copper and 75,000 ounces of gold annually for the first five years. At current prices, that’s $440 million in copper and $51 million in gold.

ebaron@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Province 2006

Native hunters up north take aim at corporate greed
Friday, August 11, 2006
By JOEL CONNELLY

ISKUT, B.C. — Like their boomer counterparts across the border in Alaska, British Columbia’s politicians dream big dreams of industrial development, but end up spending taxpayers’ dollars on bridges to nowhere.

A $3 million bridge across the Stikine River was built in the late 1970s for B.C. Rail, even though track laying stopped more than 80 miles away.

Simultaneously, another government agency — B.C. Hydro — was planning a dam that would have put the bridge 300 feet under water.

The severity of the land has turned back the boosters, leaving this wild, gorgeous country with a non-intrusive economy — wilderness tourism and natives’ subsistence hunting and fishing.

“The story of the Stikine has essentially been one of false hopes and would-be developments … of railway lines not quite constructed; grand telegraph proposals that failed … gold mines that petered out; copper and coal deposits that defied development, and on and on,” Alaska Geographic magazine observed in the early 1980s.

Twenty-five years later, gold and copper prices are up and a global economy demands “resources” to keep expanding.

But native peoples, who inhabit the 20,000-square-mile Stikine drainage, worry that sacred places will be used and abused, and that multinational companies will “extract” wealth and then walk away.

“The health of the people and health of the land are directly connected. … Everything that we eat comes from here,” said Gerald Amos, chairman of the Nanakila Institute in Kitimat.

Marie Louie, leader of the Iskut Band, notes that several great rivers rise in close proximity among nearby mountains and meadow-covered plateaus.

“If pollution from development goes into one river, it goes into all of the rivers,” Louie said.

On the American side of the border, do we have a dog in this fight?

Yes! Three B.C. river systems where major mining development is proposed — the Stikine, Taku, and Unuk — cross the border into Alaska. All have major salmon runs.

Can subsistence hunters bring down a charging multinational company? Or form a united front against corporate tactics of divide and conquer?

It does happen. In the 1950s, Dr. Edward Teller (“Father of the H-Bomb”) championed a scheme to use nuclear weapons to carve out a harbor in Arctic Alaska. Successful resistance to “Project Chariot” united native villages.

In British Columbia, native leaders in ceremonial robes blocked logging trucks on Lyell Island in the Queen Charlottes. The protest helped create Canada’s Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.

Haida natives later went to court and won a greater voice in how Weyerhaeuser logs its lands.

The great MacKenzie Valley of the Northwest Territories was slated for a natural-gas pipeline in the 1970s. Native villages took their case to a government inquiry headed by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Thomas Berger.

Berger’s scathing report blocked the pipeline. The project is likely to go ahead, three decades later, with far more direct involvement by the valley’s aboriginal residents.

Yet, the airplane flight back down to Vancouver shows the pains of a resource economy.

At sunset, you can look down and see thousands of drowned trees sticking out of the Ootsa Lake reservoir. Ootsa is a natural lake, dammed and vastly enlarged in the 1950s. Its waters were redirected through the Coast Range to power the giant aluminum smelter at Kitimat.

The lands to be flooded were not logged. Thousands of moose, elk and woodland caribou drowned in the debris-filled reservoir. Native subsistence hunters were packed off to farms bought by the government. The result: rampant alcoholism.

At Brittania Beach, en route from Vancouver to Whistler, is a mine that once produced more copper ore than any other site in the British commonwealth.

Anaconda pulled out in November 1974, making no effort to clean up the mine and its chemical wastes.

It left behind the largest source of metal pollution in North America. A $30 million water treatment plant opened in April of this year, more than 35 years after closure of the mine.

It has made strides in environmental management, but the mining industry remains a bossy, reactionary force in British Columbia. Mining is the province’s third-ranking industry, behind forestry and tourism.

It throws its weight around. A pro-business government under Premier Gordon Campbell took office in 2001. The mining lobby began a drive to reduce by more than 90 percent the popular, newly created South Chilcotin Provincial Park, north of Whistler.

The miners backed off only when warned that environmental protests would torpedo Vancouver’s bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Vancouver newspapers love to depict B.C. environmentalists as strident and unreasonable, while putting industry’s plans in the friendliest focus.

With natives, however, the sneering stops.

They’ve been here 300 years, living off a land that has defeated boomers’ big dreams. They stand their ground, once even driving off Greenpeace anti-hunting activists who flew up from Vancouver.

Used to pushing people and governments around, mining companies may be compelled to walk humbly on the land. It’ll be a character-building lesson.

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com.

Logging in Clayoquot Sound, circa 1993

The deal that ended mass protests in Clayoquot Sound was fatally flawed. Now the Big Greens are calling foul.
Wed, 2 Aug 2006

In the mid-1990’s. almost a thousand people were arrested for blocking logging roads leading to untouched rainforest on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. What started as a grassroots campaign later escalated to a markets campaign by Greenpeace and ForestEthics targeting buyers of BC wood. The province and the logging companies were forced to the negotiating table with First Nations and environmentalists. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was drafted as a compromise – to protect a small part of Clayoquot Sound in exchange for an end to the protests.

Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS) – the folks who organized the grassroots civil disobedience campaign – didn’t sign the agreement. They condemned it for allowing logging in most of the remaining pristine valleys of the Sound. The criticisism was well-founded: the MoU was a compromise in the worst sense of the word. For seven years, FOCS has been exposing fresh clearcuts in this eco-tourism paradise.

This week the Big Greens are back on the scene, and Tzeporah Berman, now a director of ForestEthics, is “choking back tears” at the prospect of more logging in Clayoquot. But Berman and others were surely aware that Clayoquot was not protected even as they declared victory in 1999.

Mark Hume reports in the Globe and Mail:

Clayoquot opened to logging
Furious environmental groups threaten resumption of B.C’s ‘war of the woods’

VANCOUVER — More than 90,000 hectares of Clayoquot Sound — an icon of British Columbia’s wilderness and site of the largest environmental protest in Canadian history — has been opened to logging.

The decision, by a planning body known as the Clayoquot Sound Central Region Board, has met with angry denunciations from environmental groups who are warning the “war in the woods” that rocked B.C. during the early 1990s could be on again.

“This is unbelievable,” Adriane Carr, leader of the B.C. Green Party, said yesterday. “To me it’s tantamount to a declaration of war. . . . People all over the world believe that the forests in Clayoquot Sound are protected. They will not stand quietly by as chainsaws rip through the heart of Clayoquot Sound.”

It was after the fury of the past environmental protests that the government set up boards to review logging across the province and devise land-use plans. There has been limited logging in the Clayoquot Sound area in recent years, but major activity has been held in abeyance while the central region board pondered land-use options in a vast area.

Rights to log in the area are held by two companies, Interfor [International Forest Products] and the aboriginal-run [partnership] Iisaak Forest Resources. The logging companies now have to present detailed forest stewardship plans to the central region board before any cutting or road building takes place.

Clayoquot Sound, which covers 350,000 hectares of Crown land on the west coast of Vancouver Island, is a United Nations Biosphere Reserve. But development is restricted only in a core area comprising one national park, 16 provincial parks and two ecological reserves. Outside that core, development can take place in buffer or transition areas as long as it meets scientific guidelines.

The new logging is supposed to meet those standards, but Tzeporah Berman, program director of enivronmental group ForestEthics, said key wilderness areas in the middle of Clayoquot Sound will be lost.

“I never thought I’d say these words: Clayoquot Sound is going to be logged. The pristine valleys are now open to having roads blasted into them,” she said, choking back tears.

She said the decision could trigger blockades. “I hope it’s not going to come to that. But this is our worst nightmare.”

During the summer of 1993, Ms. Berman was a key organizer in a protest that drew 12,000 people (850 of whom were arrested) to a logging-road blockade in Clayoquot Sound. With the Australian band Midnight Oil dropping in for a supporting performance, staged in a clear-cut zone known as the black hole, the event became a catalyst for an international movement to save the richly forested area.

The region, which contains the largest intact old-growth rain forest left on Vancouver Island, is one of B.C.‘s major tourism attractions because of its ancient trees, salmon rivers and scenic ocean beaches.

The Clayoquot protest of 1993 was sparked by a provincial government decision to protect some areas by legislation, while opening 62 per cent of the land to logging. Environmentalists demanded that the whole area be saved, and soon thousands of protesters were flooding in to set up camp and use their bodies to block logging crews.

In a search for peace in the woods, the B.C. government later handed the issue to an international panel of scientists, who were asked to come up with a sustainable plan for logging areas not already set aside as parks. That in turn led to the UN biosphere designation in 2000. But that did not restrict industrial activity in a 58,000-hectare buffer zone and a 180,000-hectare transition area.

Jim Lornie, provincial co-chair of the Clayoquot Sound Central Region Board, said a total logging ban was never contemplated by his group.

In a decision last week, the board agreed to open eight major watersheds to logging, including areas environmental groups have long claimed are irreplaceable, such as Pretty Girl Lake, Ursus Valley, Upper Kennedy River, Clayoquot River and Fortune Channel.

Mr. Lornie said the board is seeking a balance between economic activity and environmental protection. “You really have to factor in the interests of first nations here. . . . At some point down the road they are going to want to put treaties in place and they are going to want to have some form of an economy, whatever the scale of it is, to support their people,” said.

It is expected that logging in the area would largely be done by Iisaak Forest Resources.

Francis Frank, President of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council — which represents 14 tribes on Vancouver Island, including five that are members of the Clayoquot board — said all logging would have to meet scientific guidelines.

But Mr. Frank agreed the issue could lead to blockades and to divisions within the native community.

“You face the possibility of road action again. . . . That’s coming across loud and clear that if Iisaak was to proceed and get into some of these pristine areas that they shouldn’t be surprised that the environmentalists are out on the logging roads.”

Mr. Frank said that in 1993, aboriginals largely supported the blockades. Would that happen again, even if the loggers were natives this time?

“I’m sure [environmental protesters] would have a level of support within first-nation communities. Now what degree or level, I don’t know, but I’m certain there will be some.”

Wed, 19 Jul 2006

Three arrested on informant’s evidence before alleged eco-sabotage occurred.

In January, three people in their twenties were arrested in California for allegedly planning to sabotage a power station, cell-phone tower, and a US Forest Service facility.

A press release from U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott states Zachary Jenson, 20, of Monroe, WA, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy and agreed to testify against his friend and alleged co-conspirator, Eric McDavid, age 28. Jenson will be sentenced October 3rd, and may be freed on bail Friday.

Lauren Weiner, 23, made the same deal in May. She is now free pending her sentencing hearing August 8.

The FBI accused the three of planning the sabotage in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, an underground network that targets developers, logging companies, and government agencies that destroy wilderness and wildlife habitat.

Associated Press reports:

Three days before their arrests, the three allegedly scouted the Nimbus Dam and nearby fish hatchery on the American River near Sacramento, and the Forest Service’s Institute of Forest Genetics near Placerville.

They didn’t know an undercover FBI informant had infiltrated the group. The FBI secretly rented a cabin for the group in Dutch Flat, outside Auburn, and wired the building for audio and video surveillance.

Jenson and Weiner have named McDavid as the supposed ringleader.

McDavid remains in custody at the Sacramento County jail, where he has resorted to hunger strikes in order to receive vegan meals. His supporters say he has been held in a Total Separation Unit, meaning that he spends almost all his time alone in a solitary cell.

Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network, an advocacy group “supporting all who do not compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” lists both McDavid and Jenson on its website, but its policy states “we DO NOT support people that provide information to law enforcement or snitch on allies or co-defendants.” Prisoners who testify against others are dropped from the support list.

A paid FBI infiltrator known as “Anna” is responsible for the bulk of the evidence against Jenson, Weiner and McDavid. She provided the funds to rent a house for the group near Auburn, California, which was wired to record the conversations inside.

The FBI admits “Anna” was involved in gathering evidence on 12 other anarchists. Once it was known an infiltrator was at work, activists compared notes and pinpointed a young woman who joined in a number of public protests and organizing gatherings in 2005, including Bio-Democracy in Philadelphia, an anti-OAS gathering in Miami, the Crimethinc convergence in Indiana, and the Feral Visions gathering near Asheville, NC.

“Anna” is now reported to be living in Iowa with another group of environmental activists.

“She was always asking about ALF actions locally,” an anonymous commenter wrote on Infoshop.org last month.

Other anonymous activists have posted photos of “Anna” taken at public demonstrations in 2005.

Vancouver BC, July 8, 2006 – Vancouver environmentalist Betty Krawczyk, 78, is back in jail pending trial for her protests at Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver. On Friday, July 7, Justice Brown ordered Krawczyk to remain in custody at Surrey Pre-Trial Centre until her next hearing at BC Supreme Court on September 15.

“For her own good, Ms. Krawczyk must be detained to protect the public,” Justice Brown stated. “Entering construction zones endangers Ms. Krawczyk, those accompanying her and the workers.”

Krawczyk was removed from court Thursday and held overnight for her bail hearing Friday afternoon. She appeared in a gray BC Corrections sweatsuit and slippers, her short white hair combed flat. She said the court has no right to hold her without charge. “I’m held in some sort of limbo,” she said. “I feel it’s contrary to my rights as a citizen.”

Justice Brown said she is considering criminal contempt of court charges for Krawczyk’s three attempts to stop construction in a wetlands area in May and June. Dozens of Eagleridge supporters were arrested along with Krawczyk in May after pitching tents in the path of bulldozers, linking arms and refusing to move. The Eagleridge Bluffs area now falls under a court order to prevent protestors from blocking construction to upgrade the Sea-to-Sky Highway.

“The Crown is using this as a way of keeping any sort of publicity away from issues about the way we do business in BC, and about the way the Attorney General instructs the police to arrest people,” Krawczyk told Justice Brown. “I really resent being arrested under the auspices of a corporation that’s destroying a precious bio-system – an American company – under the BC courts.”

Justice Brown then interrupted Krawczyk, saying, “This is not a place for a political speech.”

Krawczyk has four previous convictions for contempt of court. In total, she has served over a year in jail for her efforts to prevent logging in Clayoquot Sound, the Elaho Valley and the Walbran Valley.

During the hearing, the judge scolded Krawczyk for representing herself. “I have repeatedly suggested you get legal advice. I can’t give you legal advice.” But Krawczyk said the only lawyer she would work with was Cameron Ward, who is not available.

Meanwhile, Ned Jacobs of the Coalition to Save Eagleridge Bluffs reports that logging and clearing the trees and brush from the route has temporarily stopped because Bluffs volunteers have found nesting migratory birds in the path of the logging. A 200-metre wide swathe of broken earth and stumps is visible from the highway and from the air, but covers only about half a kilometer of the seven-kilometer route. He writes:

“The protesters are not giving up . . . By locating active nests of protected birds, they have delayed the destruction of the Larsen wetlands. They continue to call for a halt to this dangerous diversion and to the breaking of our Olympic promise.”

But the Coalition’s appeal of the injunction was denied by the court on July 4th, and it now appears construction will continue as soon as the nesting season is over.

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For more info about Eagleridge Bluffs, the wetlands and Kiewit Inc’s plan to blast a new highway over community opposition, visit here: mostlywater.org/node/4147