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formal end of British rule in BC many decades ago. The 'buried epistem-
ologies' of documents like
Beyond the cut
and
Clayoquot: on the wild side
ensured that the Nuu-chah-nulth were either ignored (as in the former case)
or depicted as a traditional culture sharing the modern environmentalist
desire to 'respect nature' (evident in Dorst and Young, 1990). This was made
possible, Braun argues, by historic processes of dispossession and reloca-
tion: when the British colonised BC from the 1850s onwards they set about
controlling land and resettling indigenous bands into small 'native reserves'.
This appropriation and clearing of BC's populated coasts and valleys, Braun
insists, is what made it
seem
normal, a century later, to regard places like
Clayoquot as essentially 'natural spaces'. What
Beyond the cut
and
Clayoquot:
on the wild side
could not countenance was the suggestion that Clayoquot
had been a thoroughly inhabited, utilised and culturally meaningful area
prior to the arrival of British colonists. Nor could they entertain the idea
that modern-day descendants of the pre-1850 Nuu-chah-nulth bear little
relation to their predecessors, in terms of lifestyles, values or aspirations. In
short, what the very public disagreements about the future of Clayoquot
(and later, the Great Bear Rainforest) took for granted was something that
BC's native bands wanted to oppose. They not only agitated for an equal
say in what happened to Clayoquot; they also wanted to assert their historic
rights of use and entitlement against a settler society that had taken so much
away from them.
Fortunately, the Nuu-chah-nulth in Clayoquot were drawn in to the dis-
cussions and decisions about the region by the turn of the millennium. This
occurred against the background of native groups across Canada making
land claims cases to the courts in order to regain right of use - and indeed,
ownership - of areas their forebears were displaced from. Parts of Clayoquot
have in fact been logged by new firms controlled by native bands, giv-
ing the lie to the assumption that today's indigenous Canadians somehow
have 'nature's interests' in their cultural genes. Though it's difficult to rectify
what Braun calls the 'cognitive failures' of non-indigenous Canadians, the
Clayoquot case shows why challenging seemingly unproblematic beliefs in
nature's naturalness can be vitally important.
THE NATURE WITHIN: RETHINKING HUMAN IDENTITY THE
GENETIC WAY
As I suggested in
Chapter 1
, the idea that nature is fast disappearing has
given it a new saliency in public discourse and in the pronouncements of
politicians, businesses and civil society organisations. The Clayoquot and
Great Bear Rainforest cases remind us that much of the discussion relates
to non-human nature. According to many commentators, modern capitalist
societies are 'ecocidal': they're engaged in nothing less than an arms race
against the living Earth. Not only are they destroying the biogeochemical
