Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother
“With the masterful insight and skill of Karen Moe, Elder Bill Jones breaks our hearts open with his deeply personal expose of the ongoing trauma inflicted on Indigenous people and their beautiful ancestral forests by colonial capitalism in Canada.”
-Suzanne Simard author of When the Forest Breathes.
It is the essential teaching for our time.”
-Elizabeth May, O.C., M.P
“I was lost before I was born”:
the starting point of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones’s lifelong journey of decolonization. “You were all Indigenous once”: the starting point for ending a world based on exploitation and greed.
At Port Renfrew, British Columbia, from 2020 to 2021, both settlers and First Nations experienced a collective transformation and became reacquainted with our Great Mother during the fight to save some of the world’s last remaining old-growth forest at the Fairy Creek Blockades. As Elder Bill sat in a tent during a West Coast storm at the height of the protests, he experienced the final phase of his personal decolonization when he came to a realization that has informed his life ever since.
Weaving together the stories of Elder Bill’s personal life and that of his ancestors with elder teachings, settler feminism, and the inspirational account of the Fairy Creek Blockades — the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada — Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother shares wisdom to inspire readers to achieve their own self-awakening, now and for generations to come.
Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones is a ʔuuštaqyu and holder of First Nations traditions and ritual. He is the spiritual guide of the Rainforest Flying Squad and the old growth logging blockades on Vancouver Island. He lives in Sooke, BC.
Karen Moe is an artist, feminist activist, and author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. She lives in Lantzville, BC and Mexico City.
Publication Date September 1st, 2026 (Canada) and
September 26th, 2026 (the US and Internationally)
Now available for preorder at your favourite bookstore!
“Let us follow Bill’s lead: sit in the forest, be quiet, and listen once again. While we still can.”
-Brandi Morin, award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French frontline journalist, author and filmmaker.
“A masterfully woven, deeply vital account of the lives of a man, a people, and a forest. This is hard wisdom—hard-won and long-enduring.”
-Robert Moor, award-winning author of In Trees.
“Through their words, we understand Fairy Creek not simply as a site of conflict, but as a catalyst for transformation.”
-Jess Housty, author of Crushed Wild Mint.
“In our deeply troubled present moment, we need some ways to connect past and future. This book (and the trees it describes) are one way to imagine that connection, with old wisdom helping revivify our stale understandings of how to live a life.”
-Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun