I erred, on my way to the airport for a flight to the Queen Charlotte Islands last weekend, thinking they were part of the Gulf Islands, those tranquil suburban havens for aging hippies, in B.C.’s Georgia Strait. I fretted that National Post columnist Elizabeth (“Milhous,” as Frank calls her) Nickson, who lives on Salt Spring Island, might see it and attack me, verbally or otherwise, as she has mused in print about doing.

So I was surprised when my flight kept going far west and north of Vancouver Island, to a large archipelago, a Canadian Galapagos of primordial flora and fauna; with a Haida community living continuously for 10,000 years, with fairly small disruption compared to other first nations; and a superb artistic tradition, revitalized in the past 50 years. I wasn’t the first to go wrong, soothed my host, writer Adele Weder of the local arts council.

Two days later, we pulled up outside Haidabucks, in a nondescript building in the nondescript town of Masset (pop. 700) on the north shore. “You have to see it,” said Adele, “to appreciate how ridiculous Starbucks has been.”

The Seattle-based coffee octopus had issued a legal cease-and-desist order to “protect the public from confusion and deception.” Right. Thanks. The little café, which serves mainly meals and sandwiches, was already closed at suppertime. The logo contained a Haida symbol. From the shore a few kilometres off, you could see Alaska. The four Haida “bucks” who started it in 1999, were doing some wordplay as part of their name. Maybe Starbucks got the joke, maybe not.

I was involved in run-ins with Starbucks, over their plan to displace Dooney’s café in Toronto a few years ago, so it felt familiar. “We have a strong warrior tradition,” said one of the bucks, who engaged the same B.C. law firm representing his people on land claims, where the Haida are not backing down either. The Haida were indeed feared by other first nations along the coast.

“Down in Queen Charlotte City, at the south end of Graham Island, a bumptious gift-and-antique dealer named Jack, who runs Chubbie’s café upstairs (he’s a bit of a conglomerate, too), renamed it Chubbiebucks, and said dozens of entrepreneurs elsewhere were ready to do the same.

Starbucks, whose CEO says they always try to “produce social, environmental and economic benefits,” soon backed off, tripping badly as he backpedalled. That is always how it goes with those who try to domineer: They are shocked and dismayed by the resistance they not only encounter but usually produce. Modern imperialism created modern nationalism: in India, Africa, China, Canada.

In Cancun, Mexico, right now, the World Trade Organization is trying to salvage the latest (agricultural) round of globalization. They have to fight off the usual dissidents and protesters, whose obstinacy and obtuseness appall them.

Where did they come from? They weren’t even around when globalization started, because globalization wasn’t around!

I was in Mexico City in 1990 for an anti-NAFTA meeting co-hosted by the opposition party, PAN. Then PAN won the presidency, switched sides and now sends the fierce Mexican cops against globalization foes.

Just like Jean Chrétien, who criticized NAFTA, then embraced it after winning, and unleashed the RCMP on protesters in Vancouver. Power acts, others react. Fair trade in coffee, by the way, is a big issue among antiglobalizers.

Or take Iraq, this postanniversary day. Under Saddam, there was no terror of the 9/11 sort. There was a savage police state, but not random shootings and bombs. That didn’t stop the United States from citing endless Iraq-al Qaeda ties, and now they’ve got them. Iraq under “coalition” control has become a global “hub of terror.”

The United States is shocked because the premise of its policy was: We act, no one reacts. It’s a heavy irony that the United States now insists the United Nations step in to deal with chaos, the possibility of which was one reason the UN refused to endorse the invasion to start with.

I don’t mean that no cultural specifics separate the situations of the Haida, the WTO and the Middle East. But there’s a human commonness, too, that would be easily visible to an impartial observer on a distant perch like, say, Mars. It’s what gives us non-experts the right to analyze and judge those situations.

In Osama bin Laden’s recent bucolic video, he doesn’t talk theological particulars; he urges resistance against “the crusaders,” evoking a simple kind of Islamic “nationalism.” And the hate preached in a fundamentalist London mosque reported yesterday in The Globe is, I’d say, generically related to the xenophobic appeal against immigrants in the current Ontario election campaign (“bringing good people into Ontario while keeping bad people out”); or the evocation of fears about rising crime (though crime is actually falling) in our little Toronto mayoral race.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.