A View from the North: Conservation and the Indigenous Reality
Splitting Wood, Acrylic on Canvas, 24”x24”. © Heidi Broner
A love of wood shapes my story. The sounds and smells of split billets or of burning logs – the fresh weight of a plank just off the mill – the revelation of beautiful grain in a newly surfaced board – all are important in the telling. So, too, are the hints spoken quietly by the wood itself about what shape it would like to take. Often in woodworking one imposes a need, but to listen is a kind of gratitude, a thankfulness for what the tree has given to the work at hand, and recognition for all the wooded places that supply our constant human need.
The author’s woodworking shop. Photo © Hans Carlson
A love of forests shapes my story, too, because home means trees at my back. It’s not that the grassy sightlines of western prairies, or the towers and arches of desert canyons aren’t compelling. They are. It’s just that the woods are where I have always lived. When they are not there, I miss their green overhead defining limits to the blue. I miss the sound of wind and rain in their leaves, the contrast of dark branch and shining snow. In the subarctic, moving out above treeline, I miss the evergreen of black spruce and jack pine, the hush of boughs, their scent on the air. The tundra is sublime – as beautiful as the desert or prairie – but when it’s time to find home for the night I seek out the pockets of valley trees, like a deer in winter hemlock. There is thankfulness there, too – and wood for the fire.
Being human means that we all live between our love for and our need to use the beauty, abundance, and biodiversity of a caring world. So it is with my love of standing forests and felled trees. Yet, while gratitude and balance should be the goal, I know many who proclaim a love of wooded places but who seem to forget the necessity of the working woods – a necessity residing in the furniture we use and the houses that keep us warm and dry.
There are those, too, who disregard thankfulness, discounting the need for gratitude.
Either of these leads to the spiritual danger about which Aldo Leopold warned almost a century ago – the danger of believing that breakfast originates in the grocery, and heat magically within the furnace. One cannot love trees out in the forest and imagine “lumber” to be a different substance that comes simply and endlessly from the warehouse or home center. If we are to honor Leopold’s land ethic, we must remember and respect the direct, working connection we have to the land. At the same time, we need to bear in mind our potential destructiveness as we seek to meet our needs.
Many of us strive to heed Leopold’s ethic, but when it comes to forests, we too often opt to push our demand over the horizon, embracing spiritual sanctuaries and wooded playgrounds close to home. Now there are forests where we get our wood, and those where we don’t – forests physically far away and those close to home. Yet distant forests are near at hand in the geography of the global balance sheet, and in this abstracted economic terrain the forest outside someone else’s window is often closer than the one outside our own.
Some of these distant forests near at hand are in northern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and while some good stewardship happens in these Northwoods, much forestry there is still driven by short-term profit margins alone. As a conservationist in Maine, these woods and this problem are of central importance to me, but to fully articulate the conservation that I think should be happening in this region, I need first to discuss a more distant forest, a small portion of the circumpolar boreal forest that rings North America and Eurasia, a part of Quebec that Canadians call eastern James Bay.
This region of black spruce and tamarack, jack pine and muskeg, is a second home to me. My Cree friends call it Eeyou Istchee, “the people’s land,” and here the James Bay Cree – the Eeyou – have lived for about 5,000 years. The name Eeyou Istchee is recognition of this long tenure, but more importantly, it is a demand for land and justice, because that name was born of the Cree’s recent and decades-long struggle over resource control on their land.
When I first went canoeing in this country 40 years ago, it felt like a distant wilderness, though all of this was already brewing. Since then, I have watched as much of the forest has been clearcut, driven by government and industry which abandoned long-term ecological health in favor of maximizing short-term profit. This began on the roads made for one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric facilities – the James Bay Project – built, then expanded to provide “sustainable” power for New England and southern Quebec. The flooding of tens of thousands of square kilometers in the north and massive clearcuts to the south of Eeyou Istchee have thus been the two dominant modes of developmental destruction in one of the last intact forests on the planet.
Impacts of development in Eastern James Bay, Quebec. Photo © Hans Carlson
I don’t canoe much there anymore, traveling mostly by truck. On a couple of occasions logging roads have led me to vast clearcuts where previously I had known only forested campsites, places which had taken weeks of paddling to reach. These were personal moments of loss for me, but my feelings only scratch the surface of what my Cree friends experience everywhere on their lands. Any comparison would be unjust, for mine has been the loss of a memory, not of a home or a way of life. In addition to watching the forest disappear, then, I have also witnessed firsthand how an Indigenous people have suffered along with their land.
Paul Dixon of the Waswanipi Nation of the James Bay Cree looking at a clearcut on his hunting territory. Photo © Hans Carlson
What the Cree know, and we largely do not, is that their forest has been systematically dismantled to supply vast quantities of wood to American markets. The Cree would like to conserve what’s left, and just as importantly they would like to conserve their culture of forest stewardship and its language of hope and gratitude. They cannot succeed without our awareness and participation, however, and here is where conservationist thinking and the way we organize our action in the Northeast is so important, far beyond what we think of as home.
Log truck, Barrett-Chapais Mill near the Ouje Bougoumou Nation of the James Bay Cree. Photo © Hans Carlson
Barrett-Chapais Mill near the Ouje Bougoumou Nation of the James Bay Cree. Photo © Hans Carlson
At the heart of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities (WWF&C) is the vital acknowledgement that while preserving a large expanse of Wildlands is essential, a good deal of the land we conserve we must also work; we can and should do more to grow our own food and supply our own timber. Leopold’s ethic is clear in this vision, which tries to balance biodiversity, connectivity, and carbon sequestration with the needs of the human economy, and this gives me hope. If implemented, the WWF&C conservation vision would also likely reach beyond our region to help conservation in places like Eeyou Istchee.
Given what I have said about Eeyou Istchee, however, we should reflect on who here is missing from our northeastern vision. For my Wabanaki friends here in Maine, it has been but a moment in their 500-generation relationship with Wabanakik (“the Dawnland”) since they faced what the Cree face today. Their dispossession was sweeping, and they now control less than one percent of what was their traditional homeland across the Northwoods, southeastern Quebec, and western New Brunswick. In Maine, our collective conservation efforts cover something like 25 percent of what was Wabanaki land – this is roughly true of the wider region, too – and many of us feel that an ethical imperative resides in the difference between conservation’s 25 percent control and the Wabanaki’s one percent. Many of us practicing conservation in Maine want our organizations and the larger movement to address this imperative along with the need for land protection and better stewardship in our working forests.
Across New England, early colonists dispossessed the original people of their land and cut down the original forest. They planted farms, sent timbers and deals out across the colonial Atlantic world to help build an empire, and then, in later generations, industrialized New England’s rivers and northern forests to feed a domestic economy. The results were widespread deforestation, environmental degradation, and the migration of extractive practices to other parts of the continent. Conservationists today are heirs to those who began addressing the environmental damage in the late nineteenth century, yet conservation to date has had almost nothing to say about those who suffered along with their land. Even today, we speak too little about this historical reality and this problematic legacy.
New England’s involvement in the destruction of distant resource frontiers mirrors the lingering bad practice in the Northwoods. The same ethical questions surround our conservation success, and all this demands that we evolve our thinking. Conservationists must name decolonization as part of our effort, and not just hint at its lingering effects with bootless phrases like, “we dispossessed the original people here.” Conservation’s success in New England has been built, after the fact, upon the dispossession of Native peoples, and communities of their descendants are still our neighbors. Missing this is twin to the spiritual danger of balancing our future conservation success against the abuse of other forests and other people in the global economy.
What decolonization looks like in practice needs a vision, one that sits side by side with our forest vision and food vision. It needs to include the ongoing connection between the land we want to conserve and the Indigenous communities in our midst. This means land back, and here I mean the return of some land, along with the return of access, the return of voice, the return of sovereignty and stewardship across a much wider landscape. Long before Leopold – who, like so many early conservationists, looked right through Native history – the Indigenous inhabitants of this place practiced their own land ethic that acknowledged both human need and the necessity of thankfulness. The beauty and abundance that Europeans found here in the wilderness were not accidents, but the long-term results of Indigenous ethics and practice. It is time to return Indigenous participation and Indigenous ideas to this land – not just because it’s the morally right thing to do, but because conservation has much to learn from those who have carried Indigenous ethics into the present.
Hans M. Carlson is the Executive Director of Blue Hill Heritage Trust, which conserves land in downeast Maine. Previously, he was Director of Great Mountain Forest, a working conservation forest in northwest Connecticut, and taught in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land and Walking Toward Moosalamoo: A Natural History of Terra Nullius.