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For centuries, a single Sitka spruce stood on the banks of the Yakoun River in Haida Gwaii.
But this tree was different.
Its needles were golden instead of green, the result of an extraordinarily rare genetic mutation that should have made survival almost impossible. To the Haida people, however, Kiidk’yaas was far more than a botanical curiosity. Its story reached back through generations of oral history to a boy who disobeyed his grandfather, looked back, and was transformed into a tree.
Then, in 1997, one man entered the forest with a chainsaw.
What he did devastated the Haida community, baffled people across Canada, and ultimately led to his own mysterious disappearance.
But the death of Kiidk’yaas was not the end of its story.
Scientists had taken cuttings from the tree before it fell. What happened to those cuttings created an extraordinary and sometimes uneasy relationship between science, conservation, and the Haida people.
This is the story of a tree that should not have existed, a sacred relationship that survived its destruction, and the remarkable effort to ensure that Kiidk’yaas might live again.
