She took his word for it; what did a transplanted Louisiana girl know about clearcutting? But time passed and the forest didn’t return, Ms. Krawczyk recalled in a 1996 oral history she recorded for the Ecofeminist Story Web. The winter rains brought landslides, cutting savage trenches down the naked hillsides and destroying a creek near her homestead.
Ms. Krawczyk was horrified but took comfort knowing that the B.C. New Democratic Party was now in power, having won the 1991 provincial election. Surely the NDP would stop the clearcutting, she thought.
“I was in Mississippi visiting my mother when I received the newsletter from the Friends of Clayoquot saying no, the NDP would not be stopping the clearcuts,” Ms. Krawczyk recalled. “The day I got back, I saw news of the first day of the logging blockades. I knew that’s where I had to be.”
Ms. Krawczyk would spend her 65th birthday in a Nanaimo jail for participating in that 1993 blockade. She would ultimately be incarcerated for a cumulative three years during the 1990s and 2000s, first for her participation in blockades and then for contempt of court when she refused to sign undertakings promising that she wouldn’t do it again.
“That was a lot of jail time for someone who was non-violent and peaceful,” recalls Cameron Ward, a retired lawyer who supported Ms. Krawczyk as she represented herself at various court proceedings in those years. “The courts were offended by her refusing to sign the undertakings. And she was nothing if not stubborn.”
She told journalists in those years that she resented being jailed given that there were so many better uses of her time. “But I wouldn’t sign the undertakings, because I couldn’t go back to my home and continue with my duties while the logging went on.”
Her last sentence was 10 months for contempt of court in 2007. Age 78 at the time, she had refused to sign an undertaking to stay away from a West Vancouver blockade protesting a highway expansion in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympic Games.
“There aren’t a lot of people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is,” says her youngest daughter, Marian Krawczyk, a medical anthropologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “I think she had this very strong streak of ‘This is morally wrong!’ She got frustrated sometimes because she didn’t see this same ethos in other people.”
Ms. Krawczyk died in Parksville, B.C., on May 9, age 96, following two strokes. Predeceased by her son Joseph Cuchiara Jr. and daughter Barbara Camp, she leaves her sons Mike and Andrew Camp; daughters Susan Camp, Margaret Phalen, Rose Mary Roth and Marian Krawczyk; eight grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren.
By the time Ms. Krawczyk found her way to Clayoquot Sound in the early 1990s, her eight children were grown, her four marriages were behind her, and paid work was no longer a necessity. She was able to devote herself to logging protests on the B.C. coast with the same fervour that she brought to numerous other causes over the years: racism during the American civil rights years; labour rights; women’s equality; the Vietnam War draft; affordable childcare for working mothers.
She was born Betty Joreen Shiver on Aug. 4, 1928, in Salinas, Calif. Her parents, Winnifred and Jacob Shiver, were itinerant fruit-pickers, though her father would go on to become a Baptist minister after the family’s move to Baton Rouge, La.
Those years in Louisiana placed Ms. Krawczyk on the front lines of the fight to integrate schools in the Deep South, which she said was the most difficult protest period of her life.
“It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, because those protests involved friends and family in my life, my deepest roots,” she said in her oral history. “I didn’t lose my mother or my sister, but I lost just about everybody else. It was terrible. The Baptist church played a role as well. I came out of it no longer looking at authority to guide me.”
In the Clayoquot years, Ms. Krawczyk initially feared that her claustrophobia would make jail intolerable but discovered after her first incarceration that it wouldn’t be a problem and “the food wasn’t that bad.” Media reports soon called Ms. Krawczyk and other older protesters the “eco-grannies.”
Occasionally referred to as a Raging Granny, Ms. Krawczyk liked to distinguish herself from that particular movement. While she appreciated the Raging Grannies’ humorous protest songs and tea-party costuming, she was more one for chaining herself to a logging truck or climbing an old-growth tree about to be felled, say those who knew her.
“Her connection to place was powerful,” says Michael Mullin, who co-founded Friends of Clayoquot Sound. He remembers the day Ms. Krawczyk showed up at the office wanting to join the protest. “She was a person who knew how to hold the line. She wasn’t afraid of anyone.”
Environmental activist Tzeporah Berman, international program director at Stand.earth, remembers Ms. Krawczyk as “funny, fierce, smart and courageous,” unafraid to voice an unpopular opinion or go to jail for months if that’s what it took to make her point. “Betty showed us what effective resistance looks like, and how important persistence is to make social change,” Ms. Berman says.
Married and a mother by the time she was 18, Ms. Krawczyk was on husband No. 3 when she left Louisiana for Virginia, where she went on to protest the Vietnam War and refuse to pay income tax unless guaranteed her money wouldn’t go to war efforts. When one of her sons was at risk of being drafted, the family fled to Kirkland Lake, Ont.
Ms. Krawczyk left that husband to marry math teacher Wallace Krawczyk, helping him with his first political campaign as NDP candidate for Sarnia-Lambton in the 1974 federal election. He lost that bid, as well as three later runs for office, twice federally and once provincially. (Ms. Krawczyk would run unsuccessfully for public office herself in later years, first for the Green Party in the 2001 B.C. election, then for the Work Less Party in the 2008 federal election and the Vancouver mayoral race that same year.)
In her down time, she churned out pot-boiler “true romance” stories under a pseudonym, raised the last of her children, and founded the Sarnia Women’s Liberation Movement.
The enthusiasm she would bring to the Clayoquot protests in her 60s and 70s found other outlets in those years.
The younger Ms. Krawczyk recalled an older sister coming home in the early 1970s with stories of the Mexican cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzalez, having seen him on TV at a neighbour’s house. A few weeks later, Ms. Krawczyk bundled the two girls, ages 6 and 11, onto a Greyhound bus destined for San Miguel de Allende so they could see Mexico for themselves.
“It took five days on the bus,” says Marian Krawczyk. “It was crazy – who the hell takes two little kids on a bus across two countries because of a cartoon mouse?”
The elder Ms. Krawczyk was a lifelong tap dancer, and always kept a pair of tap shoes at the ready should anyone ask to see her Jailhouse Rock routine. She changed jobs and moved often; daughter Marian said that when the family threw her mother an 80th birthday party, they planned to read out all of the places that Ms. Krawczyk had lived to that point, but gave up after 27.
Mike Camp, a sculptor based in Northern Ontario, says his mother was affectionate and fun, and noted for her mean homemade gumbo and jambalaya. But when caught up in a new adventure, “she was like a Rottweiler with a bone,” Mr. Camp says.
“There’s an old saying, that a person who has no enemies is someone without character. Well, Betty had lots of character. There are lots of judges and lawyers and police who wished they’d never met her.”
Ms. Krawczyk wrote five books about her many adventures and maintained a blog, Betty’s Early Edition, up until eight months ago, even after suffering her first stroke. (In her penultimate post, she wrote of planning to change her surname to Rhodes, her mother’s maiden name.) Her writing, diaries, community activism and court records are held at Simon Fraser University in its public archives.
“My mother was never really afraid of anything. She just thought she would do the best she could and the universe would take care of it. Her life was a full frontal assault,” Marian Krawczyk says. “My mother was a dangerous woman. I’ve thought, that’s not the worst epitaph.”
