But Catface Mountain isn’t the only thing visible from Tofino. In the foreground sit tracts of weathered, sad-looking, prefab reserve housing. “We’re not looking for hand-outs,” says the Ahousaht’s chief councillor, John Frank, shouting above the crashing surf at the south end of Flores Island; nearby, two men hunt for chanterelle mushrooms on an otherwise empty white-sand beach. “I’ve watched as millions of dollars in trees leave our land, without seeing one red cent come our way,” the 59-year-old adds, pointing to the quilt of shaved mountainsides and ragged clear-cuts that sweep up and over the shoulders of the range. “This mine is going to benefit us for seven generations.”
The youngest of 13, Frank, known locally as Johnny-O, bought his first boat, the Falcon III, at 18, and, like his brothers, fished for herring, salmon, and sea urchin. “Four hundred of us would leave the harbour on April 15. For six months, we’d be gone fishing. Everyone would make $20,000, $30,000,” he says. “And then, bang,” a decade ago, the fisheries collapsed. Soon, the suicides started. “I was almost one of them,” he says. “I’d fished for 40 years, day in, day out: that’s all I knew.” After selling his boat and fishing licence, he was still $30,000 in debt. “I lay down in the bath, and I thought: I’d rather be dead.” That was six years ago, when unemployment in the community of 900 peaked at 80 per cent. In 2005, the Ahousaht recorded one suicide attempt for every 10 members. Today, says Frank, it’s a happier reality. Unemployment has been slashed by a third—thanks largely to forestry, fish farms, and that mining project.
So a whole new war is brewing in Clayoquot’s placid woods. “The rage the mine will generate will make the logging protests pale in comparison,” says Mullen. “We’re not prepared to allow them to destroy a world heritage site,” another well-known local environmentalist told Maclean’s. These are “so-called ‘traditional lands,’ ” she adds. “They haven’t got treaty yet.” That’s a striking change of tone from the recent past, when greens argued—loudly—that the Nuu-chah-nulth, who have called Clayoquot home for 10,000 years, deserved both title and final say.
Well, it was a beautiful arrangement while it lasted. The greens used native title claims to boost their credibility at the blockades. First Nations, meanwhile, used their media-savvy allies in land-use disputes they’d once fought alone. The game is changing rapidly as a new landlord takes over from the Crown, and just where public sympathies will fall is hard to predict. The greens taking on a multinational forestry giant is one thing, after all—a grossly impoverished First Nation, quite another.
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