Chief Doug Neasloss had always dreamt of seeing a spirit bear — but his first encounter didn’t start in quite the way he had imagined.
“I was out guiding a Japanese film crew, and I stopped to take a leak,” he tells me. “I’d just unzipped my fly, and I looked up, and this big white bear was walking down the river towards me, salmon flapping in his mouth, blood all over his muzzle. He lay down in front of me, eating his fish. I stayed for hours watching him. That moment changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do in life. And I’ve got the spirit bear to thank for that.”
Like many in Klemtu, a tiny island community of 450 people on British Columbia’s north coast, Doug had heard occasional tales of the moksgm’ol — white bear in the local Tsimshian language — but was sceptical they existed. So that first sighting was a formative moment: it inspired him to become a bear guide and conservationist, he tells me, and later to stand as chief councillor for the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation. “There is an aura around them,” he says. “They feel really sacred. In that moment, I realised the rainforest had to be protected. That I had to do my part.”