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The review concluded logging “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects” as long as the plan adhered to mitigation measures that include leaving buffer zones at roads, around streams and patches of forest.

Underwood said the land will be reforested and she is hopeful it will recover to allow for cultural uses again.

“It’s not an old-growth forest; it’s already been logged before,” Underwood said. “This was our opportunity to do it and have some input to how it gets done.”

Previously, Underwood said Indian and Northern Affairs would have done the work, handed over a cheque and prescribed how the money should be spent.

The first of three phases to the plan covers about 55 hectares of the reserve to remove some 33,500 cubic metres of timber consisting of Douglas fir, western red cedar, hemlock and balsam, according to the review.

Underwood said the subsequent two phases might not occur, depending on community input.

Nick Claxton said the plan is a sensitive issue within the community, because “it’s reserve land and it’s our own people.” He believes the Tsawout council should have held a community meeting and perhaps a referendum.

“I recognize the world we live in now and obviously our community has been put into a pretty dire economic situation, living on the reserve,” Nick Claxton said. “But if there was a better way of doing it, if that’s a way to rephrase the question, we should be doing the logging, we should be processing the lumber and maybe we could be using it for our needs, as opposed to paying a company to cut it for us and then exporting the logs.”

Perry La Fortune, another Tsawout member opposed to the logging, said, “there was no community discussion. We were just informed this was going to be done.”

And La Fortune characterized the logging as clearcutting without leaving reserve patches of trees behind as were specified in maps attached to documents for a previous version of the plan.

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