Getting Kids out on the Land

Twenty-five years ago when the Haida blockaded logging operations on Lyell Island, young protesters took a stand to protect the land for their unborn grandchildren. The protest sparked elders to get involved and the international response led to the creation of Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, co-managed in a unique partnership between the Haida Nation and the Government of Canada. And those future grandchildren? Many are in school, but have never even seen the iconic place that rallied their grandparents.

So while Canada geared up to celebrate 100 years of National Parks, 15 students from schools all over the islands were invited on a day-long adventure into Gwaii Haanas, in the hopes that a new generation would become connected to this isolated part of the archipelago.

Gwaii Haanas is no easy place to get to, not even when you live on the islands. Some of the kids came from Masset at the northern end of Graham Island (one of two main islands in the chain), trudging onto a school bus at 6:30 a.m. in order to meet the others an hour and a half south at the ferry landing for the crossing to Moresby Island (the main southern island). A half-hour on the ferry and then an hour's bumpy ride on a logging road followed. At Gaawu Kuns (Moresby Camp), a wide estuary where Pallant Creek empties into the sea, the Zodiacs awaited.

Eight-year-old Markus Carty, the youngest in the group of Grade 4 to 11 students, bundled into thick rain gear and tumbled into the high-speed inflatable boat. Some of the teenagers refused to wear the wind and waterproof gear. With dark clouds looming out on the water, the adults shook their heads. Even Guujaaw, Haida president and one of the key players in the long ago blockades, tried to get his 15 year-old daughter to wear a slicker or an extra toque.

'Our people kind of got tamed'

An hour later when the boats got to the beach at Lyell Island, he noted a change in the generations that extends beyond teenage vanity. "Our people kind of got tamed. They want to sit around warm and watch television." But out on the land things are different. His gesture encompassed the 5,000 square kilometres of Gwaii Haanas -- both land and ocean protected from mountaintop to sea floor. "If someone wanted to turn off their iPod and live like an old Indian, they could still do it here," he said. "They could live off the land, hunt, fish and have adventures."

This is a key feature of the Haida/Government of Canada co-management relationship -- protecting Gwaii Haanas in the context of a living culture that continues to rely on area.

"That's the standard that we hold [the management of] this place to. As long as there are places for our people to enjoy the culture. And we have to make sure they can do that, whether it is now or in 100 years," said Guujaaw to the children.

With so much wilderness (more than 50 per cent of the islands are protected from resource extraction), one might think that Haida Gwaii students are always out on the land. But not every one has the means or the knowledge to take advantage of the bounty outside their doorstep. Stephanie Fung, education co-ordinator at Gwaii Haanas, said she could tell by the reluctance of some of the kids, whose names were chosen via a random draw at each school, that they weren't used to the idea of zooming across the ocean deep into vast wild spaces.

Across Canada, learning to camp

If Haida Gwaii youth are attracted to activities like computer games and television, imagine the rest of the country. It's this trend, away from outdoor pursuits, that is pushing Parks Canada to get youth enthused about the country's vast array of nationally protected areas. Grade 8 students across the country are offered free parks passes and an upcoming TV show will unplug eight young urban people from their techno-dependent lifestyles and thrust them into the national parks, heritage sites and marine conservation areas for the summer.

A nationwide "Learn to Camp" event aimed at teaching hundreds of participants to pitch a tent and cook over a fire will be held in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec and Halifax. And last year, 32 university students from across the nation were offered Canada's Greatest Summer Job, spending a season in a National Park and producing a video to document the experience. Sea to Peak by Joseph Crawford, the lucky Gwaii Haanas student intern, was chosen as a finalist in the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2010.

But the trip to Lyell Island with local Haida Gwaii kids wasn't just aimed at showing off the natural wonders of Gwaii Haanas. The organizers want these future stewards to learn how they can make a difference in protecting or enhancing the area.

'Moving fish is stressful'

Lyell Island was heavily logged in the 1970s and '80s and the openings along creeks caused erosion and siltation, which destroyed salmon spawning habitat due. Parks Canada has been working since 2006 on stream restoration projects in the area and the students were tasked with releasing the first salmon fry into logging-damaged Beljay Creek in an effort to repopulate it.

The eggs were collected in the fall from a nearby creek with a healthy chum salmon population and mixed with milt from males at the local Pallant Creek Fish Hatchery. Meanwhile, the Hecate Strait Streamkeepers, a local stewardship group, sent their Fisheries and Oceans Canada-funded education co-ordinator Jason Shafto to set up tanks at islands schools and gave the first overview of the Stream to Sea salmon program. Later he delivered the fertilized eggs and the students watched the lifecycle of the salmon begin.

Back on Lyell at the mouth of the creek, the fish arrived by floatplane in a big cooler. A special tank injected oxygen into the water to keep the levels safe for the thousands of squirming creatures. "Fish need cool clear water with lots of oxygen," said Shafto to the crowd of eager youth. He'd been back to the schools to collect the fry and then carefully drove them down the island to the floatplane base. "Moving fish is stressful," he told them. He'd had to keep stopping at creeks along the way to freshen the water for them.

With that in mind, the children tried not to jostle their buckets filled with the inch-long fish as they made their way along slippery rocks to a quiet pool farther upstream.

Chum usually head straight for the ocean when they emerge from their eggs, Shafto said, as the buckets were tipped and the fish dashed into the moving water, aiming straight downstream.

Only .5 to three per cent of fry ever make it back to the creek they come from, the children were told, and that's when female fish are releasing hundreds of thousands of eggs into the river.

"We'll meet back here in four years for a barbeque," joked Ernie Gladstone, superintendent of Gwaii Haanas, who was also along on the trip.

He told the students about his memories of the Lyell Island protests. He was about 12 years old when he first came down and got attached to the area. All through his teenage years he continued visiting and he's still working here.

"We're trying to get people like you visiting these places, so that you learn about them and learn about why they are important. I'm hoping when you guys go back today you'll have some of those same kinds of memories that I had and you'll talk to your friends and your family about the experience you've had here and hopefully this will inspire you to do whatever you chose to do in your life."

'So many levels'

Soon it was time for the long journey home. The extra toques went on this time but back at Moresby Camp, the most common answer to what was your favourite part of the trip, was the Zodiac ride. Oh, and the salmon part too.

"Anything that gets them out of the classroom is a good thing," said Barb Elduayen, a teacher at Chief Matthews Elementary School in Old Massett, on the value of excursions like this. "It hits them on so many levels."

Children at this band-run school are lucky. They go on many field trips, sometimes to gather cedar bark for weaving, other times to dig razor clams off North Beach, but Elduayan says a trip like this one brings so many pieces about the history of this place into one. For kids to understand that many governments are working together in their homeland in a cooperative manner is a powerful thing.

According to Fung, Gwaii Haanas plans to offer this opportunity again, at least for the next three years, while funding for the project continues. And that's good news not only for students, but for those who worked so hard to ensure the logging stopped in the area.

One student, at least, felt the impact of Guujaaw's urging for kids to get out on the land. "When you get a chance to come down, come and learn things about the land and learn about who you are. Because it's the land that we come from," said Guujaaw while back on the beach near Beljay Creek.

Young Droughen Moseley, in Grade 7 at Sk'aadgaa Naay Elementary in Skidegate said he dreams of coming down again and camping for several days to see if he can survive.