Participating in protests against logging old-growth trees on Vancouver Island is about more than protecting forests, Naas tells me. For Naas (a camp alias being used by request), standing with protesters at Fairy Creek is about defending a vision of a sustainable, equitable future, where social and political norms prioritize people and place, instead of profit.

“Ultimately the way to achieve that future is recognizing and respecting Indigenous law and land sovereignty,” Naas says, “The First Nations are the original caretakers of this land and if there is to be hope of recovery, we must allow Indigenous land stewardship to resume.”

Naas, a Two Spirit artist and ECU student currently between his first and second year, is from the Hesquiaht First Nation. As of May, he has been serving as a camp cook on the frontlines of a fight to preserve one of the last stands of ancient trees in British Columbia.

For nearly nine months, protesters at what is broadly known as the Fairy Creek Blockade have been blocking logging company Teal-Jones from accessing a number of stands of old-growth forest in a remote region of southwestern Vancouver Island. Occupying strategic locations in camps along logging roads and on bridges near Port Renfrew, the groups have prevented fallers from accessing the Caycuse watershed to harvest the trees, many of which are hundreds or even thousands of years old — trees that protesters say represent less than three percent of remaining old growth in the province.

And by some accounts, the pressure may be working. On June 9, the BC government announced it is deferring the harvesting of old-growth trees in Fairy Creek and the Central Walbran Valley for two years. The move came following a request from the Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht First Nations to defer old-growth logging while they prepare stewardship plans. But the deferral represents only a start to the work Naas hopes the blockade might accomplish.

“These protests really represent a huge push for recognizing toxic systems, and recognizing we need change, even if it seems impossible at this point in time,” he says. “Because if we don’t change — if we don’t confront extractive resource practices and this idea of working-to-live — there’s not going to be anything left.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/ecu-student-on-frontlines-of-fairy-creek-protests-says-blockades-are-a-battleground-for-a-sustainable-future

Speaking with artist Preston Buffalo, it quickly becomes clear his life and work are fiercely resistant to definition. And that’s just the way he likes it.

“If somebody can’t put a label on you, it’s really uncomfortable for them,” he tells me by phone from his 200 square-foot live-work space in Vancouver’s Railtown neighbourhood. “They don’t know what to do with you. I feel like that’s where I fit in.”

When it comes to art, he’s not interested in shock value, he says. Although he does believe it’s “important to leave somebody a little bit unsettled; leave them wondering what they just looked at.”

Preston’s ease with exploring edge-case questions — often raised by his own, self-professed outsider status — is evident in his first solo exhibition, Digitizing Indigeneity, currently showing at Never Apart, in Montreal, through June 27. The sprawling virtual exhibition showcases his fluency across media, including sculpture, printmaking, photography, soundscape and digital media.

As with the rest of his practice, Preston’s instinct toward iconoclasm is front and centre throughout Digitizing Indigeneity. Describing himself as an “urban, queer Indigenous artist,” Preston is a Cree man, raised on the West Coast among Coast Salish elders and artists, who paints Formline poodles — a “clan symbol” for “those of us out there who are disenfranchised.” He explores feelings of displacement from the community of his birth and from his family’s ancestral lands in Alberta in a series of exquisite black-and-white photographs recording the decay of fence posts and abandoned automobiles under epic prairie skies.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/preston-buffalo-is-taking-the-power-back