THE ISSUE WITH TISSUE

CANADA | 2022 | DOCUMENTARY | 116 MINUTES | 4K | ENGLISH AUDIO

A film by Michael Zelniker

”What we do to the land, we do to ourselves.”

The Issue with Tissue documents the little known, largely untold story of the boreal forest and the Indigenous First Nations who call it home, that it is being clearcut for the manufacture of toilet paper and that protecting and conserving the boreal is an existential imperative.

Told in the words and voices of the First Nations Elders and Leaders of the boreal, leading scientists and activists, The Issue with Tissue creates a kind of talking circle that inspires our storytellers to speak with candor and intimacy about the issues confronting us all, and that the way forward lies in elevating and supporting Indigenous knowledge and stewardship that is rooted in an ages old connection to the boreal forest and the trees that are housed therein.

We learn that the boreal is critical to our survivability, that it is the largest remaining intact forest on planet earth, it stores more carbon than any other terrestrial landscape, it is the largest fresh water source with countless lakes, rivers and wetlands. The boreal is North America's bird nursery - approximately 2 billion birds nest in the boreal each year, as many as 5 billion migrate south in the fall. It is home to iconic species like caribou, bears, moose and wolves - many listed as endangered because of unfettered extractive industrial exploitation.

It is also home to more than 600 Indigenous First Nations communities who have lived sustainably on the boreal for thousands of years. That the logging industry, mainly to feed American consumer products companies, is clearcutting these last remaining old growth, large intact forest landscapes so we can wipe our bums with softer, more plush toilet paper.

All of this, and more, makes up The Issue with Tissue, told powerfully and poignantly by a stellar group of First Nations Elders and Leaders, scientists and activists, including Senator Michèle Audette, Innu First Nation, Dr. Suzanne Simard, author of “Finding the Mother Tree”, the late Elder Dave Courchene, founder of the Turtle Lodge, Valérie Courtois, Executive Director Indigenous Leadership Initiative, and Dr. Nigel Roulet, a lead author of the United Nations’ IPCC reports, to name but a few of the assembled group who open their hearts and share their stories, lifting their voices in a unified outcry: The boreal must be protected and conserved.

In April 2020 I became aware that large intact, old-growth forest landscapes across the Canadian boreal are being clear-cut for the manufacture of toilet paper. These existentially important forests, which we literally depend on for our very survival, are being cut down so we can wipe our bums with softer, more plush toilet paper. Is there a more obscene illustration of what's gone wrong?

Having grown up in Montreal, spending summers 100 miles north of the city on the southern edge of the boreal, feeling deeply bonded to these forests and trees, I felt compelled to learn more.

After countless hours of research, and dozens of hours on zoom, I came to believe that the little-known, largely untold story of the boreal must be told. Perhaps the most important insight I had was that any story about the boreal must place the Indigenous Peoples of the boreal front and center. It's home to more than 600 First Nations communities - lands and waters they've lived and thrived on for thousands of years.

Flying from my home in Los Angeles to Vancouver, during COVID, quarantining for 14 days, before embarking on a 42-day/12,000-mile journey, from coast to coast, meeting with more than 50 First Nations Elders and Leaders, prominent scientists and conservationists, all of who opened their hearts and shared their stories, ending up in a remote part of Northeastern Quebec at an Innu gathering, before returning to Los Angeles with 125 hours of interview, landscape and wildlife footage.

What began as a story about trees and toilet paper evolved and emerged into a much deeper story that takes us from trees to toilet paper to treaties, from carbon to climate change to caribou to colonization, from water to birds to Indigenous knowledge/stewardship to the way forward. The boreal is an epic landscape that demands a very large canvas.

THE ISSUE WITH TISSUE has transmuted from just another movie about eco-destruction into a critically relevant story about the horrifying impacts and legacies of colonization, the Indian Act, residential schools, and the other atrocities that the Original Peoples of Turtle Island have endured at the hands of settler governments and how all of it was done in the service of unfettered extractive industrial exploitation.

"What we do to the land, we do to ourselves." I have come to understand that the larger systemic issue we are going to have to confront and reconcile is the one of disconnection. Disconnection allows us to do things like colonization. Disconnection allows us to go into wild spaces, and exploit the resources, without any care or concern for how we're impacting the rest of creation. Disconnection allows us to throw away our children's future, in service of satiating selfish, greedy, temporal needs.

As Elder Dave Porter says, "when we're in a forest, among the trees, we're with our ancestors, our Elder relatives. The trees are talking to us, telling stories of life. The question is, are we listening?” Through the process of photosynthesis, trees breathe out oxygen, and we breathe in that oxygen. We exhale carbon dioxide, trees inhale that carbon dioxide. Can there be a more mutually beneficial relationship? Were it not for these forests and trees, we wouldn't be here - our very survival depends on trees and plants.

Dr. Suzanne Simard, in "Finding the Mother Tree", speaks of her decades-long research into the subterranean, mycorrhizal networks that exist in forests, that these collaborative, cooperative, mutually supportive relationships between the trees, the fungi, the mosses and plants are what have allowed forests and trees to strive and thrive for millions of years. Trees have been on Planet Earth much longer than we humans, surely they have something to teach us about longevity and sustainability.

Perhaps the trees and our Elder Ancestors are talking to us, perhaps they are guiding us to understand: The way forward is not through survival of the fittest and competition to death but through cooperative, symbiotic, mutually supportive relationships. As Elder AJ Felix says, "let's be family again, let’s be relations again, let’s love each other because when we love, we respect and we look after each other.”

This theme of interconnectivity ties all the elements together encouraging us to realize, we are all connected, and we are all family. As Joni Mitchell says in her iconic song, "Woodstock" which we adapted for the closing of our documentary, "we are star stuff, billion-year-old carbon". We are all made up of the same elemental DNA, the same primordial soup that those who call Planet Earth home, literally have emerged from. In fact, we are all related, we are all family, and we do all come from the same stuff, the same Mother Earth.

And the sooner we embrace and embody this ideal, the sooner we are going to find our way out of the existential crises that we have created, that confront us today, threatening human survival and the survivability of the rest of creation that we share Planet Earth with.

Indigenous First Nations' Elders, Leaders and their communities from coast to coast right across the boreal

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