Democracy lessons from the Spirit Bear.

• Author: Mildon, Marsha
• Position: School's in - Simon Jackson, the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition - Interview - Cover Story

The feature section of this issue of LawNow focuses on democracy and democratically engaged citizens. This edition of School's In focuses on democratically engaged youth--how they become involved and the lessons they can teach other youth in attaining their goals.

Canada has quite a noteworthy tradition of young people who have made significant impacts on their world: locally, nationally, or globally. Craig Kielburger, the young boy who mounted a campaign to eliminate child labour, is one of the best known of our active youth. His book, Free the Children, and organization of the same name (www.freethechildren.com) give many suggestions about ways to get involved and be successful (see LawNow 23:5, April/May 1999, School's In, for an important discussion of the role of activism in the classroom as well as of Kielburger's book). Eight-year-old Hannah Taylor's Ladybug Foundation Inc. (www.ladybugfoundation.ca) to help the homeless is another example of the good work being done by the many youth of Canada who are passionate to make change.

For the rest of this School's In, however, I am going to let Simon Jackson, founder of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition (www.spiritbearyouth.org) tell his story about passion and making change directly to other young people across the country, through an interview I did with him by telephone, November 30, 2004. Teachers may find it useful for a class to read this interview aloud and then engage in a discussion of how students might get involved in issues of importance to them.

Interview with Simon Jackson of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition

MM: I've read that you saw your first bear in Yellowstone when you were seven years old, and then you became engaged in saving bears. But that's a big leap. Can you tell me the steps that took you from being an ordinary seven-year-old seeing a bear to a young boy acting on behalf of the bears?

SJ: For me, I didn't think it was that big a step. When you're seven, if you see a bear, you are interested in bears. If you see a train, you're interested in trains. Because I had seen this bear, I was very aware of all things to do with bears.

Now my dad was a journalist and we watched the news every night. One night watching the news, I saw the Kodiak bears and the problems with destruction of their habitat in Alaska. And since I had just seen the bear in Yellowstone, it was almost like a direct assault on that bear. I wanted to do something. I liked drawing at the time, so I drew a few posters of a bear and had a lemonade stand. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do to save the money from the lemonade stand to save the habitat of the bears.

I wrote a couple of letters--

MM: Where did you get the idea to write letters? Was it through your dad's journalism?

SJ: No, probably more through my morn. She signed me up to be a member of the World Wildlife Fund, and information on the Kodiak bear had come from them coincidentally right after I had seen the Kodiak on the news. In the publication, it said to write letters. So I sent out letters to President Bush Sr. and to Prime Minister Mulroney. Then a few months later, I got a letter from the World Wildlife Fund saying the Kodiak bears were saved, and I thought 'Yes! I saved the Kodiak bears'. Clearly, I didn't, but my voice along with everyone else's did.

MM: That's interesting. About how old were you then?

SJ: I think I was still 7.

MM: It strikes me that it was a really important moment when you were able to say 'Yes, I saved the bear'.

SJ: It was the most important lesson I ever learned--that one person, no matter who they are or where they live, can make a difference to life. And at the time, I was as idealistic as I could be. I thought all it took was sixty dollars and a couple of letters to save an animal. It was a very personal feeling and it really did plant that seed. One of the biggest reasons--if not the biggest--why I was able to persevere with the Spirit Bear campaign was the fact that I had had this early success, that I knew 'it is possible to win'. If you had told me in the very beginning that this was going to be a ten-year battle and about all the obstacles I was going to face, I don't honestly know if I would have felt able to overcome that. But because I had had that early success, and because I had been involved in a couple of other successful issues while I was growing up, they reinforced the idea that I could do these things.

MM: What were the other issues you were involved in?

SJ: I was reading the paper and read about the campaign to save the Tatshenshini in northern BC. So again I wrote some letters. And I had an electric train and I sold some of my electric train cars and saved my allowance to send money to save the Tatshenshini. And the Tatshenshini was protected. Then the other issue was trying to ban the use of lead shot for hunting waterfowl because it was poisoning bald eagles, and it was banned in some areas of the country.

MM: So you were involved early in causes that had quite immediate successes. When did you first become aware of the Spirit Bear?

SJ: I almost simultaneously heard it from three different avenues. First, my grandparents knew I liked bears and gave me a photograph of the Spirit Bear for Christmas. Also, we had been visiting a national park and some people we were talking to asked if we knew about a white bear that was in our...