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6. Treaties, Trauma, Trees: The Dream of Hadwin
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s i x Treaties, Trauma, Trees: The Dream of Hadwin If a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touching the soil, so to speak. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical essence, but not the necessity of their racinating function. — j a c q u e s d e r r i d a 1 The Golden Spruce and the Logan Elm Here is a parable from ‘‘west of everything.’’ In 1997 a man named Grant Hadwin swam the frozen Yakoun River with his chainsaw in tow and cut down an extremely rare golden spruce in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. The tree was both ancient —it had stood for more than three hundred years—and a genuine scienti fic puzzle, and its symbolic importance was recognized both by the timber company MacMillan Bloedel, which had, under pressure, set aside the land on which the tree stood, and by the local Haida nation, into whose oral history the tree had been incorporated and revered as an ancestor. Hadwin had worked for MacMillan Bloedel and had evidently concluded that his counsel on forest management was not being heeded, but in the statement he sent to the Vancouver Sun, MacMillan Bloedel, the Haida nation, and Greenpeace, Hadwin’s motivations seem more obscure: ‘‘I didn’t enjoy 187 188 The Dream of Hadwin butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university-trained professional, should be able to understand. . . . I mean this action, to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters , whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc., appear to be responsible for most of the abominations, towards amateur life on this planet.’’2 The distinction between professional and ‘‘amateur life’’ is an elusive one, admittedly, but as a university-trained professional who has been trained to train others, I take myself to be an addressee of this message and act. From what, and to what, does Hadwin wish me to ‘‘wake up’’? And what is the status of this act that wakens? Hadwin apparently thought of his act as a kind of terrorism: ‘‘He advocated terrorism as the most effective means of bringing about change, and he talked a great deal about trees’’ (126). In addition to his fierce opposition to clear-cutting, Hadwin had aligned himself with Native American grievances . In a letter to CNN, he wrote: ‘‘Your focus appears to be on Bosnia and O.J. Simpson. Your Native American problem, however, parallels our own and yet your coverage, appears to be non-existent’’ (109). It turns out that the golden spruce and its surrounding forest had, through the sustained lobbying of the Haida and other environmental groups, already been protected from further logging, a fact that makes Hadwin’s violence look rather self-defeating, directed at the very compromise between economic, native, and environmental interests that he would presumably have sought. Such self-destructiveness may make his act seem more authentically ‘‘terrorist,’’ of course, insofar as one interpretation of terrorism understands it as a practice in which sending a ‘‘message’’ ultimately trumps the achievement of any more limited political goal. Such terrorism, Roland Barthes suggests, ‘‘remains within the signifier.’’3 But as far as Hadwin was concerned, it was not he, but the powers that be that absurdly remained within the signifier in their overestimation of a single symbolic tree: ‘‘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 labeled’’ (139). Perhaps Hadwin was not so much attacking a symbol as he was attacking a mode and practice of symbolization. The very process of compromise, with its demarcation of a preserve or sanctuary, and its elevation of one tree over all the others, was apparently too much for Hadwin to bear. [54.87.17.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:23 GMT) The Dream of Hadwin 189 Here now is another parable, apparently more peaceful, but just as bound up with the symbolism of trees, land, and Indians as the story of Hadwin and the golden spruce. In January 1842 the inaugural issue of The American Pioneer, the short-lived organ of the Logan Historical Society published out of Chillicothe, Ohio, described the dedication ceremony of their society...