This is the third post in the series The Land is Never Silenced: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Literature in Canada, edited by Sabrina Schettino and Deondre Smiles.
Marlene Creates, photographer, poet and intellectual who lives in Newfoundland and Labrador, in Portugal Cove, dedicated one among several of her works to the eastern Boreal Forest surrounding her studio: “The main coniferous trees where I live are black and white spruce, larch, and balsam fir. There are also some deciduous trees and shrubs, such as birch, willow, and alders”1
From the east to the west coast of Canada, all along the subarctic region there unfurls the Boreal Forest, a patrimony of oxygen, beauty and complexity, en plein air, that is to say, as a Kind of work of art in its own right, a product of natureculture, under the sun, visible and known to most people. This contribution means to highlight different approaches and perceptions of trees-vs-forests moving from the East Coast to the West Coast.
The Photography of Marlene Creates
First, she decided to take photographs of each single tree with her hand touching its bark, in order to know one tree at a time, to become acquainted with singularity, rather than embracing the entire forest within a single encompassing gaze. The project, entitled Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand was carried out in 2007, with black and white photographs of 81 individual trees.
Second, the same project was repeated with the same trees in 2018, with color digital photographs, eleven years after. Three elements cooperate in this instance: the individual trees, their relation to the forest as a whole, and the human gesture of touching the tree. The time interval between the two sets of photos implies a dimension that speaks of ageing (of both the tree and the hand), dying (trees that are blown down by storms), old tree-friends gone missing and leaving an emptiness behind (in the photo only the hand is portrayed).
Marlene Creates is a self-conscious artist, and she is well-aware of her delicate, light and simple gesture. This is just one way to make kin with trees by touching, photographing and memorizing them, in order to know, recognize, and distinguish them in the midst of the forest.
It is one patient experiment that implies repeated visits to the same tree and touching as a form of respectful greeting, an act of reciprocal recognition and proximity. The photos are also the aesthetic material for an exhibition, a display on the web, and a personal and artistic archive; they have also been arranged into a published book, written in 2017. This is just one among numerous artistic interventions in the patch of Boreal Forest where the artist lives and works, in order to harmonize her presence in that ecosystem, which is also a linguistic, dialectal ecosystem. To sum up, this is one way to zoom in and familiarize with the trees of the Boreal Forest through art. The artist has dedicated attention and works also to the whole forest as ecosystem.
The Golden Spruce and the Haida
Another interesting, though sad story of the relationship between a single tree and a whole forest is provided by John Vaillant’s non-fiction The Golden Spruce (2005) and comes from the West Coast of Canada.
In his reportage, the Canadian writer tells the story of a peculiar, gigantic Sitka spruce tree (Picea sitchensis) with golden needles, instead of green ones. Looked at as if it were a mutant or an albino tree, it represented a unique spectacle of beauty, towering among the green forest, thus, it was re-named Picea Sitkensis ‘Aurea’.
In Vaillant’s words, “Sixteen storeys tall and more than six metres round, the golden spruce was unique in the botanical world.”2 Admired by tourists, well-known to the local population and the community of loggers (Anglos), it was venerated by the Haida, who are the Indigenous First Nations People, custodians of Haida Gwaii, the archipelago of islands off the coast of Vancouver, known in colonial times as Queen Charlotte Islands, in British Columbia.
To the local Haida, based in Old Masset (population 700), the Haida reserve, the tree was an ancestor: “According to Haida legend, the golden spruce represented a good but defiant young boy who had been transformed”3
The boy had disobeyed his elderly grandfather, by turning back while leaving the village, as a punishment for this transgression he was transformed into that beautiful tree, named K’iid K’iyaas. This is a local legend, a cautionary tale, with a precise moral that should be a warning for future generations.4 The tree was dear to the Haida, but it could be admired by everyone.
One day, on January 21, 1997, the beautiful tree went crashing down to the ground. Two very precise marks were proof of the fact that the tree had been hacked by an expert logger, who had not felled the tree straight away, but had just made incisions, so that the wind would have ended the job of blowing it down.
The person responsible for this terrible act of ecophobia wrote a letter to the public, stating that the act of “butchering” was painful, and was not meant to “disrespect The Haida People”, but rather to express a protest against the logging industry which indiscriminately destroys the forests of British Columbia with its policy of massive and total clearcuts.
Eventually, the protest was also against the blindness of people who protect one single tree and lose sight of the bigger picture, thus ignoring the devastation that deforestation is causing. British Columbia was notorious as the ‘Brazil of the North,’ as Suzanne Simard also claims in her famous Ted Talk, “How Trees Talk to each other.”5
To the Haida, the loss of the Golden Spruce was a terrible blow: “people were crying, they were in shock; they felt enormous guilt for not protecting the tree better. […] some among the Haida saw the crime not as an act of vandalism, or protest, but as a kind of murder”. They believed that a piece of their community was extinct.6
An official mourning ceremony to reconcile the loss was held for the dead Golden Spruce, and the Haida claimed protection over the territory and full ownership of the remains of the tree: “The Haida have long regarded K’iid K’iaas as a sentinel to the Yacoun Valley, and now that it has been destroyed, the Haida will escalate protectionist measure for our land”.7 This case study shows how Indigenous Knowledge takes care of individual trees as much as of the whole forest, as one Haida princess expressed it:
“If the tree dies, the Haida Nation will die”; “They guarded this tree closely to the heart, and felt the public would strip the tree and it would disappear”8
Suzanne Simard and Trees As Community
In turn, science also contributes to a different view of a forest as much more than the sum of all its individual trees: “a stand.” Suzanne Simard, professor at the Forestry Department of the University of British Columbia, once a logger herself, turned into a devoted scientist to reforestation; by chance, she used to know the culprit who attacked the Golden Spruce, but, above all, she witnessed the same systematic deforestation of the region.
Simard is now an expert on the problems reforestation implies, particularly when the soil is so compromised that the saplings do not take root, for they miss the fungal mycorrhizae that are able to attach themselves to the roots, thus creating a symbiotic network that allows better and more efficient nourishment.
She witnessed how “on Haida Gwaii, the last of the cedars, some more than a thousand years old, are being clear-cut on Graham Island, leaving the forest along the spawning rivers degraded and the Haida wondering what will happen to their way of life. When will this stop, this unraveling?”.9 Sensitive to the Haida’s philosophy of care, she raised consciousness about the necessity for different type of forestry.
With her beautiful essay “Finding the Mother Tree” (2021) she provides a response to the preservation of the Boreal Forests of Canada, thus recreating the balance between attention for a single tree – in this case the mother tree – and the whole forests of British Columbia.
She managed to demonstrate that trees do not stand alone, on the contrary they cooperate and their existence is not based necessarily on competition. Particularly Mother trees are important, they are the taller and bigger trees to be spotted in the forest, and they are able to direct their nutrient to the siblings, particularly in cases of ecological imbalance.
Her scientific results hint at various discoveries: maintaining the Mother trees and a patch of forest instead of producing clearcuts might help reforestation; mixed forests are thriving better than mono crops; trees can communicate through chemical volatile substances, which act as messengers; trees also share nutrients and help each other in case of need or distress within a forestal ecosystem.
She knows that reforestation is a long and slow process, sometimes a difficult, if not impossible, one. Thus, it is undoubtedly crucial to preserve forests.
Her career was not easy, nor straightforwardly progressing. She found obstacles represented particularly by male policymakers and forestry experts. The prestigious scientific journal Nature, published her work under the title “The Wood-Wide Web”, and this boosted her fame and her results also internationally.10
Suzanne Simard shows how a single tree is inscribed into a larger body of interrelations, and how the forest is a living, cooperative network. She began the Mother Tree Project in 2015 “with a guiding principle of retaining Mother Trees and maintaining connections within forests to keep them regenerative.”
With climate change, her work is extremely important, to the point of wanting to “further develop an emergent philosophy: complexity science. Based on embracing collaboration in addition to competition – indeed, working with all of the multifarious interactions that make up the forest – complexity science can transform forestry practices into what is adaptive and holistic and away from what has been overly authoritarian and simplistic”.11
Her pedagogic idea to “reestablish local involvement in our forests,” is in line with the care indigenous people devote to the land, as the Haida demonstrate with guardianship on Haida Gawaai forest patrimony.
The way might be still long, but hopefully we shall reach a future when demonstrative actions such as the one that brought down the Golden Spruce are no longer needed in order to raise consciousness about climate change and all its co-causes, including extensive deforestation–a future when the interconnection of all that exists is not only Indigenous Knowledge, relegated to small communities across the world, but will become shared and common ground in our scientific practices and artistic gestures.
- Marlene Creates, “Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest,” in C. Concilio and D. Fargione, Trees in Literature and the Arts. Humanarboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (Lexington Books, 2019), 230. ↩︎
- John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A Trues Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Knopf, 2005), 24. ↩︎
- Valliant, The Golden Spruce, 165. ↩︎
- Valliant, The Golden Spruce, 188-190. ↩︎
- Vaillant, The Golden Spruce, 122 ↩︎
- Vaillant, The Golden Spruce, 165 ↩︎
- Valliant, The Golden Spruce, 166. ↩︎
- Valliant, The Golden Spruce, 229. ↩︎
- Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf, 2021), 292. ↩︎
- Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 165. ↩︎
- Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 304.
See also Carmen Concilio, “The story of The Golden Spruce between action and inaction, ecophilia and ecophobia”, Dis-4Change Studies on Climate and Environmental Discourse, forthcoming. ↩︎
Feature Image: Golden Spruce, Haida Gwaii, taken by Mike Beauregard, 1984.
