The Nature Conservancy in Brazil - Dispatches from the Great Bear Rainforest

Michelle Beeman is the Director of Conservation Strategy for The Nature Conservancy’s U.S./Canada Partnership. For the better part of the last two and a half years, she has worked with a wide variety of partners to help ensure a healthy future for the Great Bear Rainforest, a wild and remote region covering 20 million acres along the north-central coast of British Columbia. Photo © The Nature Conservancy.

Links

COIAB (Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon)

Author: Michelle Beeman
Date: May, 2006
Location: The Great Bear Rainforest, British Colombia

Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest has attracted world attention for its approach to conservation, which incorporates environmentally compatible land use management and community development. Three indigenous leaders from Brazil’s Amazon rainforest recently trekked up the western coast of Canada for five days to meet with First Nation tribal leaders and their communities and learn more about unique partnerships and consensus efforts within Great Bear. I was privileged to accompany the delegation and witnessed a fascinating dialogue between different peoples who may live continents apart, but whose stories and histories have remarkable similarities.

Day 1: Introductions in Vancouver

In a nondescript office building in downtown Vancouver, a remarkable initial meeting began between leaders from the Amazon and First Nation leaders from the coast. The chief of the Haida Nation, Guujaaw, who leads a coalition of eight coastal nations in British Columbia, opened the meeting by welcoming the Brazil delegation in his native language. He then also welcomed them in English, which was translated into Portuguese for the Brazilians. The three Amazon leaders each responded by sharing a greeting in their respective tribal languages, which was similarly translated back through Portuguese to English. While the rest of the official conversations were conducted simply in the “mainstream languages” of English and Portuguese, the indigenous leaders quickly recognized in each other the power of speaking in an original voice. These languages have been handed down through generations and yet were almost lost this century due to misguided efforts at “assimilation” of their peoples.

Simply speaking in their own tribal words was an offering to each other, and an identification and affirmation of commonality between indigenous groups. It was a wonderful moment; one that very plainly created a bond between these unfamiliar leaders around a common link that mainstream culture does not share. To me it seemed like a perfect way to begin the discussions that ultimately centered on the theme of advancing indigenous interests in their lands through developing partnerships and finding common ground with many different groups.

Travelling to the remote Great Bear Rainforest means small planes and long boat rides. Photo © Michelle Beeman

Day 2: Koeye Camp

Not unlike the Amazon, one of the reasons the Great Bear Rainforest still retains much of its natural wonder is because it is very hard to get there. You have to take either a boat or a plane to get anywhere, and even then, you are hostage to the ever-changing weather. Jecinaldo Sateré-Mawé, Miquelina Tukano, Laurenço Krikati, and Jorge Terena, the Amazon indigenous leaders, and the rest of our small travel entourage piled into a small float plane for a two-hour flight followed by a two-hour boat ride on a fishing boat to reach the heart of the region – a small lodge at the mouth of the Koeye River owned by the Heiltsuk First Nation. The Koeye flows down out of the mountains, meeting the Pacific Ocean in a lush cove filled with abundant sea life, surrounded by giant cedars and home to one of the region’s highest concentrations of black bears.

We spent the day with some of the Heiltsuk First Nation leaders, learning about their natural resource management plans, and touring the youth center that they have established at Koeye inlet. This combination of lodge, ceremonial big house and camp facilities has become the cultural heart of the modern day tribe. This traditional Heiltsuk camp location dates back between 8,000 and 10,000 years and feels heavy with the presence of past generations. The community now uses the lodge as the centerpiece for efforts to revive cultural traditions and language, cultivate First Nation pride and healing for families, and teach environmental stewardship.

Listening to a Heiltsuk youth sing some traditional welcoming songs led Jecinaldo Barbosa, a leader of the Amazonian Sateré-Mawé tribe to share some of his peoples’ rituals and traditions, including a description of the trials that young men endure as part of their coming-of-age ceremony. He also explained the origin of the traditional triangular and other geometric tribal markings adorning his face and forearms. Applied with the dye of the native Amazonian genipapo berry mixed with tobacco, the markings stay on the skin for about three weeks.

The village’s power is supplied by a generator and if we weren’t forced to retire due to the electricity being shut down for the night, I’m sure we would have heard more stories swapped about songs, and language, and the importance of raising indigenous children to be proud of who they are and where they come from.

Kitasoo children wearing clan blankets perform a traditional dance inside Klemtu Big House. Photo © Michelle Beeman

Day 3: The Feast

We flew in a 1936 Grumman Goose floatplane to Klemtu, a Kitasoo/XaiXai First Nation community of 1,200 people further north on the coast. The Klemtu waterfront used to hum with commercial fishing boats that provided regular income for workers. With the decline in fish stocks, however, and the increase in large factory trawlers further out to sea, the marina is now very quiet.

After a botany tour with Doug Neasloss, our young Kitasoo guide, and a meeting with chief Archie Robinson and others about their land use planning, it was time to sample the local cuisine. Miquelina Machado, from the Tukano tribe in the Amazon, led the delegation into the local school cafeteria, where we were welcomed by the entire community. The arrival of four Brazilians from a far away rainforest had clearly piqued the curiosity of young and old alike.

We shared the head table with the chiefs and their wives, and were treated to a welcoming dance by men in full traditional regalia that included white fabric headpieces and long red tunics embroidered with clan designs of killer whales, ravens, eagles and wolves. The front table boasted every possible preparation of salmon, halibut, herring, and seaweed. I discovered another common thread linking the Amazon indigenous leaders and coastal nations – their love of fish. From the Great Bear Rainforest to the Amazon, fish are an important part of native diets.

After the feast, we were led to the ceremonial Big House for a series of dances performed by the children of the community. The chiefs gathered around a hollowed log to perform the drumming and singing, which was the backdrop to the two dozen children moving around the fire circle. The last celebration dance was reserved for their guests, requiring all of us to get up and dance around the circle. Laurenço Milhomem’s smile may have been about the dancing, or because he knew the next day likely brought more feasting on salmon, which never seemed to lose its appeal to the Amazonian guests.

A rare glimpse of the elusive Spirit Bear. Photo © Ian McAllister Photography

Day 4: The Spirit Bear

Our fourth day found us heading even further north into Gitgaat traditional territory, noteworthy for being the primary location of the famed white “Spirit Bears” of the Great Bear Rainforest. In addition to the other grizzly and black bears that thrive along the coast, the Spirit Bear is a genetic subspecies of black bears that live in the Great Bear Rainforest. On Princess Royal Island, approximately one of every ten black bear cubs are born with a white coat. We were traveling along the island’s shoreline on a boat owned by Marven Robinson, the lead Gitgaat bear guide from Hartley Bay. Marven has spent the last nine years scouting out and watching over the bears in the territory, forming the beginning of an ecotourism operation and creating a “Watchman” program to protect the area from poachers. If there is anyone who could locate the elusive Spirit Bear, it was Marven.

In my two previous trips into the Great Bear Rainforest, I had not been lucky enough to see this magnificent symbol of the forest, but I hoped that my luck might turn this time. As we headed north near Gil Island, we received a radio call from a nearby fishing trawler that they had sighted a white bear on the beach. Thirty minutes later, having scrambled over large barnacle-encrusted boulders to get to the beach at low tide, Marven led us into the edge of the forest to see an elderly male Spirit bear resting under an upended cedar tree. I spent 30 minutes sitting quietly under a tangle of branches, just watching this unique animal, wondering what parallel experience our visitors might have in the Amazon forest – perhaps catching a fleeting glimpse of a jaguar?

Day 5: Sharing Gifts and Connections

The Amazon indigenous leaders were given numerous gifts during their trip along the way, everything from a ceremonial paddle from a Samoan delegation in Washington, to sweatshirts from an Indian college in Wisconsin to hand woven cedar baskets from the women elders in Hartley Bay.

During our final night in Klemtu at the dancing ceremony, one of the local chiefs presented Jecinaldo with a beautiful symbol of the coastal clans and a gift of honor for visiting guests: a 4 foot high totem pole carved by a Kitasoo master carver. The chief spoke about how honored their community was to have visitors from a different rainforest come to their tiny village in the cold north, to hear about their struggle to reclaim their lands and their culture. The Kitasoo wanted to offer hope and encouragement to their sisters and brothers in the Amazon, to continue their hard work of organizing and planning, and to remember their visit to Canada. Jecinaldo responded that he was so honored to have been given such a warm welcome, and that the whole delegation was surprised at how familiar this distant place felt to them. Their respective struggles and challenges were really not that different, even a hemisphere away.

For me, the entire trip was a reminder about how The Nature Conservancy does its best work when it connects people around common goals and visions. It doesn’t always have to be about specific conservation plans, or watershed management, or government negotiations. Sometimes the best efforts are simply to bring two groups of people together to learn from each other and to encourage each other to keep working to care for the places in which we live and work.