Covering the largest demonstration of civil disobedience in so-called Canadian history, Fairy Creek presents an up-close look at a powerful display of resilience and community faced with unequal use of force from a centuries old colonial institution acting in favour of the lumber industry, its profit potential and continued colonization of Vancouver Island and its resources. 

Canada’s illegal occupation and destruction of the unceded territory of the Lekungen, Squamish, Musquem and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations communities and their old growth forests is threatened by a group of activists forming blockades in an act of peaceful protest. They call  attention to the continued logging of British Columbia's old growth forest, and demand permanent protection to the remaining, intact old growth. They face the lumber industry's fragile understanding of the simple concepts of renewable resources and biodiversity that gets favoured in government policy. To put it simply, Fairy Creek is comfortable letting lumber industry stakeholders depict themselves as gigantic idiots by simply listening to what they have to say on the matter.   

Faced with aggression from the lumber industry, individual industry workers and the RCMP, Fairy Creek follows the personal effects, intimacies, and sacrifices of the community, and stakeholders in the resistance who attempt to save the old growth trees in the Fairy Creek watershed. 

It brought back the same feelings of outrage that I experienced when I witnessed the resistance to protect British Columbia’s remaining old growth forests in the Fairy Creek watershed from being logged when the blockades started in 2020. 

Fairy Creek reminds us of the importance of grassroots organizations' capability to stand up against unjust, exploitative governments and private industries, and the power of people calling for change as a body politic. The documentary positions itself objectively in the conflict, acknowledging the importance of resistance within the contemporary climate movement, while also leaving space to witness the flaws and ignorances that exist in an environmental protest that takes place on Indigenous land, and the realistic efficacy of peaceful stand-ins. 

The Fairy Creek blockades are presented as far whiter than one would expect for a movement of Indigenous land rights, emphasizing the internal conflicts, racial nuances and the multiplicity of motivations to protect the old growth from logging. 

While the blockades are an integral part of the resistance against anti-Indigenous, anti-climate action policies, the underbelly of whiteness in the contemporary environmental movement is visible here. The blockades are a valuable reminder that reconciliation is a communal act, and that an end to old growth logging is a mere step in the ongoing process for Indigenous land reclamation of Canada’s illegal occupation of the west coast. Legal protection of old growth against logging will not protect the forests, the removal and dismantling of the Canadian nation-state from Indigenous lands will. 

Respect existence, or expect resistance. 

Oh, and also fuck the government (at all levels).