Picturing Transformation

The remarkable story of how a First Nations chief, an artist and a mountaineer evolved a new form of environmental and cultural activism, and saved 50,000 hectares of forest in the process.

The history of British Columbia is rife with stories of conflict between loggers and environmentalists, First Nations and government-backed corporations. Many of them have ended in violence, arrests and clear-cutting. Between 1997 and 2007 Farm License 38, encompassing Sims Creek in the upper Elaho Valley became the site of a wholly different kind of protest.

Because of the actions of ten thousand people brought together by Squamish Nation Hereditary Chief Bill Williams, artist Nancy Bleck and the late mountaineer John Clarke, this land - a 50,000-hectare section of the Squamish First Nation now known as Wild Spirit Places--was saved. It was a stunning example of how welcoming people to the land, showing them its physical and spiritual wealth and allowing them to experience it themselves transformed the way they saw it. And by quietly, cumulatively building a critical mass of people who had seen--witnessed--this land firsthand and come to view it as important; the Uts'am/Witness.