‘Indian Against Indian’: The Walbran Forest Protection Blockade and Truth & Reconciliation as Colonialism Continues ...
- Vigilance
- Sep 17, 2025
- 15 min read
Updated: Sep 18, 2025
By Karen Moe
Cheerful as it sounds,
I’ve always found the term “Truth & Reconciliation” dubious; maybe that’s because there isn’t and has never been anything ‘cheerful’ about the relationship between the Canadian government, industry and the Indigenous peoples of Canada and Tuesday September 9th was even more damning proof when not only an Indigenous Elder was taken to court for defending his ancestral territory, but also a logging corporation has created a shell company with an Indigenous name to, in Pacheedaht Elder Bill’s words, “pit Indian against Indian.”
On Tuesday September 8th, 2025, Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership filed an injunction application with the BC Supreme Court against Elder Bill Jones, forest protector Will O’Connell and other forest protectors (who chose to remain anonymous) who are blockading the logging road that leads to stands of remaining old growth forest in Upper Walbran Valley on Pacheedaht territory, some of what Will O’Connell refers to as “the last of the last” on Vancouver Island, in BC and in the world. Unlike the injunction granted by the BC Supreme Court to Teal Jones Cedar on the April 1st 2021 against the Fairy Creek Blockades seven and a half months after the Blockade began, however, industry’s request for this injunction happened immediately. A mere fifteen days to be exact. Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership is trying to nip this blockade in the bud before it has a chance to become another Fairy Creek that, with 1,188 arrests, became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history and succeeded—temporarily at least— in protecting the Fairy Creek Watershed from clearcutting. And the most insidious thing is, this time, unlike Teal Jones that was front and center in its justifications to destroy pristine ecosystems, Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership is a shell company set up to conceal Western Forest Products' continued colonial activities in Canada’s relentless extraction economy.
On September 12th, 2025, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Amy Francis granted Tsawak-quin its injunction.[1] The judge’s decision had everything to do with the estimated $3 million in revenue from the ancient trees that are reduced to merely ‘harvestable timber’ and concern for the blockade affecting the company’s “allowable volume of harvest in future years”[2]—read: so that they won’t be able to rape the earth as much. It had nothing to do with the most extensive near record-sized cedars on Earth.[3] It had nothing to do with, as Elder Bill argued, “the broader public interest in preserving old-growth forests and battling climate change, … [and the] evidence that logging in the area will result in the loss of biological diversity and climate resilience.”[4] No, with another act of monetary profit-prioritizing soullessness and environmental irresponsibility committed by the Canadian nation state which continues to serve the Crown (read: the British Crown which, as well all know, colonized Turtle Island[5] and created Canada), Justice Amy Francis stated “the argument against old-growth logging was not for her to decide [and how] … this case is not about the wisdom of government forest policy. It is decidedly not about the court’s views on whether and where old-growth logging should occur in this province, even in the context of climate change.”[6] (Emphasis mine: one can’t help but notice the ironic admittance to a lack of wisdom in the big picture). Elder Bill’s lawyer, Ben Isitt, stated flatly that injunctions “seem to be granted almost automatically when requested by a company.”[7]
So, who or what exactly is the Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership?
Well, it doesn’t have to do with Indigenous peoples except if one is referring to a First Nation that has become firmly entrenched in the destructive practices of the colonizer; and it has nothing to do with First Nation stewardship of their ancestral land in the sense of protecting it as is proclaimed on the websites of the First Nations’ who have become embedded in corporate partnerships. Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership is a fancified, politically correct name for a tree farm licence (TFL) and, specifically TFL 44. And the Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership is primarily composed of Western Forest Products Inc., which holds a 65 per cent equity interest with Huumiis Ventures Limited Partnership, owned by the Huu-ay-aht First Nations, holding the other 35 per cent.[8] Tree Farm Licences are awarded to logging corporations by the Provincial government. As such, Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership is, beneath all of the obfuscation that colonial capitalists have honed to perfection, a continuation of the colonization of Canada. As always with the buying out of First Nations land in Canada, Western Forestry Products—the non-Indigenous company—get most of the spoils. This is a classic case of strategic outsourcing where corporations hide behind the first peoples of the land they are exploiting and then all is justified because it is perceived that the Indigenous have “freely” chosen to do it to themselves—as we descendants of a colonizing culture have presumed for generations as we have watched Indigenous people ‘self’-destruct and denied the historical reasons why.
Elder Bill states that, like all people, “there are good Indians and there are bad Indians” and such a dichotomy is even more extreme when the Indian Act— begun in 1876 and continuing today hand-in-hand with so-called Truth and Reconciliation—is involved. (Indeed, one could ask, if we have Truth and Reconciliation, why does Canada still have the Indian Act which is responsible for residential schools and the Indian reservation system?) One of the themes of Elder Bill and my forthcoming book, Listening, Once Again, to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades & the Life of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones is the process of colonizing consciousness. As Elder Bill explains: first a person is denied, then they are deprived, then they become depraved and finally demented. The legacy of the Indian residential schools with its process of depriving Indigenous children of personhood and culture, the stealing and exploitation of Indigenous land and the squashing of a people who had no fixed borders for millennia onto reservations, manufactured the depravity and dementia in the lives of the corrupted Band Councils. The First Nations Band Councils who partner with colonial industry have reached the state of dementia and, as Elder Bill proclaims, exist 100% in “the world of let’s pretend.”
“Government and industry are using a new tactic,” he continues. “They're using Indians to combat Indians. Their tactic is not to log it themselves. That'll be white guys against Indians. They're saying, ‘Hey, let's get the Indians up there.’ They're enticing them into suing me, turn the Indian against Indian, divide and rule.” Colonial corporations like Western Forest Products are deploying the mythology of Truth & Reconciliation along with the convenience of white guilt that serves to hobble analysis that may not only be credible, but also useful because, as Elder Bill says, “white people are afraid they will upset the Indians.” In the context of truth and reconciliation, it’s verging on hate speech to criticize anything First Nations do, even if they are the acts of Band Councils that, in Elder Bill’s words, “have been trained since the Indian Act to accept money from the government and industry”—which are virtually the same thing.
As written in the affidavit submitted against Elder Bill Jones, Will O’Connell, John Doe, Jane Doe and persons unknown, the Plaintiff’s (we’ll call them what they really are: Western Forest Products) claim against the Walbran Protection Camp (also known as Cougar Camp) is: “irreparable harm to business and property rights.” However, on the same document, they also state their commitment to “managing the biodiversity within TFL 44 … to achieve the three indicators for the successful management of biodiversity in coastal forests:
(i) Ecologically distinct ecosystem types are represented to maintain lesser-known species and ecological function
(ii) The amount, distribution, and heterogeneity of stand and forest structures important to sustain native species richness are maintained over time; and
(iii) The abundance, distribution and reproductive success of native species are not substantially reduced by forest practices.”
The plaintiff admits that 50% of their harvest in TFL 44 is old growth—despite clear evidence of the necessity of preserving old growth forests for the biological diversity they claim to be managing[9] and Western Forest Products celebrates on their website “collaboration, science and traditional knowledge, support[ing] healthy and thriving forests for generations to come.”[10]
In the Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership Tree Farm Licence 44 Management Plan, the shell company states their commitment to the “[r]etention of old forests and management for recruitment of old forest characteristics across a landscape [that] are considered as foundational elements for sustaining biological diversity.”[11] As Chief Councillor Robert J. Dennis Sr. of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation promised, Huumiis Ventures Limited Partnership’s “forestry management would align with the nation’s sacred principals.”[12] Why then, have the Huu-ay-aht First Nation in partnership with Western Forest Products headed for and decrying forest protectors for blocking a stand of towering cedar aged at least 400 years when the designation of ancient trees on coastal BC is 250 years? Why then, as the Tyee commented on September 11th, 2025, is it “unclear how logging in TFL 44 has differed from industrial logging elsewhere in coastal old-growth forests. As crews come and go, every tree in the cut block comes down in one clearcut after another”?[14]
If one drives the logging roads anywhere in the middle of Vancouver Island,
they will see all forestry stewardship and “retaining the integrity of biodiversity”[15] logging corporations and their First Nations partners proclaim are blatant lies as clearcuts scar the mountainsides in every direction. Upon the signing of the Western Forest Products and Huu-ay-aht partnership in March 2020, such statements as: “Huu-ay-aht and Western have demonstrated a track record of cooperation and a willingness to work together to achieve reconciliation and forestry revitalization,”[16] blatantly contradict what has been really happening to the forests they have been working together on ‘revitalizing’ to the point that—if it weren’t so tragic, it would be laughable—it is the polar opposite. Clear cuts kill as they take everything: ecologically distinct eco-systems, heterogeneity, abundance, reproductive success, native species and yes, what no capitalist has ever been able to resist since the onset of the colonization of Turtle Island: the ancient trees worth millions. All are empty statements concealed beneath glossy First Nation and logging corporation websites awash in the rhetoric of government and First Nations partnerships in the fraudulent climate of Truth & Reconciliation. This is green-washing in partnership with what can be referred to as colonialism-washing.
Granted, the BC government has done something in terms of temporarily deferring the logging of old growth watershed like Fairy Creek; but the majority of what they have done has resulted in not really doing anything at all. Five years ago this month, the BC government came up with their 14 recommendations in B.C.'s Old Growth Strategic Review process to work towards A New Future for Old Forests and "a ‘paradigm shift’ that would create a framework to come up with policy changes that would help industry and First Nations transition to second-growth logging or other economic activities … in the management of one of the province's most iconic natural resources.”[17] Any active commitment to these recommendations has been stalled since their inception. The BC government’s new future for forests is mimetic to the fraudulent celebration of retaining biodiversity on logging corporations’ websites. There are still 1.36 million hectares of the best remaining old growth still at risk of being logged.[18] The ancient stands of cedar in the Upper Walbran being a part of it.
To, unfortunately, make matters worse
and in absolute keeping with the strategic control of Indigenous peoples for the purpose of exploiting their resources since the implementation of the Indian Act, exactly like with the injunction against the Fairy Creek Blockades, the Pacheedaht First Nation Band Council consented to Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership logging of the Upper Walbran over a 4 year period—a time period within which all remaining old growth will undoubtedly be the first taken. Elder Bill Jones has filed an application for a civil suit against his nation “to challenge Pacheedaht’s continuing course of conduct in consenting to the forestry activities within Pacheedaht territory on behalf of him and other Pacheedaht members without consulting them or providing them with notice.”[19]
Elder Bill did not know of the consent given to Tsawak-quin by Band Council Chief Arliss Daniels—even though it was purported in their statement that the Nation’s Elders had been consulted—until September 4th, 2025, over a week after the Walbran Forest Protection Camp had begun. As Elder Bill explains, “the Pacheedaht First Nation consents to the logging of their territory due to revenue sharing agreements and the money stays primarily with the elite band council.” Moreover, the Pacheedaht First Nation, due to lack of consultation with the Elders and through their legislation of unaccountability even to their own band members and loans from government and banks, has accumulated a debt of what Elder Bill estimates as approximately $30 million (it’s impossible to know exactly due to the unaccountability). As such, due to monetary constraints, it can be argued that, to a certain extent, the continuing course of conduct of the Pacheedaht Band Council consenting to the forestry activities by colonial logging corporations like Teal Jones and Western Forest Products is a form of continued colonial coercion.
As another rope in the quagmire, the Huu-ay-aht First Nation who own Huumiis Ventures Limited Partnership is one of the five Western Vancouver Island Nations that signed the Maa-nulth treaty with the governments of Canada and British Columbia on April 1st, 2011. The said purpose of this treaty is to consolidate how “Canada, British Columbia, and the Maa-nulth First Nations will share benefits from natural resources, and how those resources will be managed”[20] Sound harmless? Maybe even another celebratory act of truth and reconciliation? Nope. The provincial and federal governments paid these five nations capital transfers of $96.7 million for the right to extract resources from 24,550 hectares of Maa-nulth First Nations Lands that were paid out over ten years. If 9.67 million dollars were paid annually to the Maa-nulth treaty nations by the government, how much was the government and industry making per year? As we all know, colonial governments and industry never do anything for nothing.
As Elder Bill states: “the elite own all the money and all of the time,”
all the time to twist truth and reconciliation to their continued favour. In 2021 alone—ironically during the height of the Fairy Creek Blockades that affected the bounty that year— “the BC government collected more than $1.8 billion dollars in stumpage fees—a number that would have been higher still but for the protests.”[21] That was in one year. And the five First Nations who gave government and industry access to their land with the Maa-nulth agreement, shared 9.67 million between them. What did a logging company make? In the same year, Western Forest Product’s net income was $202.8 million USD.[22]
From the front lines of the Walbran Forest Protection Camp on September 15th, 2025, @bmorinstories interviewed land defender Will O’Connell who presented a most enlightening explanation of the BC Government’s misleading stats used to convince the public that a colonizing culture is redeeming itself through environmental protection:
“This is an instance when the government is actually lying to the people and manipulating the public,” O’Connell explains.
“And you see it lately in their stats…. As long as the public isn’t out here seeing what’s happening, they can continue to tell us that old growth is safe and also log it to the last tree. And the way they’re doing it is by telling you this one stat. The stat they tell you is the percentage of old growth protected. It used to be about 60% when they first said it. And then it was 70% and now it’s 85%. The percentage of old growth that is protected is a misleading stat because it has nothing to do with the percentage of [unprotected] forest that’s been logged. We want to know of our forest how much is left is old growth. But if you tell us the percentage of old growth that’s protected as you log it, that percentage grows. Because eventually we’ll have 100% protected when every single other [currently unprotected] bit has been logged.”
Today, September 17th, 2025, Angela Davidson (aka Auntie Rainbow Eyes) of the Da’naxda’xw/Awaetlala Nation will turn herself in at the Campbell River Police Station to serve the 31-day prison sentence she was given by the Canadian Crown for protecting unceded Indigenous territory at the Fairy Creek Blockades from 2020-2021. On September 9th, 2025, eighty-five-year-old Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones was summoned by industry to leave his care facility in Sooke BC and travel to the BC Supreme Court in Vancouver to present his case as an Elder against the logging of some of the last remaining old growth in BC and the world on his ancestral territory. On September 12th, 2025, the injunction against Elder Bill’s plea to have the “ability to practice his culture and religion, thereby impairing his Aboriginal and constitutional right to freedom of conscience and religious expression”[23] and to not allow the destruction of the ancient forest of the Upper Walbran which “give us air, water, food, medicine and spirit”[24] was awarded to the shell company Tsawak-quin Forestry Limited Partnership on the ground of the loss of $3 million and potentially impeding the corporation’s right to log even more in future years. Since the implementation of the Indian Act, Indigenous peoples, through their corrupted band councils, continue to be coerced into the destruction of their land for the benefit of the government and their side-kick corporations.
With Truth and Reconciliation Day just around the corner,
what can we, the citizens of BC, Canada and the world, make of all this? What can we do with all of this? How can there be any truth and reconciliation when the Canadian Crown still prioritizes industry and allows corporations to take Indigenous people to court, to incarcerate them, for protecting the very land that the government tells us it is protecting? As we witness another fight for some of the last remaining old growth in the world at the Walbran Watershed, as we realize the extent of depravity industry and government will go to make what they say isn’t happening, happen, we learn the truth: colonialism is as a hydra that will keep re-inventing itself until we all, as Elder Bill guides us, “go to the forest, be quiet and sit and let our hearts flow. Then we will be able to solve the problems of this Earth.”
Epilogue:
As I am writing this article on September 15th, 2025, the Walbran Forest Protectors are building tree sits in ancient cedar trees, climbing and preparing to stay high in the canopy in the company of the thousands of non-human—and many of them endangered—species who have resided there for centuries, millennia, before Europeans first landed on the shores of Turtle Island. The RCMP will come. The tree-sitters will be commanded to descend. They won’t. The loggers may fall trees nearby as acts of intimidation. The tree-sitters will stay in the ancient tree they are protecting as long as they can until maybe the BC government will spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to bring in helicopters to extract the defenders as they did at Fairy Creek in 2021. The Forest Protectors on the ground are undoubtedly preparing to be arrested. Many have been arrested before. They will do it again. Maybe they are building hard blocks to make this as difficult for the RCMP as possible, to put off another day of killing the ancient trees. And they’re doing this for the trees and all that they give us as they still thrive in the biodiversity of our Great Mother. They are doing this for us.
As we edit on September 16th, 2025, the Forest Protectors of the Upper Walbran are waiting for the RCMP raid. They have dug in with sleeping dragons and are ready to chain themselves to trees. Tree sitters are ready to ascend.
As we publish on September 17th, 2025, Rainbow Eyes is turning herself in for defending her ancestral land and hoping her appeal for justice will be heard.
*
I’m most grateful to all of you for coming here. That means to me you care, and I think that is the most important thing in this world, to have people who care.
Elder Bill Jones.
*
Notes:
[1] https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/injunction-granted-against-protesters-blocking-walbran-logging-11205551?utm_source=Times+Colonist+Headline+News&utm_campaign=054a8314cc-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d22ba5c6e6-a978a9ba3c-97039545&mc_cid=054a8314cc&mc_eid=a67511dbd3
[2] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Turtle Island is the Indigenous name for North America.
[6] https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/injunction-granted-against-protesters-blocking-walbran-logging-11205551?utm_source=Times+Colonist+Headline+News&utm_campaign=054a8314cc-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d22ba5c6e6-a978a9ba3c-97039545&mc_cid=054a8314cc&mc_eid=a67511dbd3
[7] Ibid.
[8] https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/forestry-company-asks-for-injunction-to-remove-logging-protesters-in-walbran-11183327
[9] Affidavit No. S256648 Vancouver Registry.
[11] Tree Farm Licence 44 Management Plan 6 8.1.1.2 Old Forest
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] As one of countless instances: https://bcbusiness.ca/industries/indigenous/teal-jones-partners-with-the-pacheedaht-first-nation-to-grow-their-role-in-forestry/
[16] https://huuayaht.org/2020/03/huu-ay-aht-reaches-historic-tfl-44-agreement-with-western-forest-products/
[17] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-old-growth-strategic-review-5-year-anniversary-conservation-1.7631786
[18] Ibid.
[19] Notice of Application made by William Jones against Pacheedaht First Nation under Federal Courts Act, RSC 1985, c F-7, Section 18.1 September 9th, 2025.
[20] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/consulting-with-first-nations/agreements/final_agreement_implementation_report_2013-2014.pdf
[21] https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/green-gold/#:~:text=and%20Investment%20Project-,The%20last%20of%20the%20green%20gold:%20With%20the%20best%20trees,still%20but%20for%20the%20protests.
[23] BC Supreme Court Affidavit No. S256648 Vancouver Registry
[24] Ibid.
About the Writer:
Karen Moe is an author, art critic, visual and performance artist, and feminist activist. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and she has exhibited and performed across Canada, the US and Mexico. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor Vigilance Press (2022). During her North American Tour, she was presented with the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” by the DA of Ventura County for being instrumental in the life sentence given to the serial rapist who died in prison in 2017. Karen speaks internationally on sexual violence, sharing her lived experiences of trauma & triumph. Victim has recently been translated into Spanish and is being adapted for film. She is currently collaborating with Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, Listening, Once Again: The Fairy Creek Blockades & the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, forthcoming: September 2026. Karen lives in Mexico City and Lantzville BC.
wow. so thorough and true. indian against indian as with woman against woman or trans against woman to make it all so much harder to disentangle threads of gender and race etc. the same narrative of decimation persists regardless but the language to oppose it complexifies into, often, silence.