JAY HAMBURGER

I think we were in Vancouver;

I had been involved in struggles to save various forest areas.

I think so many hectares up there on the Sechelt coast…

I was really just trying to figure things out;

I wanted to be part of the frontline.

I wanted to be out there.

I forget what day it was, it was in August.

I was willing to go all the way with it…

My partner was up there arm-in-arm singing with women, and it was a jolt, I have to say;

Atty and I stood out on the road and got arrested.

I remember many of the fire circle meetings…

I mean it can happen overnight;

I think it is that wave that starts way back in the middle of the ocean.

I hadn’t seen her I guess

for three

or four

or five years.

I think the complications lie.

I felt, to take a tiny bit of the wind of the sails of the Friends of Clayoquot,

I mean we looked to them for a lot of the leadership…

Atty and I have had to try to get on with our lives;

I think we would love to be constantly involved.

I think the Friends of Clayoquot haven’t really stopped, they’re still very well aware,

Whether or not they’ll be able to get another action like that going, I don’t know.

I mean there’s only so many times Atty and I can go out and get arrested…

I don’t mean to sound rough on the loggers or the industrialists,

but what do they think we’ve gone through?

He found us guilty, but he, and I wish he hadn’t;

I wish that one judge had said

‘these people are by law, by very high law,

these people are not guilty,

 they are right, this has to stop’

I did wish that our judge had been unprecedented, he did listen a little bit more than the rest

He’d said that

‘I would not respect you if you didn’t,

I would not respect you if you did not follow through with your convictions’

We were sentenced and I served my electronic monitoring…

I might be wrong, you know;

I may have seen it from another point of view.

I did not know that that would be the situation when I arrived.

It dawned on me after I got there-

I just felt that the action needed to be… … 

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Moore, Niamh, “Oral history interview with Jay Hamburger (audio recording and transcript),”

Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story Web, accessed March 29, 2023, https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/items/show/42.

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