WEBVTT 00:00:00.917 --> 00:00:03.105 This is not a story of Tibet 00:00:03.105 --> 00:00:05.180 and it's not a story of the Amazon. 00:00:05.180 --> 00:00:07.618 I won't be taking you to the high Arctic, 00:00:07.618 --> 00:00:11.721 the life of the Inuit, or to the searing sands of the Sahara. 00:00:11.721 --> 00:00:16.729 This is actually a story of my own backyard. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:16.729 --> 00:00:20.005 It's a land known to the Tahltan people 00:00:20.005 --> 00:00:22.814 and all the First Nations of British Columbia 00:00:22.814 --> 00:00:25.161 as the Sacred Headwaters, 00:00:25.161 --> 00:00:29.113 the source of the three great salmon rivers of home, 00:00:29.113 --> 00:00:33.611 the Skeena, the Stikine and the Nass. 00:00:33.611 --> 00:00:36.361 It's a valley where, in a long day, perhaps, too, 00:00:36.361 --> 00:00:38.899 you can follow the tracks of grizzly and wolf 00:00:38.899 --> 00:00:41.136 and drink from the very sources of water 00:00:41.136 --> 00:00:43.758 that gave rise and cradled the great civilizations 00:00:43.758 --> 00:00:45.721 of the Northwest Coast. 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. 00:00:49.971 --> 00:00:52.192 It's the sort of place that we, as Canadians, 00:00:52.192 --> 00:00:55.258 could throw England, and they'd never find it. 00:00:55.258 --> 00:00:59.071 John Muir, in 1879, went up just the lower third of the Stikine, 00:00:59.071 --> 00:01:00.921 and he was so enraptured he called it 00:01:00.921 --> 00:01:03.221 a Yosemite 150 miles long. 00:01:03.221 --> 00:01:05.259 He came back to California 00:01:05.259 --> 00:01:08.471 and named his dog after that river of enchantment. 00:01:08.471 --> 00:01:10.822 In the Lower 48, the farthest you can get away 00:01:10.822 --> 00:01:13.035 from a maintained road is 20 miles. 00:01:13.035 --> 00:01:15.759 In the Northwest Quadrant of British Columbia, 00:01:15.759 --> 00:01:18.684 an area of land the size of Oregon, there's one road, 00:01:18.684 --> 00:01:21.397 a narrow ribbon of asphalt that slips up the side 00:01:21.397 --> 00:01:24.432 of the Coast Mountains to the Yukon. 00:01:24.432 --> 00:01:27.557 I followed that road in the early 1970s, 00:01:27.557 --> 00:01:30.329 soon after it was built, to take a job as the first park ranger 00:01:30.329 --> 00:01:32.603 in Spatsizi wilderness. 00:01:32.603 --> 00:01:35.837 My job description was deliciously vague: 00:01:35.837 --> 00:01:39.981 wilderness assessment and public relations. 00:01:39.981 --> 00:01:43.278 In two four-month seasons I saw not a dozen people. 00:01:43.278 --> 00:01:46.144 There was no one to relate publicly to. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:46.144 --> 00:01:47.871 But in the course of these wanderings, 00:01:47.871 --> 00:01:50.254 I came upon an old shaman's grave 00:01:50.254 --> 00:01:52.917 that led to an encounter with a remarkable man: 00:01:52.917 --> 00:01:57.401 Alex Jack, an Gitxsan elder and chief who had lived 00:01:57.401 --> 00:02:01.067 as a trapper and a hunter in that country for all of his life. 00:02:01.067 --> 00:02:04.604 And over the course of 30 years, I recorded traditional tales 00:02:04.604 --> 00:02:08.493 from Alex, mostly mythological accounts of Wy-ghet, 00:02:08.493 --> 00:02:11.773 the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore 00:02:11.773 --> 00:02:15.569 who, in his folly, taught the people how to live on the land. 00:02:15.569 --> 00:02:19.357 And just before Alex died at the age of 96, 00:02:19.357 --> 00:02:21.200 he gave me a gift. 00:02:21.200 --> 00:02:24.960 It was a tool carved from caribou bone 00:02:24.960 --> 00:02:27.736 by his grandfather in 1910, 00:02:27.736 --> 00:02:31.020 and it turned out to be a specialized implement 00:02:31.020 --> 00:02:35.247 used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves. 00:02:35.247 --> 00:02:39.298 It was only when Alex passed away that I realized that 00:02:39.298 --> 00:02:42.272 the eyelids, in some sense, were my own, 00:02:42.272 --> 00:02:45.433 and having done so much to allow me to learn to see, 00:02:45.433 --> 00:02:49.271 Alex in his own way was saying goodbye. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:49.271 --> 00:02:51.977 Well, isolation has been the great saving grace 00:02:51.977 --> 00:02:56.221 of this remarkable place, but today isolation could be its doom. 00:02:56.221 --> 00:02:59.321 You've heard so much about the developments of the tar sands, 00:02:59.321 --> 00:03:02.989 the controversy about the Keystone and the Enbridge pipelines, 00:03:02.989 --> 00:03:05.699 but these are just elements of a tsunami 00:03:05.699 --> 00:03:08.086 of industrial development that is sweeping across 00:03:08.086 --> 00:03:11.884 all of the wild country of northern Canada. 00:03:11.884 --> 00:03:17.311 In Tahltan territory alone, there are 41 major industrial proposals, 00:03:17.311 --> 00:03:21.022 some with great promise, some of great concern. 00:03:21.022 --> 00:03:23.235 On Todagin Mountain, 00:03:23.235 --> 00:03:27.999 revered by the Tahltan people as a wildlife sanctuary in the sky, 00:03:27.999 --> 00:03:32.260 home to the largest population of stone sheep on the planet, 00:03:32.260 --> 00:03:34.323 Imperial Metals -- 00:03:34.323 --> 00:03:37.421 but the 75th-biggest mining company in all of Canada -- 00:03:37.421 --> 00:03:39.911 has secured permits to establish an open-pit 00:03:39.911 --> 00:03:41.880 copper and gold mine which will process 00:03:41.880 --> 00:03:45.873 30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years, 00:03:45.873 --> 00:03:49.399 generating hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste 00:03:49.399 --> 00:03:52.449 that, by the project's design, will simply be dumped 00:03:52.449 --> 00:03:56.148 into the lakes of the Sacred Headwaters. 00:03:56.148 --> 00:03:58.824 At the Headwaters itself, 00:03:58.824 --> 00:04:02.350 Shell Canada has plans to extract methane gas 00:04:02.350 --> 00:04:06.237 from coal seams that underly a million acres, 00:04:06.237 --> 00:04:09.483 fracking the coal with hundreds of millions of gallons 00:04:09.483 --> 00:04:11.562 of toxic chemicals, 00:04:11.562 --> 00:04:14.337 establishing perhaps as many as 6,000 wellheads, 00:04:14.337 --> 00:04:17.813 and eventually a network of roads and pipelines 00:04:17.813 --> 00:04:21.733 and flaring wellheads, all to generate methane gas 00:04:21.733 --> 00:04:24.175 that most likely will go east 00:04:24.175 --> 00:04:28.410 to fuel the expansion of the tar sands. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:28.410 --> 00:04:31.025 For over a decade, the Tahltan people, 00:04:31.025 --> 00:04:33.426 both clans, Wolf and Crow, 00:04:33.426 --> 00:04:36.339 have resisted this assault on their homeland. 00:04:36.339 --> 00:04:39.588 Men, women and children of all ages, 00:04:39.588 --> 00:04:42.316 elders in wheelchairs, have blockaded 00:04:42.316 --> 00:04:45.628 the only road access to the interior. 00:04:45.628 --> 00:04:48.269 For them, the Headwaters is a kitchen. 00:04:48.269 --> 00:04:52.041 It's a sanctuary. It's a burial ground of their ancestors. 00:04:52.041 --> 00:04:53.876 And those who really own it 00:04:53.876 --> 00:04:57.903 are the generations as yet unborn. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:57.903 --> 00:05:00.341 The Tahltan have been able, 00:05:00.341 --> 00:05:03.367 with the support of all Canadians who live downstream, 00:05:03.367 --> 00:05:08.754 all local politicians, to resist this assault on their homeland, 00:05:08.754 --> 00:05:12.111 but now everything hangs in the balance. 00:05:12.111 --> 00:05:14.923 Decisions that will be made this year will literally determine 00:05:14.923 --> 00:05:17.779 the fate of this country. 00:05:17.779 --> 00:05:19.681 The Tahltan have called for the creation 00:05:19.681 --> 00:05:22.880 of a tribal heritage reserve which will set aside 00:05:22.880 --> 00:05:27.632 the largest protected area in British Columbia. 00:05:27.632 --> 00:05:31.480 Our goal is not only to help them do that 00:05:31.480 --> 00:05:35.180 but to encourage our friends, the good people at Shell, 00:05:35.180 --> 00:05:38.744 not only to withdraw from the Sacred Headwaters, 00:05:38.744 --> 00:05:41.953 but to move forward with us and join us 00:05:41.953 --> 00:05:45.893 as we do the remarkable, the extraordinary: 00:05:45.893 --> 00:05:50.244 set aside a protected area that will be for all time 00:05:50.244 --> 00:05:53.906 not simply the Sacred Headwaters of the Tahltan people 00:05:53.906 --> 00:05:58.644 but the sacred headwaters of all people in the world. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:58.644 --> 00:06:02.619 The Tahltan need your help. We need your help. 00:06:02.619 --> 00:06:05.796 And if any of you would like to join us on this great adventure, 00:06:05.796 --> 00:06:08.732 please come and see me later today. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:08.732 --> 00:06:10.982 Thank you very much. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:10.982 --> 00:06:15.025 (Applause)