The forest is a living, breathing, sentient being, a repository of carbon— the essence of life—and a connecting force in indigenous life. And we must harvest the trees with care, lest this connection is lost. That was the theme of a public meeting, called the Forest Forum, held in January at the Tluu Xaada Naay longhouse in Gaw Tlagée Old Massett.

UBC forest ecologist Suzanne Simard of the Mother Tree Project (mothertreeproject.org) told the Forum that preserving our native forests is an important part of the fight against drastic environmental change. “Twenty percent of the excess carbon dioxide in the air is from land use change - from harvesting forests,” she said.

“The more trees you take away from the ecosystem, the more it threatens all levels of biodiversity in the soil, in the mosses, in the lichens, in the shrubs, in the herbaceous plants. They all change and we lose things.”

As an example of the connectivity of living things in the forest, Suzanne drew attention to the salmon that swim in our streams - an important food source for bears, who leave the salmon remains on the forest floor. “The whole soil/food web,” she said, “is changed by the nutrients that these salmon carry into the forest (which) end up moving thru the mycelium networks right into the trees.”

Rande Cook, a hereditary chief and artist of the Kwa’kwa’ka’wakw nation who lives in Victoria, spoke in an online talk about the importance of the forest in indigenous life. “If we’re talking about our very essence of who we are as a human species. then why are we allowing the impacts of colonization to carry on? Why are we allowing industry to interfere with this relationship that we’ve had for thousands of years? Why are we allowing governments and corporations to come in and still extract and take what they need and push us aside when we talk about our very needs? We’re running out of time and that’s the scary part.”

Underlying all this urgency is the need for people to learn what some scientists call “the language of nature.” The American mycologist Paul Stamets (who did not attend the Forum) puts it this way: “If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.”