June 30: Lax Kw'alaams
The village of Lax Kw’alaams, officially a reserve and still usually referred to as Port Simpson, is a short floatplane ride or ferry trip from Prince Rupert. This band of the Tsimshian Nation have settled here on and off for tens of thousands of years, living off of Pacific Ocean fishing—salmon (spring, pink, coho and sockeye), halibut and north up the coast, oolichan— along with some hunting, on the central west coast of what is today known as British Columbia. A visitor will notice immediately the large number of eagles, hawks and equally powerful crows everywhere along the water. They fly in and around the area called Rose Island where they nest, as majestic as they have ever been. The eagles and hawks may not be here much longer; their diet consists strongly of various fish—fish that have been nearly wiped out. This lack of fish threatens more than these birds; the whole Nation is threatened.
June 30: Lax Kw’alaams
The village of Lax Kw’alaams, officially a reserve and still usually referred to as Port Simpson, is a short floatplane ride or ferry trip from Prince Rupert. This band of the Tsimshian Nation have settled here on and off for tens of thousands of years, living off of Pacific Ocean fishing—salmon (spring, pink, coho and sockeye), halibut and north up the coast, oolichan— along with some hunting, on the central west coast of what is today known as British Columbia. A visitor will notice immediately the large number of eagles, hawks and equally powerful crows everywhere along the water. They fly in and around the area called Rose Island where they nest, as majestic as they have ever been. The eagles and hawks may not be here much longer; their diet consists strongly of various fish—fish that have been nearly wiped out. This lack of fish threatens more than these birds; the whole Nation is threatened.
The connection a people have with their traditions is enough to be labeled “necessity” for cultural survival, but when these traditions involve the food supply and the health of the earth itself, then this is not only defense of their own history, it is a defense of the future—a defense of both their own and the future of others, human and otherwise. The threats to fishing are many:
1) mismanagement of fish stocks by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans(DFO);
2) The decimation of streams and creeks (where many fish spawn) due to clearcut logging and heli-logging practices;
3) Campaigns to protect seals from urban environmentalists (and the resultant decline in salmon eaten by the seals);
4) climate change;
5) Commercial fisheries and salmon farming;
6) Seine fishnet practices;
7) Over-abundance of sport fishers, led by outfitters.
All these problems have combined to threaten the Tsimshian people’s ability to continue to live off fishing stocks as they have for at least ten thousand years. As Eddie Knott put it “You can’t blame just one thing, you have to put them all in a pot like you’re making a soup.” Explaining the example of Staman Bay, adjoining Lax Kw’alaams, Eddie described how the fish populations are dying of a thousand cuts. Scientists warned about the dangers of clearcut logging near the streams that lead out into the bay, and what would happen to the spawning grounds.
“The politicians say ‘To Hell with the pink salmon, nobody buys them’ but they are a big part of the natural cycle,” he explained. “They are vital, like a compost, feeding the streams.”
The areas in the bay where over five years ago logs were dropped by helicopters remain barren. “The bay used to be the spawning area for herring, pink salmon and spring salmon,” pointing to the waters edge, Eddie continued “See where those logs are sticking up? They were dropped in from heli-logging. The whole bay was nothing but logs.” Since then there have been almost no examples of fish returning to spawn in these creeks, creeks that have also been altered drastically by the logging practices in the area. These creeks are where the coho salmon spawn. When an area is clearcut, the soil is loosened and silt can run off into the streams—making the water impossible for fish of all kinds to survive in. Compounding this impact, the bay that was used to ‘temporarily” hold the logs before being shipped to the mill is now covered in the bark, stripped off and scattered everywhere. This, too, has disrupted the spawning beds in the streams—but also the bay itself.
The mouth of the Skeena River, a traditional trading route of the Tsimshian Nation, is now being proposed as a location for “open cage penned” salmon farms. There are many scientific examples of how such farms are spreading disease near their locations along the southern coast of what is known as British Columbia; regular salmon swim by and near these penned salmon and sea lice jumps from one to another, poisoning wild stocks. There is an abundance of information on these risks. However, the story Eddie told was more disturbing:
“I bought one of those farmed salmon and took it home. I looked at it, it looked like a regular fish, smelled the same and all that. Then, when I was frying it, it blew up. If you take a tin can of something, and heat it up—I suggest you do this experiment outside— it will explode. That’s what happened when I cooked the farmed salmon.” What does this mean? Well, if I may editorialize, it means ‘don’t eat the fish!’ Asked what Tsimshian people thought of the farming, Eddie stated “Our people are against it, all the studies show that there is no future in it.”
The local Lax Kw’alaams Indian Nation band council is currently asking people from the entire Skeena region, whatever nation they are, to let the provincial governments and DFO know they are opposed to such “farming” aquaculture practices from being brought to this region, where salmon are already disappearing.
27 years ago, when Eddie Knott first was fishing in the area, there were approximately 800 fishers for the season—and more than enough fish. Today, along with those fish taken in Alaska, commercial boats from other nation-states having dramatically increased, sports fishers becoming plentiful and more—the area now has more than 3700 fishers in a single year. Conservation sits behind money. Eddie and others believe the land and the oceans need to have an absolute moratorium for one year, to replenish the fish stocks.
The environment, including people, is dependent on every aspect of an interlocking system. Seine fishnet practices, dragging the river bed of the Skeena for “only four years”, has scraped and damaged the bottom of the river drastically. These giant nets drag along the bottom, tearing up all plant life and getting everything in their path. This has removed the food source of many fish in the river. Tsimshian fishers decried the approval of these nets by the DFO at the time, but it took four years of damage before it was halted and banned.
Today, in order to be able to simply get started in the fishing industry, it is estimated that it would cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. That means people from the Nation could not possibly get started today—and that without changing course, an ancient way of life will disappear. The land and property on a reserve does not belong to the Nation, according to Canadian law—but instead is considered leased Crown land. Therefore the people who have lived here for time immemorial have no collateral to borrow from a bank, even if they wanted to. Yet some other statistics need to be mulled over: Unemployment is overwhelmingly a majority in real terms and those who have graduated high school are a tiny minority of the population of the Lax Kw’alaams village. Life hasn’t always been only based on berries and fishing— traditionally, Tsimshian people from the whole region have gone to a place called Dundas Island to fish. However, the Nation’s rights in this part of their territory are currently under dispute with the provincial government, long before any “treaty process” has been entered into (The Tsimshian, like nearly all Nations in BC, have never had a treaty foisted on them by Canada).
When people think of the effects of climate change on human beings, if they think of it at all, it is in the far north. Yet in this territory so far this year it is four degrees hotter than last year. Averages will likely bring that down, but such rises in temperature also explain, in part, the near total disappearance of the humpback whales that used to migrate off shore, in pods of 20-30. The rising temperatures have reduced the plankton in the water, the main source of food for the whales. But the numbers of seals, protected from hunting by well-meaning urban environmentalists, are skyrocketing in number—further threatening the fish stock. With fish numbers already in drastic decline, the seals are coming further and further inland to eat—even going into streams and creeks themselves, yet one more strain on the fish, and caused by urban “direction” from people such as the DFO and “green” organizations. Traditional knowledge is not valued, but it continues to serve people here.
“For thousands of years, mother nature has never lied to us,” explained Eddie. “We use these berries to tell us what kind of fishing season we are going to have,” as he held out lox berries, as well as salmon berries from near Staman Bay. “When the berries are all red, we will have a plentiful [salmon] run.” The berries this year are, in some cases, already rotting off the bush; in other cases they are not even blooming yet. Their over-all appearance is half-red, half-green. “This means that the run will not be so good, but will instead come in spurts. We have always been able to tell what kind of season it would be this way, always.”
Recently, scientists from the universities in the South of BC have been predicting that current trends will leave no possible life with fishing for salmon or anything else by the year 2008. This is based on data collected from trends that have been borne out elsewhere. “If this isn’t changed soon, we are going to end up like Newfoundlanders,” explained Eddie. With the changes in climate, with fish disappearing and with all of the imbalances in environmental health being seen in the area around Lax Kw’alaams of the Tsimshian Nation, the other berries are also acting strangely. Huckleberries and blueberries, normally supposed to wait until mid-late July to ripen, are already falling off their branches. If you don’t trust the scientists, then trust the berries. Something very wrong is threatening the web of life here, and the people who live with the oceans. Eddie offered a final analogy.
“Think of the elk. What follows the elk through the mountains? Wolves. Wolves and other predators follow them for food. Think of the salmon as the elk, and humans as the wolves. What happens to the wolves if they have no elk left to follow?”