Unless a tree is particularly large, or unusually shaped, it will not stand out as an individual, and unless it is isolated from its mates, it will seldom announce itself from a distance. But despite being embedded in a forest of similarly large trees, the tree that came to be known as the golden spruce was an exception on both counts. From the ground, its startling colour stopped people dead in their tracks; from the air, it stood out like a beacon and was visible from miles away. Like much of the surrounding landscape, the tree was incorporated into the Haida’s vast repertoire of stories, but as far as anyone knows, it is the only tree, in what was then an infinity of trees, ever to be given a name by the Haida people. They called it K’iid K’iyaas: Elder Spruce Tree. According to legend, it was a human being who had been transformed.
I read an early copy of the upcoming (2023) rerelease of The Golden Spruce with a new afterword from author John Vaillant (wherein he cringes at some of his outdated language and attitudes in the original release and gives updates on Grant Hadwin — the man at the centre of the book’s mystery — and on the Haida people’s quest for self-government on the unceded territory of Haida Gwaii). This is my favourite type of narrative nonfiction: a central mystery explored through a deep dive into the history, geography, botany, sociology, and politics of a region, extrapolated into a lesson for people everywhere. For those who don’t know: On January 20th, 1997, logging surveyor and renowned outdoorsman Grant Hadwin swam across a freezing river in order to surreptitiously compromise a centuries-old Sitka spruce — a magical mutant whose unlikely golden needles were integral to the local tourism industry and sacred to area First Nation peoples — and after it toppled, he then disappeared while supposedly travelling to his day in court to answer for his act. Vaillant explores the history of the Haida people — from precontact with Europeans to today — the history of the logging industry, the unusual and harsh geography of British Columbia’s coast and offshore islands, and interspersed with it all, the story of how one man became jaded with the logging industry and decided to make a hugely controversial statement by felling a sacred tree. Meticulously detailed and compellingly written in engaging prose, with a message on moral and cognitive compromise that should resonate with every reader, this is exactly to my taste and satisfaction; rounding up to five stars.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard to say who was more inebriated by greed: the Europeans who were seeing profits in the hundreds of percent, or the Natives who were suddenly able to leapfrog their way to the top of the social hierarchy and put on spectacles of largesse hitherto unimaginable by any potlatch host on the coast. So eager were the Natives to get their hands on the traders’ various technological marvels that a man would readily sell the otter cloak off his wife’s back and, on occasion, her back as well. And so desperate were the Iron Men to acquire these skins that they would trade away virtually anything that wasn’t crucial to the journey home; this included Native slaves from down the coast, firearms, silverware, door keys, and the sailors’ own clothing. These were boom times for all concerned, a rapacious festival of unrestrained capitalism.`
The Haida people were long known as fearsome warriors — travelling up and down the coast in massive dugout canoes; raiding, looting, and enslaving other peoples — and when they first made contact with Europeans, they were fiercely savvy in the rules of trade and bargaining. Due to an incredibly profitable Chinese market for otter skins, a mutually advantageous partnership arose between European traders and the Haida people — in which the Europeans risked the perilous journey around the southern tip of South America in order to get to the west coast of Canada and traded iron goods and weapons for a seemingly unending supply of otter skins — but despite sea otters originally numbering in the millions, they soon became extirpated from much of their range and the market collapsed; leaving the Haida people vulnerable to exploitation when the Europeans, and then the North Americans, set their sights on the inland trees that the Haida had no immediate need for. As Vaillant notes, the otter trade “set the tone for every extraction industry that has come after”; unrestrained capitalism extracts to the last drop, but even the greedy logging companies knew to leave the famous golden spruce alone.
Meanwhile, Grant Hadwin grew in his career as a talented logging scout: with an uncanny ability to survey access roads into hard-to-reach areas, and an aptitude for backwoods survival in harsh conditions, Hadwin both dearly loved the old growth forests of Haida Gwaii and contributed much to their destruction. He also suffered from mental illness (his brother did not survive his battle with schizophrenia), and after experiencing a mystical epiphany in the woods, Hadwin started firing off Unabomber-type anti-society screeds to the media and logging outfits. Ultimately, he seemed to believe that chopping down the famous golden spruce (which he apparently didn’t know was sacred to the Haida) would draw attention to the evils of the logging industry:
“When society places so much value on one mutant tree and ignores what happens to the rest of the forest, it’s not the person who points this out who should be labelled,” Hadwin told a Prince Rupert reporter who questioned his sanity. In the short term at least, the collective reaction to the loss of the golden spruce ended up proving his point: that people fail to see the forest for the tree.
The Golden Spruce ends with the fruitless search for the missing Hadwin, the (unsanctioned by the Haida) efforts to clone and market copies of the fallen mutant tree, and a survey of modern-day loggers who acknowledge the permanent damage they are doing while being unwilling to walk away from their big paychecks (Vaillant compares this to stockbrokers, soldiers, and slaughterhouse workers: people who insulate us from the dirty work that support our lives; the unspoken “moral and cognitive dissonance” that allow us to succeed and function in this world). And although he states that First Nations’ stories are considered “owned” by their tellers, and would never be shared by someone outside their community, Vaillant gives us a couple of versions of the Haida’s tale of the golden spruce in order to conclude:
At the root of the golden spruce story is a very simple message: respect your elders, or you’ll be sorry. However, beneath this surface layer of meaning, the parable could also be read as a lesson on how to survive the loss of one’s entire village to massacre, how to weather a stint in residential school: don’t look back; don’t try to return to that dead place. But everyone in a position to deny or confirm this, or any other theory, is dead. Like the tree and the man who cut it down, the story is a puzzle or, more accurately, a piece of a puzzle, the whole of which can never be fully known.
The tale of the golden spruce is still a puzzle to this day, but it’s an intriguing story and I am happy to have finally read Vaillant’s multidisciplinary approach to it. Happier still to have read an updated version, twenty-five years after the initial destruction of this magical mutant tree.
