They also laugh that the Bellevue-based home builder just got an award for using “green” building techniques in its massive housing developments, which they say are directly deforesting their land, running off wildlife, and poisoning the environment with herbicides.

All of it, says Maria Swain, one of three Ojibwe tribal members who came to Seattle last week to protest Weyerhaeuser, the timber giant that owns and supplies lumber to Quadrant, is so that suburbanites can live “high on the hog” in a Quadrant home.

“The clearcut destroys everything,” Swain says. “It destroys the life. It destroys the animal habitats.”

“We used to pick blueberries,” she says. “We can’t even do that now because of the contaminants.”

Since the 1990s, Weyerhaeuser has been buying logs that other companies clearcut at the Whiskey Jack Forest in northern Ontario. The area is home to about 700 members of Swain’s band of the Ojibwe, called the Grassy Narrows First Nation, which theoretically controls the land under a federal treaty signed in 1873.

Swain says the people of Grassy Narrows wrote letters of protest, then sued the provincial government in 2000 over the logging license it issued to Canada’s Abitibi Consolidated. In 2002, after getting nowhere, Grassy Narrows mothers and high-schoolers started a logging-truck blockade that continues to this day.

Tribal members also travel to Seattle to protest at an annual stockholder meeting that Weyerhaeuser holds in April.

This year, Swain and two others — youth organizer Carol Kejick and Warren Ashopenace, one of the original Grassy Narrows blockaders — drove 3,000 miles for a protest March 13 at the Built Green Conference in Everett. While representatives of Quadrant were inside receiving a Built Green award from the Masters Builders Association, protesters from the Rainforest Action Network donned cardboard caribou antlers and sprawled on the sidewalk to demonstrate the destruction in the Whiskey Jack Forest.

Ashopenace says Weyerhaeuser buys about half the site’s wood for a mill it operates in Kenora, Ontario. Rainforest Action members say products made there under the Timberstrand label are currently being used at Quadrant construction sites in Bothell, Lynnwood, Kent and other cities.

Quadrant is one of five home-building companies that Weyerhaeuser owns in the U.S. Last year, according to Weyerhaeuser’s latest annual report, the companies sold more than 5,800 homes for $2.9 billion, with the company clearing an overall profit of $453 million in sales.

Ashopenace says more than half the forest in their territory is now gone. With its loss, beaver, deer and moose have moved on, he says, devastating the hunting and trapping that many Grassy Narrows people once depended on in winter. After the clearcuts, the three say the logging companies spray herbicides that kill everything but the new trees they’ve planted, making it unsafe to gather traditional medicines such as bitterroot or sage.

“We’re basically left with nothing now. A lot of people are on welfare,” Swain says.

Mercury poisoning is also a problem. A pulp mill caused the poisoning in the 1960s, but Ashopenace says the clear-cutting disturbs contaminated dust, keeping mercury levels and health problems high among his people.

Swain, for instance, was born without one kidney. Her granddaughter has epilepsy, which she says is a growing problem among Grassy Narrows newborns. To make matters worse, her daughter and two nieces are facing trial in July after being arrested last year for what Swain says was a peaceful road blockade.

Inside Weyerhaeuser’s stockholder meeting on April 19, supportive shareholders plan to urge other investors to pass a proposal they have filed with the company. It calls on Weyerhaeuser to study its commitments at Whiskey Jack and report on what options it might have for getting its wood elsewhere.

In a written reply to the proposal, Weyerhaeuser notes the Kenora mill provides jobs for aboriginal people and that “no comparable timber sources are available within reasonable transport distance.”

Weyerhaeuser also says it’s a government matter: “We believe that treaty claims must be addressed by the provincial and federal governments directly with the First Nation leaders.”

Swain and Ashopenace respond that provincial and federal officials each say it’s up to the other to resolve. In the meantime, the clearcutting and herbicide spraying continue.

“We’re not just doing it for ourselves,” Swain says. “Every day you hear about global warming. You have to think about what’s being lost up there [and] all the fancy homes they’re building as a result of what we’re losing.”