Logging company MacMillan Bloedel announced their intention to log Wah-Nah-Jus Hilth-hoo-is (Meares Island) in 1979. The island is the territory of the two Nuu-chah-nulth Nations and they and residents of Tofino opposed the logging, Meares Island being where Tofino drinking water comes from, among other issues. Despite opposition, the BC Government in November 1983 that it would open up roughly 90 per cent of Meares Island to logging. Following the declaration of the tribal park, MacMillan Bloedel approached the island’s shore on Nov. 21, 1984, Moses Martin, then the elected chief of the Tla-o-qui-aht, greeted them. First, he read a statement asserting the Tla-o-qui-aht’s title to the island. Then he asked them to join him for a meal. “‘You’re welcome to visit our park,’” Martin recalled saying years later. “‘But leave your saws in the boat.’” The logging crew declined the invitation and left. The blockade continued for months and on March 27, 1985, the court sided with the Tla-o-qui-aht in an historic 3-2 decision. Meares Island remains without the scars of clearcuts today. The blockade was also an important early struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and against logging which would continue into the 1990s in the larger Clayoquot Sound area.

Following the student uprising in February of 1970, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago declared a state of emergency on this day in 1970 to try to contain the Black Power Revolution. Prime Minister Williams passed a Sedition Bill, outlawing texts such as Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ along with the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Williams further cracked down on the Black Power demonstrations by introducing the Public Order Act, which greatly impinged upon civil liberties to reduce the popularity of protest marches. His repression was unsuccessful in its intents. When the Trinidad and Tobago Army regiment was summoned to the capital, Port of Spain to help enforce order about half of the army, led by Rex Lassalle, Raffique Shah and other junior officers, refused to take up arms against the citizenry. Lassalle and Shah, together with other junior officers, took control of the Teteron Barracks. When the mutineers tried to leave Teteron, they were fired upon by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard. The mutineers held Teteron for 10 days, while engaging in negotiations with the government. The two leaders were court martialed and jailed but both were released on appeal in 1972. Rex Lassalle was radicalized while in his military training in the UK, experiencing racism and being asked to produce "a written military appreciation of how to wipe out a Mau Mau enclave". On his way home from the UK he stayed in New York with an aunt in the aftermath of the Watts riots and the assassination of Malcolm X. While there, he read Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which inspired him to read Fanon's other works.