1
00:00:00,917 --> 00:00:03,105
This is not a story of Tibet

2
00:00:03,105 --> 00:00:05,180
and it's not a story of the Amazon.

3
00:00:05,180 --> 00:00:07,618
I won't be taking you to the high Arctic,

4
00:00:07,618 --> 00:00:11,721
the life of the Inuit, or to the searing sands of the Sahara.

5
00:00:11,721 --> 00:00:16,729
This is actually a story of my own backyard.

6
00:00:16,729 --> 00:00:20,005
It's a land known to the Tahltan people

7
00:00:20,005 --> 00:00:22,814
and all the First Nations of British Columbia

8
00:00:22,814 --> 00:00:25,161
as the Sacred Headwaters,

9
00:00:25,161 --> 00:00:29,113
the source of the three great salmon rivers of home,

10
00:00:29,113 --> 00:00:33,611
the Skeena, the Stikine and the Nass.

11
00:00:33,611 --> 00:00:36,361
It's a valley where, in a long day, perhaps, too,

12
00:00:36,361 --> 00:00:38,899
you can follow the tracks of grizzly and wolf

13
00:00:38,899 --> 00:00:41,136
and drink from the very sources of water

14
00:00:41,136 --> 00:00:43,758
that gave rise and cradled the great civilizations

15
00:00:43,758 --> 00:00:45,721
of the Northwest Coast.

16
00:00:45,721 --> 00:00:49,971
It's such a beautiful place. It's the most stunningly wild place I've ever been.

17
00:00:49,971 --> 00:00:52,192
It's the sort of place that we, as Canadians,

18
00:00:52,192 --> 00:00:55,258
could throw England, and they'd never find it.

19
00:00:55,258 --> 00:00:59,071
John Muir, in 1879, went up just the lower third of the Stikine,

20
00:00:59,071 --> 00:01:00,921
and he was so enraptured he called it

21
00:01:00,921 --> 00:01:03,221
a Yosemite 150 miles long.

22
00:01:03,221 --> 00:01:05,259
He came back to California

23
00:01:05,259 --> 00:01:08,471
and named his dog after that river of enchantment.

24
00:01:08,471 --> 00:01:10,822
In the Lower 48, the farthest you can get away

25
00:01:10,822 --> 00:01:13,035
from a maintained road is 20 miles.

26
00:01:13,035 --> 00:01:15,759
In the Northwest Quadrant of British Columbia,

27
00:01:15,759 --> 00:01:18,684
an area of land the size of Oregon, there's one road,

28
00:01:18,684 --> 00:01:21,397
a narrow ribbon of asphalt that slips up the side

29
00:01:21,397 --> 00:01:24,432
of the Coast Mountains to the Yukon.

30
00:01:24,432 --> 00:01:27,557
I followed that road in the early 1970s,

31
00:01:27,557 --> 00:01:30,329
soon after it was built, to take a job as the first park ranger

32
00:01:30,329 --> 00:01:32,603
in Spatsizi wilderness.

33
00:01:32,603 --> 00:01:35,837
My job description was deliciously vague:

34
00:01:35,837 --> 00:01:39,981
wilderness assessment and public relations.

35
00:01:39,981 --> 00:01:43,278
In two four-month seasons I saw not a dozen people.

36
00:01:43,278 --> 00:01:46,144
There was no one to relate publicly to.

37
00:01:46,144 --> 00:01:47,871
But in the course of these wanderings,

38
00:01:47,871 --> 00:01:50,254
I came upon an old shaman's grave

39
00:01:50,254 --> 00:01:52,917
that led to an encounter with a remarkable man:

40
00:01:52,917 --> 00:01:57,401
Alex Jack, an Gitxsan elder and chief who had lived

41
00:01:57,401 --> 00:02:01,067
as a trapper and a hunter in that country for all of his life.

42
00:02:01,067 --> 00:02:04,604
And over the course of 30 years, I recorded traditional tales

43
00:02:04,604 --> 00:02:08,493
from Alex, mostly mythological accounts of Wy-ghet,

44
00:02:08,493 --> 00:02:11,773
the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore

45
00:02:11,773 --> 00:02:15,569
who, in his folly, taught the people how to live on the land.

46
00:02:15,569 --> 00:02:19,357
And just before Alex died at the age of 96,

47
00:02:19,357 --> 00:02:21,200
he gave me a gift.

48
00:02:21,200 --> 00:02:24,960
It was a tool carved from caribou bone

49
00:02:24,960 --> 00:02:27,736
by his grandfather in 1910,

50
00:02:27,736 --> 00:02:31,020
and it turned out to be a specialized implement

51
00:02:31,020 --> 00:02:35,247
used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves.

52
00:02:35,247 --> 00:02:39,298
It was only when Alex passed away that I realized that

53
00:02:39,298 --> 00:02:42,272
the eyelids, in some sense, were my own,

54
00:02:42,272 --> 00:02:45,433
and having done so much to allow me to learn to see,

55
00:02:45,433 --> 00:02:49,271
Alex in his own way was saying goodbye.

56
00:02:49,271 --> 00:02:51,977
Well, isolation has been the great saving grace

57
00:02:51,977 --> 00:02:56,221
of this remarkable place, but today isolation could be its doom.

58
00:02:56,221 --> 00:02:59,321
You've heard so much about the developments of the tar sands,

59
00:02:59,321 --> 00:03:02,989
the controversy about the Keystone and the Enbridge pipelines,

60
00:03:02,989 --> 00:03:05,699
but these are just elements of a tsunami

61
00:03:05,699 --> 00:03:08,086
of industrial development that is sweeping across

62
00:03:08,086 --> 00:03:11,884
all of the wild country of northern Canada.

63
00:03:11,884 --> 00:03:17,311
In Tahltan territory alone, there are 41 major industrial proposals,

64
00:03:17,311 --> 00:03:21,022
some with great promise, some of great concern.

65
00:03:21,022 --> 00:03:23,235
On Todagin Mountain,

66
00:03:23,235 --> 00:03:27,999
revered by the Tahltan people as a wildlife sanctuary in the sky,

67
00:03:27,999 --> 00:03:32,260
home to the largest population of stone sheep on the planet,

68
00:03:32,260 --> 00:03:34,323
Imperial Metals --

69
00:03:34,323 --> 00:03:37,421
but the 75th-biggest mining company in all of Canada --

70
00:03:37,421 --> 00:03:39,911
has secured permits to establish an open-pit

71
00:03:39,911 --> 00:03:41,880
copper and gold mine which will process

72
00:03:41,880 --> 00:03:45,873
30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years,

73
00:03:45,873 --> 00:03:49,399
generating hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste

74
00:03:49,399 --> 00:03:52,449
that, by the project's design, will simply be dumped

75
00:03:52,449 --> 00:03:56,148
into the lakes of the Sacred Headwaters.

76
00:03:56,148 --> 00:03:58,824
At the Headwaters itself,

77
00:03:58,824 --> 00:04:02,350
Shell Canada has plans to extract methane gas

78
00:04:02,350 --> 00:04:06,237
from coal seams that underly a million acres,

79
00:04:06,237 --> 00:04:09,483
fracking the coal with hundreds of millions of gallons

80
00:04:09,483 --> 00:04:11,562
of toxic chemicals,

81
00:04:11,562 --> 00:04:14,337
establishing perhaps as many as 6,000 wellheads,

82
00:04:14,337 --> 00:04:17,813
and eventually a network of roads and pipelines

83
00:04:17,813 --> 00:04:21,733
and flaring wellheads, all to generate methane gas

84
00:04:21,733 --> 00:04:24,175
that most likely will go east

85
00:04:24,175 --> 00:04:28,410
to fuel the expansion of the tar sands.

86
00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:31,025
For over a decade, the Tahltan people,

87
00:04:31,025 --> 00:04:33,426
both clans, Wolf and Crow,

88
00:04:33,426 --> 00:04:36,339
have resisted this assault on their homeland.

89
00:04:36,339 --> 00:04:39,588
Men, women and children of all ages,

90
00:04:39,588 --> 00:04:42,316
elders in wheelchairs, have blockaded

91
00:04:42,316 --> 00:04:45,628
the only road access to the interior.

92
00:04:45,628 --> 00:04:48,269
For them, the Headwaters is a kitchen.

93
00:04:48,269 --> 00:04:52,041
It's a sanctuary. It's a burial ground of their ancestors.

94
00:04:52,041 --> 00:04:53,876
And those who really own it

95
00:04:53,876 --> 00:04:57,903
are the generations as yet unborn.

96
00:04:57,903 --> 00:05:00,341
The Tahltan have been able,

97
00:05:00,341 --> 00:05:03,367
with the support of all Canadians who live downstream,

98
00:05:03,367 --> 00:05:08,754
all local politicians, to resist this assault on their homeland,

99
00:05:08,754 --> 00:05:12,111
but now everything hangs in the balance.

100
00:05:12,111 --> 00:05:14,923
Decisions that will be made this year will literally determine

101
00:05:14,923 --> 00:05:17,779
the fate of this country.

102
00:05:17,779 --> 00:05:19,681
The Tahltan have called for the creation

103
00:05:19,681 --> 00:05:22,880
of a tribal heritage reserve which will set aside

104
00:05:22,880 --> 00:05:27,632
the largest protected area in British Columbia.

105
00:05:27,632 --> 00:05:31,480
Our goal is not only to help them do that

106
00:05:31,480 --> 00:05:35,180
but to encourage our friends, the good people at Shell,

107
00:05:35,180 --> 00:05:38,744
not only to withdraw from the Sacred Headwaters,

108
00:05:38,744 --> 00:05:41,953
but to move forward with us and join us

109
00:05:41,953 --> 00:05:45,893
as we do the remarkable, the extraordinary:

110
00:05:45,893 --> 00:05:50,244
set aside a protected area that will be for all time

111
00:05:50,244 --> 00:05:53,906
not simply the Sacred Headwaters of the Tahltan people

112
00:05:53,906 --> 00:05:58,644
but the sacred headwaters of all people in the world.

113
00:05:58,644 --> 00:06:02,619
The Tahltan need your help. We need your help.

114
00:06:02,619 --> 00:06:05,796
And if any of you would like to join us on this great adventure,

115
00:06:05,796 --> 00:06:08,732
please come and see me later today.

116
00:06:08,732 --> 00:06:10,982
Thank you very much.

117
00:06:10,982 --> 00:06:15,025
(Applause)