The longest running blockade in Canadian history still continues today in Ontario. In December 2002 members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation blocked a logging road to impede the movement of timber industry trucks and equipment within their traditional territory. The story of the blockade is a story of convergences and relationship. There has been a growth among the people of Grassy Narrows about their own identity and that of their relationship as a community to the dominant culture and to other Indigenous Nations and peoples.
In Strong Hearts, Native Lands, Anna J. Willow demonstrates that Indigenous people’s decisions to take environmentally protective action cannot be understood apart from political or cultural concerns. By recounting how and why one Anishinaabe community was able to take a stand against the industrial logging that threatens their land-based subsistence and way of life, Willow offers a more complex “and more constructive” understanding of human-environment relationships.
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