Waking to T'imlax'aamit: Ground-truthing the Indigenous rainforests of British Columbia's North Coast.

For many thousands of years, the rainforests of British Columbia's North Coast have been home to immense conifer trees, leafy shrubs, mosses, lichens, and the complex fungal communities that connect and support them. Guided by principles of balanced reciprocity, First Nations cultures have also thrived here for millennia, adapting these and other wild gifts into lesson systems of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Recently, the arrival of colonial industrialists, European settlers, and international migrants has disrupted the balanced flux of local ecological and economic activities. Considering injustices driven by Globalization, how can the Indigenous rainforests and their original residents teach newcomers to live respectfully and sustainably, and, how can Western thought accept holistic, long-term visions of home? Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this poetry-prose-essay is a creative investigation of where critical questions lead through the Indigenous rainforest, uncovering true connections with a literary form that is a diverse and complex as its subject.