Kami Kanetuska
I don’t have to speak very loudly.
Where do I start?
I didn’t...
I don’t think I was involved in environmental stuff...
I’m not starting at the beginning.
I can’t.
I mean, it seems to me my life started when I went to Nepal,
where I started to think about some of those things.
I just got invited to go there over land,
I had enough of England.
How I got there?
I had been feeling guilty,
I had heard about the protests,
I had even heard about the camp,
I had been planning to go there all summer.
I had seen…
Uh,
the article on Sile Simpson.
I had stuck a picture up in my kitchen,
I made my pot of tea,
I’d look at it
and think,
oh I better go up there.
I would get myself to Clayoquot Sound,
not quite knowing how I’d get there.
I felt that the camp reminded me of the 60s.
I went there I was tentless.
I didn’t feel like I really wanted to stay there without a tent,
I was only staying up there for a few days the first time…
But it really opened my eyes to what was going on.
I’ve always had this sense of being connected with the whole of the world.
I found the camp very pleasant.
I think there was something else…
I found it really rather extraordinary in some ways.
I enjoy things
I find the majority of the people would rather not get involved.
I didn’t really want to get…
um…
arrested.
I made that decision!
I would support anybody who wanted to get arrested.
I wanted to be involved,
I just kept feeling I wanted to be involved…
[ I wanted to be involved…
I wanted to be involved…]
I did expect that I would write more.
I would come back,
and I would talk about how amazing the camp was.
I would find that people often weren’t that interested.
And I think in a way it affected me,
I lost faith in a lot of things….
I couldn’t keep just running over there.
[ running over there,
over there,
there.]
Citation
Moore, Niamh, “Oral history interview with Kami Kanetuska (audio recording and transcript),” Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story Web, accessed April 26, 2023, https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/items/show/44.