Co-directors Candace Campo and myself were in attendance to screen our film alongside May Caroline Matcham’s beautiful doc Understanding Myself as an Amphibian.
Our VQFF event celebrated the reimaging of nature documentaries through queer and Indigenous ways of knowing.
We were thrilled to share the work with Vancouver audiences for the first time.
Our new edit emerged from two years of community engagement screenings, including at Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Polygon Gallery, Sechelt Arts Fest, and in school screenings reaching 3,500+ incredible youth in the Sunshine Coast school district.
Beautiful questions and conversations evolved from these events that helped us shape the final film. We are so excited to begin sharing this joyful work with wider audiences.
Stay tuned for screenings in other cities in Canada and internationally, as we embark on the next stage of sharing these incredible stories of multispecies coexistence from the shíshálh swiya.
I grew up frolicking on the rocky coastal bluffs around Howe Sound (Átl’ka7tsem) in unceded Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation territories, where one of the most toxic plants in the Pacific Northwest grows.
These bluffs are home to rich meadows of Indigenous root crops—chocolate lilies, camas, Columbia tiger lily, and nodding onion—plants lovingly cultivated by Salish women for thousands of years.
Among them grows the death camas (toxicoscordion venenosum), equally striking, but deadly.
Death Camas by the Salish Sea – still from Nature Girl (2025))
Mind your root crops
In early spring, the green foliage and creamy blossoms of death camas emerge from mossy rocks and meadows.
By autumn, when bulbs are traditionally harvested as root crops, death camas resemble some of their edible neighbours—long after their distinctive white-yellow blooms have vanished.
But while their bulbs resemble Indigenous onions, they lack the characteristic onion smell – a key indicator you’ve picked the wrong plant!
Harvesting root crops safely requires deep care, relationship and knowing.
Charlie, a roaming island dog, frolics among death camas in the bluff meadows of Howe Sound (Átl’ka7tsem), 2025
Love in a time of zygacine
All parts of death camas—including bulbs, leaves, stalks and pollen—carry zygacine, a potent alkaloid that is toxic to humans and animals, and nearly all pollinators.
Ethnobotanist Nancy Turner (1980 et al) even notes that the Okanagan and St’at’imc peoples have used the poison from mashed bulbs to coat arrow heads.
Yet one bee evolved to thrive on this toxic plant: the elusive death camas miner bee—one of more than 500 species of bees indigenous to BC.
After decades frolicking through death camas meadows, I’d yet to meet a single death camas miner bee.
For years, I asked other plant and pollinator nerds, “have you seen the death camas miner bee?”
Most hadn’t heard of it. Nobody had seen one.
I felt a yearning.
Death Camas in bloom by the Salish Sea – still from Nature Girl (2025)
My vigil for a specialty pollinator
Death camas features heavily in the opening sequence of my short film Nature Girl (2025), a collaboration with my friend Candace Campo, shíshálh knowledge keeper, artist and founder of Indigenous tourism company Talaysay Tours.
While spending time filming death camas meadows in spring 2023 and 2024, I was hoping a bee would finally reveal themselves, but to no avail.
It felt like holding vigil for a ghost pollinator, buzzing at the edge of science and memory.
Death camas in tall meadow grass – still from Nature Girl (2025)
Pollinators in peril
Many specialty pollinators in the Coast Salish region are at risk from habitat loss and climate change impacts, including a rise in pollinator pathogens.
I couldn’t help but wonder: How are death camas miner bees faring?
One day in May 2025, after years of waiting, watching, and wondering, I saw it: a flicker of movement on a death camas bloom.
The bee danced from blossom to blossom, then soared above our heads as I shouted to my friend, “get a photo!”
We tracked it with bated breath until it landed again, just long enough for me to press record. My heart was pounding. The long-awaited meeting was finally happening.
After years of holding vigil – it was here! My heart was full.
I offer up a poem to this underappreciated neighbour. This is a love letter for an ancient love affair between insect and plant; an ode to a mutuality mediated by a neurotoxin.
As far as toxic relationships go, it’s one to aspire to.
Poem: Love Letter to a Death Camas Miner Bee Trent Maynard
Year after year I watch these toxic flowers rise Bobbing their heads above the tall grass Growing slyly among the nodding onion Between chocolate lilies and tiger lilies Beguiling me with their gentle beauty A medicine for the eyes only Poison to most beings The poet included Empty blooms waiting Holding vigil Practically quivering on the Salish breeze Yearning for their lover The one bee who evolved to crave their poison nectar They rise for this beloved For the touch of familiar mandibles The caress of prickly feet The sweet vibrations of an undulating buttocks Today I hear a buzzing Thousands of years in the making Perched before me on a death flower Slender-waisted Long-winged Star of the vigil Death camas miner bee! Feasting upon their favourite poison Dusting pollen from the neighbours as they go Now zooming over our heads Pollen as life Pollen as death Each spring old friends rise to greet each other Finding a path In the balance of their gifts
This multimedia essay and poem was first published as a special offering for paid subscribers on my Patreon.
I’m giving away 5 delicious, nutritious wild-crafted mushroom prize packs for those who support! Donate between Dec 20-25 and forward me your confirmation email to enter. Details below.
Competition is open for residents of Metro Vancouver, the Lower Sunshine Coast, and Nanaimo-Parksville-Qualicum. Those living outside these areas in Canada can still qualify to enter by donating $50 or more, to be eligible for Canada-wide shipping.
One entry granted per $10 increment donated (ex. $30 = 3 entries). See full terms and conditions below.
UPDATE: Raffle is now closed, but the family fundraiser is still open for donations:
Dr. Nina Hewitt of UBC Vancouver Department of Geography cores a yellow cedar (Photo by Trent Maynard)
How to age a tree with a coring device
An increment borer – basically a corkscrew for trees – is the classic non-lethal, non-invasive solution for aging trees.
The device removes a tiny strip of the tree’s cross section to reveal the annual growth rings hidden inside the trunk.
Coring a tree “is about the equivalent for the tree of losing a small branch,” says Dr. Nina Hewitt of UBC Vancouver Department of Geography.
“The tree will immediately put some sap in there and then it’ll very quickly seal over that.”
A tree’s cross section also reveals information about local environmental history, including climate conditions, extreme weather events, pest epidemics, indigenous harvesting and the health of salmon runs over its lifetime. For the oldest trees, this biological database can stretch back into the thousands of years.
Cross-dating neighbouring trees can improve accuracy and reveal missing or double rings, which happen in years of extreme seasons or drought.
Watch below as Dr. Nina Hewitt tours an ancient yellow cedar forest known as the Dakota Bear Sanctuary in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) territory on Mount Elphinstone (Sunshine Coast, BC, Canada).
Dr. Hewitt explains the basic principles of dendrochronology, the science of dating trees according to annual rings.
