By Karen Moe
Change always starts with young people via their creativity.
They’re younger and they’re cooking faster!
Art beyond the bounds of surveillance and mind control
has the capacity to change how we think.
Elder Bill Jones
"The Trojan Horse", blocking 2000 Road. Photo: Will O'Connell
Art is the creation of something new, the making of things that have never been made before. The Oxford definition of art is: “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” Art is not confined to galleries and elitist academic commentary, though, to the artwork featured in commercial magazines or at International Art Fairs, costing thousands and, thereby, deemed credible and worthy of appreciation. Art that has the power to change how we think originates beyond the demarcations of cultural credibility; it originates in the breaking of boundaries and the undermining of what has been constructed as credible. The Fairy Creek Blockades, along with being a site of revolution through individual and communal acts of re-nurturing sensitivity, were a work of art where, on the front lines of saving eco-systems, creative skill and imagination were deployed to change the world by fighting to save it.
Old Growth Forest in the Fairy Creek area, most likely logged. Photo: Will O'Connell
Right away, the Blockades were fueled by youthful resourcefulness and ingenuity. Joshua Wright, filmmaker and youth forest defence activist hailing from Washington State, was the eye in the sky who provided the proof for the emergency at the Fairy Creek Watershed and the surrounding old growth forests that needed to be addressed right away. Joshua explains how:
"The blockade started during the COVID lockdown. I was on the US side of the border and travel was shut down. The first year of the blockade, I wasn't there in person whatsoever. But, at the same time, I was also intimately involved from the very beginning. Talk of the blockade started in July of 2020. That was when some activists I knew put me in touch with Carole Tootill and Will O’Connell and several other folks in Canada. I'd been tracking old growth logging via satellite imagery from Washington State. I learned to use satellite imagery from the Copernicus program and other satellite imagery services to track on a day-to-day basis where the logging was happening. I saw that the Teal Jones Group was road-building into the headwaters of Fairy Creek. I was desperate to do something because I'd seen that pattern before. So, I told Carole, Will and other Canadian activists about that planned logging. Fairy Creek wasn't something anybody knew about at that time. Nobody knew it existed except for a few local people. After connecting with the Canadian activists, the blockade was started on August 9th, 2020 and most of the time I was the only person who could reliably be connected to the Internet so, while there were Forest Defenders out at the blockades, I was the hub for coordinating between people and figuring out social media and trying to get the word out, trying to contact media, making press releases when stuff was happening on the ground and tracking whether logging approvals were going through. I was generally the person you could contact if you were out in the woods and you absolutely needed something to happen because I was going to be in service and up at any hour of the day trying to make it happen. I was 17 when the blockades started."[1]
Throughout the blockades, the Forest Defenders continued to use satellite imagery to set up ‘pop-up’ blockades. From the tracking of the logging through Joshua’s satellite mapping innovation, the Forest Defenders would get a head start on the next day’s logging and beat the loggers to their next cut block and, surprise, a new barricade would stop another day of destroying yet another ecosystem. Fairy Creek built upon the potential for connection and action the Internet provides, and thousands of people came.
Playful and creative camp names like Raven, Tarzan, Lorax, Whale Tail, Fungi, Green Duck, Nymph, Mud, Glow-Worm, Sunflower, Fawn, and Seed not only created anonymity, but also served to buoy the cheerfulness, represent the personalities of the forest defenders and, spoken daily when addressing one another, to consolidate “why we are here.” When you arrived at camp, you were soon asked: “What’s your camp name?” Coming up with a camp name was an initiation of sorts and you became a part of the play and the connection to place. And, of course, the cause.
Photo: Will O'Connell
Especially in the beginning, the building of the hard blocks (what land defenders build to block industry) was about art as well as blockading and, the blockades, in a lot of ways, were a series of art installations of what were simultaneously objects to block the logging and symbols to communicate why. Will O’Connell was one of the main builders and front-line blockaders. He explains how:
"If you can make something beautiful it attracts people, it draws people in, but it also makes your argument without having to make it. I think if people come and see the beauty of the forest, they don't need these logical arguments. You feel something. I feel the same way about creating art and how that inspires and changes our community and also draws people in."[2]
The young people who worked day and night building the hard blocks that would greet the RCMP the next morning used the resources and materials that were at hand. Along the roads, Forest Defenders erected installations of rocks and branches to impede the easy passing of RCMP vehicles. Deadfall was dragged from the forest to build the towering tripods, sometimes double where two forest defenders would be waiting for the raid, and always with the banners hand-painted with slogans like: No Logging in Fairy Creek or Last Stand. O’Connell relates how early on in the Blockades:
"We had a month before the Caycuse Valley was hit and we didn't know what enforcement would look like, so we had to start creating riddles. We didn't know what the cops could do or couldn't do or what type of tools they had. And so, to block the road, it became this great cat-and-mouse game of let's build some things and see what they can figure out. And so that first month was really creative because we had no feedback from the cops, so we were going in every direction."
On June 23rd, 2021, approaching the height of the Blockades in July and August, O’Connell designed an approximately 16-foot-tall elk that blocked the road to Ridge Camp, replete with antlers and tail, built from twisted pieces of wood from a clear-cut slash pile. Then there was the Screech Owl, the most intricately aesthetic work of activist art, that blocked the Gordon River Bridge in August 2023 announcing that the blockade and the urgency were far from over as the ancient forests are still coming down—and still are. The kind of creature that would span the bridge was inspired by the natural context of the site. As an example of the interaction of context and creation, O’Connell explains how:
"We were going to make a creature. We had all these different ideas like a bear, for example, but I saw these two pieces of curved and pointed wood and I thought, oh those kind of look like the ears of a screech owl. And so, we went from there.” The creature emerged from the forest. “It was all definitely collaborative,” O’Connell states, with Indigenous and settler working together to build these imposing figures that literally and symbolically blocked the further destruction of the ancient trees and some of the last of the earth’s pristine eco-systems."
The tale of the Trojan Horse is particularly dramatic and demonstrates the ingenuity and tenacity of its creators. Erected on June 7th, 2021, O’Connell tells the story:
"We had this plan to go into 2000 Road [the name of a logging road where, despite the efforts of the Forest Defenders, hectares of old growth were logged by Teal Jones], and we knew it was really busy there every day and they were making arrests every night. The Green Guys (C-IRG: The Community Industry Response Group or, more accurately, special corporate mercenary group of the RCMP)[3] were driving up and down with quads. To get in, you had to do about a two-hour bushwhack and everybody had to bring as much as they could. I think I probably had a bag of concrete on my back and a chainsaw. The way it works is there are these guys on quads ripping up and down and, if they catch you, they'll steal all your stuff, so when they come everybody flees into the woods and hides. There were lights sweeping by and we were hiding in the bushes and then we would come out and dig holes; we were digging holes as hard as we could and then they would rip by on the quad, and everybody would scatter but keep the tools and the Green Guys would keep coming up and down and wouldn't notice anything happening. And then on their last trip down, there would be a group of us who would run down the road and throw as much debris on the road as possible so that the Green Guys couldn’t come up with their quads and hopefully by that time we had a hole big enough to put a pipe into the ground and to concrete it in with concrete one of us had mixed in the bushes. So, somebody would run out onto the road and put the pipe into the hole. The pipes got very elaborate because there was a team of welders who had rebar and all sorts of stuff sticking out of the pipes and we’d shove that into the ground and concrete it in. Then another person would put their hand into it right away and clip themselves in. And so, they’d be lying there as the concrete set and hopefully you'd have enough time for the concrete to become solid and we had made enough of a barricade so that the cops couldn't show up. I had prepped a bunch of logs. For the Trojan Horse it was split Cedar. I'd gone off into piles of logging debris that they’d left and found logs and prepared them and we made this giant sawhorse. It was kind of a novel idea to have the lorax—what the Forest Defender locks themselves to—up in the air. I thought let's get this thing up, let's make it into a horse and then we even got a tail on it, which was great. It was a nightmare, let me tell you, to get this up. I remember we used all our strength to teeter it, and somebody was trying to get one nail to hold it and eventually we got it there. That all happened over one night."
Like the Trojan Horse and the Elk, especially the tripods were built with more care and creativity before the Blockades peaked in July and August 2021. There were harnesses, professionally tied knots and, from one, a woman hung reclined in a lawn chair. However, as the intensity of the blockades unfolded and the rate and manner of extractions of the Forest Defenders become increasingly aggressive, Will explains how,
"As we became wilder as a blockade and more desperate, the quality of the tripods devolved. People were using yellow polycord on rotten trees; people were climbing tripods 30 feet above the road sometimes and they had nowhere to sit or no harness or anything. They’d just climb up the pole and then they'd sit on the upper part of the tripod, and I remember this guy Seed, he just had a piece of wood to try to figure out how to sit on and he was wobbling, and God knows how he climbed up. He was like a monkey and then he was 30 feet above a logging road rigging up this seat with a bunch of polycord."
The evolution—or in this case devolution—of the art was in correspondence to context. The hard blocks as installations became apparatus for a kind of guerilla warfare performance art.
Flimsy Double tripod blocking the road to River Camp August 2021. Photo: Karen Moe
The cookies, though, will always remain in the dual realm of both symbolic and effective barricades, and as art—not to mention the ingenuity and perseverance required to get them from the clear cut to the truck to the site and then erect them across logging roads. Slices of stumps of tree that were hundreds of years old and weighing tonnes were taken from clear cuts, and O’Connell comments how it was a lesson in physics just to move them and how they would spend days building a ramp out of logs to get the huge slices from the clear cut and into the back to the truck.
The principal purpose of the cookies happened first. Holes were bored, a pin inserted, a space was made for a Forest Defender’s arm to fit and lock herself in. With the Caycuse Cookie, after the RCMP had extracted the Forest Defender, the activist artists came back two days later to make a work of art out of the cookie. O’Connell recalls: "We took all their chainsaws and plunged them into the back of the round. Two women chained themselves to it and we lit a fire beneath the women and the cookie to create a burning barricade. It was a piece of performance art."
Photo: Will O'Connell
Emotional in the sensation of chainsaws suggestively jabbed into the flesh of the long-dead tree and the women risking their safety chained on top of a fire, the Caycuse Cookie became a vehicle to communicate the urgency of saving the ancient forest and the commitment of the community involved through art in order to raise awareness and, ideally, entice others to join.
This is not the end of the story of the Caycuse Cookie. Two years later, O’Connell and his crew came back to get it. It had been smashed into pieces and they put it back together with the help of a group of students from Pearson College—significantly a college that unites people locally, nationally and internationally for the cause of peace and a sustainable future and is also known for its Climate Action Leadership diploma. Together, the activists, artists and students painstakingly sanded and refinished the enormous slice of stump into, what is now, a literal work of art. The Caycuse Cookie was then driven across Canada to COP-15 from Victoria BC to Montreal QB in December 2022, exhibited at the Victoria Art Gallery in 2023 and now it is hoped it will reside as a permanent monument at Pearson College.
Putting the Caycuse Cookie back together again. Photo: Will O'Connell
But this is not all in a movement that was a community of ingenuity, perseverance, commitment and art. In Caycuse and Cloud Camp, there were epic tree sits where forest defenders lived in the canopies of the forest they were defending. One was as a bird house nestled in the branches of a Sitka spruce, built with the found objects of logging waste. Another was strung over 100 feet up between two trees; you could barely see the ropes that suspended the Forest Defender in her tree sit and it looked like she was flying between the ancient trees. There were tree-sits made of boats, symbolic connections between the forest and the sea, one by Panda named “The Nova Vida.” Both artful and epic, these tree sits were also solutions to the riddles erected by the Forest Defenders for the RCMP to solve, solutions eventually escalating into helicopter extractions and the correspondingly ridiculous expense to the BC taxpayer, the majority of whom side on the saving of the ancient forest.
Joshua Wright told me how the flying dragons were a literal innovation of the Fairy Creek Blockades. A ravine is necessary to build one of these, the steeper and with a more raging a river below the better. The flying dragons were built on really steep logging roads where the road narrows. A log is put across the road and juts out over the edge of the canyon. A Forest Defender sits on the end of that log, on the one jutting over the canyon end of course. The log cannot be moved without the person being knocked off and falling to their death.
And then there were the games. Fun and effective, the Forest Defenders played a game they called “hide-and-go-creek.” The rules: the day the logging was scheduled to begin, RCMP would come into the cut block to clear out the Forest Defenders who would be hiding in the forest. They would all blow whistles, but the RCMP wouldn’t be able to tell where they were. The trees could not be cut because, due to the very convenient fact that there are still some human rights in Canada and corporations backed by the government can’t just assassinate troublesome land defenders, logging could not begin because a human could be injured or killed. Another game was called, “cops-and-loggers.” A similar premise, and in both games, the RCMP and later the Green Guys were tagged: “You’re It.” Then there was the hot tub that was built next to a pool in Granite Creek at River Camp, an on-site innovation that provided warmth and respite when the Forest Defenders were cold and wet and also giving the gift of, as in Mushroom Steve aka Fun-Guy’s case, a spiritual awakening.
“There was this guy named Paul,” Steve begins his story, “and he brought up a metal rain barrel, and he went down to the river right by River Camp at the beautiful pool there and right next to the pool, there was a little bit of a dip and he dug out the sand and then he put a big tarp in it and made a big bowl that was about three meters diameter and in the middle of it he put the rain barrel. He added some sand and then the rain barrel and then he surrounded it with logs, so it was higher up. There is a little part of the creek that comes down near the pool. He got this long piece of wood that was hollowed out in the middle. He laid that into the creek and filled up the hot tub with cold water. Then he made a fire inside the rain barrel and all the water around it got hot. So, he made a total hot tub right there! Right by the pool. It was amazing. When you're up there and it's cold and it's raining and you’re wet and dirty, to be able to sit in that hot tub and just soak up the heat was the biggest gift.
Elder Bill Jones at the Granite Creek pool at River Camp. Photo: Glenn Reid
“I had the most spiritual experience of my life in that hot tub,” Steve continues. “It was unbelievable. It was so beautiful. I was by myself. It was probably one o'clock in the morning. It was a really, really rainy night, and I was giving thanks to all of the spirits that I could feel all around me. It was so beautiful, and I was giving thanks for making this happen, for sitting there by this beautiful pool and just enjoying this hot tub. And I suddenly said: “If you hear me, please send me a message.” My knee was sticking out of the water the whole time and it was always raining. Sometimes it was raining hard. Sometimes it was raining just a little bit, but it was pretty much the whole time. It was either drizzling or pouring rain and as soon as I said: "if you hear me, please send me a message," a big raindrop that was about a tablespoon of water landed on my knee right in front of me and splashed me in the face and then boom a second one. It was just these two raindrops that hit my knee, and I thought, sometimes you say things like that, but you don't really expect to get an answer within half a second and I was in shock.
“Well, thank you very much for responding to me. Thank you so much,” I said. It was so unbelievable that moment and I broke out in tears because I was thinking that all the animals and all the trees and all the plants and everything that grew there, that lived there and had died there and all these spirits of all these plants and animals and people and everything was all around me. It was the spirit of everything that was alive before me there and that had died there. It was everything. They were all there with me and it was so beautiful, and I got this answer like: Boom, right like that. And yeah, I just burst out in tears. That moment was so beautiful.
"Then about 10-15 minutes later, I started getting really cold because the fire was out and the water was getting cold and it was pouring rain and I was like, okay, how do I get out of here? Now? How do I get dressed. I'm gonna’ be soaked. I was stuck and I thought: oh, maybe I just need to ask for help. And I said: “Spirits I'm really getting cold, and I would love to get dressed but my clothes are underneath that little piece of tarp over there and, by the time I get there, I'm going to be soaked. If there's any way you can help me, I would really appreciate it.” Within not even 5 seconds the pouring rain stopped. There was no rain. I was in shock, and I thought oh, oh okay, I guess right now. I got up and walked over to my stuff, dried myself off, put on my clothes, put on my rain gear and in less than a minute after I had put on my rain gear, it started to rain again.”[4]
The Sacred Red Dress Installation. August 2021. Photo: Karen Moe
On Granite Main, about 2 km before River Camp, is the Red Dress art installation where 215 red dresses were hung in a clearcut—symbolizing and dedicated to the remains of 215 Indigenous children that were found buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops, BC Indian residential school in May 2021 [5]. This installation, with some vestiges still visible three years later, is a simultaneously beautiful and terrible statement of the connection between the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the disappeared residential school children who died of malnutrition and disease, the murder of their land and the disappearance of ecosystems.
After the raid on Head Quarters in August 2021, the Blockaders, through the resources of support from across the country and around the world, were able to arrange a supply drop from a helicopter. Some Forest Defenders used the technology of heat sensing scopes to track and avoid the RCMP. And, when new people arrived, even if they were only going to stay for one night, there was a welcome circle in the afternoon where visitors were asked: What can you do? How can you contribute? What resources and creativity can you bring to the movement, to our community so you can be a part of it too?
Forest Defenders bushwacking at night around the RCMP exclusion zone to get supplies to the front lines
Photo: Will O'Connell
For Joshua Wright, the most impressive acts were connected to personal sacrifice, struggle and hardship. This was the supply chain where people would hike 50 km in one day with backpacks full of concrete and food to get it to the front lines and then turn around and do it again. And when it was necessary to get passed one of the RCMP’s arbitrary exclusion zones, they would bushwhack around the barricades at night, backpacks full of rebar and concrete, in order to rebuild the hard blocks and take back the logging road in the morning—and put off the clear-cutting of another slated cut block for another few days.
Many Forest Defenders discovered when enduring and triumphing over hardship and making personal sacrifices, there is an awakening available in putting yourself out there and you feel fully alive as a creature amongst other creatures, including the forest you are defending. As forest ecologist Suzanne Simard asks: “What is it about pushing our limits that makes us stronger? How does suffering strengthen the relationships that hold us together?”[6] Will O'Connell lived the answers to her questions:
"At the Blockades, I recognized my own strength as a person, and it was a feeling of being powerful. I think that was the big part for all of us who were there for a while. We all felt like we were actually changing the world and not just changing the world in some amorphous, political or online way, but physically changing the world with our hands, with the things we built in the woods at night. We stayed up all night doing stuff like this. I learned to love my physical body as it was shaping the world. We did what was needed right now for the health of the community, looking out for each other and the progress of the movement. Acting in the moment. I felt so strong. I was putting forces in motion. But at the same time doing it in a physical way. That felt incredible, putting up tree sits and barricading roads and yeah, thinking and feeling: I'm being bold and strong and, yeah, I felt like I came into my own and that experience made me more comfortable with who I am. I grew up."
Getting the Caycuse Cookie from a clear-cut Photo: Will O'Connell
Will, and so many of the Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek, lived Elder Bill’s wish for all of us: in the forest, in the company of our Great Mother, we can revive our authentic selves and re-nurture our Indigenous sensitivity. Which, when coming from a world stuck in an adolescent merry-go-round of solipsism and greed, ruled by Elder Bill’s proclaimed spoiled brats, is what also can be referred to as growing up.
Elder Bill explains how: my people and all people in this world have to now restructure our living, how we provide our living, how we stay alive. Fairy Creek provided a model of what is possible. The resourcefulness, ingenuity, creativity, commitment and, yes, struggle and suffering demonstrated by the youth at Fairy Creek is living proof that transformation is possible. The Fairy Creek Blockades provide a model of what is possible because, in Elder Bill’s words, the Forest Defenders created something for themselves; they did something, and we all have the capacity and the innate sensitivity to do so.
Trail builders make access to the old growth so people can come and become reacquainted with our Great Mother. Photo: Will O'Connell
The most crucial part of our Great Mother's message is: we all have to go to the forest, be quiet and sit and let our hearts flow.
Then we will be able to solve the problems of this Earth.
Elder Bill
*
This article is a section from the in-process memoir and legacy of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones with the working title: Flying the Coop: The Fairy Creek Blockades & the Legacy of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones. If you'd like to learn more, check out the GoFundMe page for information and, if you'd like to support the project with a donation, it would be most appreciated and very helpful to expedite the completion of the book!
I’m most grateful to all of you for coming here, Elder Bill raises his arms with the ancient trees. That means to me you care, and I think that is the most important thing in this world, to have people who care. Kleku Kleku.
*
Because of the efforts of the Forest Defenders at Fairy Creek from 2020-2021, logging of the literal watershed has been deferred. Temporarily. Many other stands like Caycuse Valley and Eden Grove were lost. The deferral of the old growth logging of the Watershed is ending on February 1st, 2025. We need to speak out to have one of the last pristine old growth watersheds in the world saved permanently, just like we did at Caramanah and Clayoquot in the 1990s. It can be done if we all speak out. In Canada, it's still possible to help save the planet. The doing is the hope.
Phone Premier David Eby and leave a message at 604-660-1297
Elder Bill with the Screech Owl, August 2023 Photo: Will O'Connell
Notes:
[1] Thank you to Joshua Wright for his support of Elder Bill and my book and also all of the information he has contributed to the project.
[2] Will O’Connell interview July 4th, 2024. Thank you to Will for his stories, insights, and the use of his photographs.
[3] https://abolishcirg.org/; https://www.aptnnews.ca/ourstories/cirg/; See the Fifth Estate report “Whose Police? RCMP unit acts as private security force, critics say.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQO2RIytszY
[4] Thank you to Mushroom Steve for this story. Interview May 13th, 2024.
[5] There were numerous articles written about this tragedy. Here’s one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-te-secw%C3%A9pemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778
[6] Suzanne Simard Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2021: 63.
About the Writer:
Karen Moe is an author, art critic, visual and performance artist, and feminist activist. Her work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, class, the environment or speciesism. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish, she has exhibited and performed across Canada, the US and Mexico and has spoken on sexual violence internationally. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor Vigilance Press (2022) which received Runner Up at the San Francisco Book Festival. During her North American Tour, she was presented with the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” by the DA of Ventura County for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist. Karen speaks internationally on sexual violence sharing her lived experiences of "trauma & triumph." Victim has recently been translated into Spanish. Karen lives in Mexico City and Vancouver Island, Canada.
IG: @karenmoeart
Beautifully told!