Dressed in winter coats, scarves and hats to guard against freezing temperatures, Grassy Narrows residents spent weeks at the blockade site to stop logging trucks from getting to the Whiskey Jack Forest to pick up wood.
Schoolchildren were bussed in to take part in the fight. Archival footage from Canada’s public broadcaster CBC shows a line of determined young people blocking a truck on a dirt road. “We believe in traditional land … not clearcutting,” read one sign held up by a land defender.
“There must have been about 50 to 75 kids stopping trucks. Trucks just stopped, and they didn’t want to move,” recalls JB, who took part in the direct action.
Residents set up a makeshift encampment, where they cooked over woodfires and held ceremonies. With locked arms, they stood or lay down in front of the trucks.
And when some of the loggers tried to reach the forest via alternative access routes, those were quickly blocked too. “They’d come at 3 o’clock in the morning to get our wood. So we started getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning to go and blockade,” JB explains.
The community’s sustained fight – the blockade still stands today – led to results: In 2008, the logging company gave up its clear-cutting in the area, citing the uncertainty, delays and added costs caused by the land defenders.
“At first, a lot of people were scared. That was a very confrontational [approach], but [the fear] didn’t last long,” says Williamson, who took part in the blockade himself.
“Physically stopping the cutting of trees … seemed more real than sitting down at the table with people that are not listening,” he adds. “The more we saw the results of physically blocking and occupying the land, we saw that was the only way that anyone would listen.”
A documentary shot by local journalists from the early days of the blockade shows community members confronting a forestry industry contractor after he is told he won’t be able to truck away the logs.
“The beef isn’t here,” the contractor says, telling the land defenders to go to company and industry offices with their grievances instead. “We’ve done that,” a community member responds. Eventually, the truck turns back down the road.
Isaacs says what she remembers most about that time was the sense of community that grew out of Grassy Narrows’s stand.
“We were all doing something,” Isaacs says while sitting in front of a fire at a clearing in the forest where the blockade started more than 20 years ago.
“We were all busy chopping [firewood], keeping the fire cooking. For the first time, I was like, ‘This is how our people felt when they were working together in a village, in a community. This is what it felt like.’”
LISTEN: Judy Da Silva, Chrissy Isaacs and Indigenous elder Chickadee Richard sing by a campfire at the site where the community first resisted logging.
Today, a wooden cabin, wigwam and other structures sit at the blockade site, just off a dirt road. Community members use the area for ceremonies and other gatherings. The wooden gate that was used to block logging trucks still stands.
“Our people, our community, we’re really resilient,” says Isaacs, whose front-line activism continues.
She recently set up a tent outside Queen’s Park, the Ontario legislature in Toronto, to protest against a new law known as Bill 5, which allows the province to bypass environmental regulations and Indigenous rights to build major resource projects.
When she got home, community members told her they, too, were ready to protect the land and the water against Bill 5. “’If we go back out there, I’ll be there,’” she says people told her.
“I feel like as long as there’s people like me or [others] who keep speaking out, we wake more people up. I don’t feel afraid. I feel like I have hope.”
