"Can subsistence hunters bring down a charging multinational company? Or form a united front against corporate tactics of divide and conquer?

It does happen. In the 1950s, Dr. Edward Teller ("Father of the H-Bomb") championed a scheme to use nuclear weapons to carve out a harbor in Arctic Alaska. Successful resistance to "Project Chariot" united native villages.

In British Columbia, native leaders in ceremonial robes blocked logging trucks on Lyell Island in the Queen Charlottes. The protest helped create Canada's Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.

Haida natives later went to court and won a greater voice in how Weyerhaeuser logs its lands.

The great MacKenzie Valley of the Northwest Territories was slated for a natural-gas pipeline in the 1970s. Native villages took their case to a government inquiry headed by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Thomas Berger.

Berger's scathing report blocked the pipeline. The project is likely to go ahead, three decades later, with far more direct involvement by the valley's aboriginal residents.

Yet, the airplane flight back down to Vancouver shows the pains of a resource economy.

At sunset, you can look down and see thousands of drowned trees sticking out of the Ootsa Lake reservoir. Ootsa is a natural lake, dammed and vastly enlarged in the 1950s. Its waters were redirected through the Coast Range to power the giant aluminum smelter at Kitimat.

The lands to be flooded were not logged. Thousands of moose, elk and woodland caribou drowned in the debris-filled reservoir. Native subsistence hunters were packed off to farms bought by the government. The result: rampant alcoholism."

Get the Story:
Joel Connelly: Native hunters up north take aim at corporate greed (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 8/11)

Related Stories:
Column: First Nations work to protect environment (8/9)