From the cbc online:
At least 38 sockeye salmon runs along the West Coast are in danger of imminent extinction, says a new report by the Sierra Club of B.C.
The report by salmon biologist Dr. David Levy’s blames the declining sockeye runs on mixed-stock fisheries, poor fisheries management as well as climate change. Download full story. Original source here.
Left unsaid in the press release and related report is the underlying political agenda that takes as its starting point an opposition to BC’s family-based commercial fishing fleet. Of the five causes for the decline of salmon identified by the Sierra Club report it is the so-called mixed stock fishery that is highlighted as the primary factor of devastation. According to the report mixed stock fisheries –harvesting salmon in channels and along migration paths- must be replaced by terminal fisheries at river mouths or far inland close to spawning channels. With individual transferable fishing quotas crashing down upon BC’s fishermen the connection between the environmental movement’s sudden release of yet another crisis report raises serious questions. Fishing quotas, supported by many Environmental NGOs, act to privatize the resource and, in terms of the salmon fishery, may also contribute to the creation of so-called terminal fisheries.
One of the potential causal factors for resource decline that the report completely ignores is the effects of criminalization of aboriginal stewardship and harvesting practices dating from the extension of the Canadian Fisheries Act to BC in the 1880s. Why might this have a bearing on resource depletion?
Our research group has identified traditional practices of resource stewardship in several of the north coast watersheds (specifically on or near Banks Island and at Lowe Inlet) that would indicate that the level of fish stocks first encountered by the late 19th century industrial salmon canning fishery was in part a by-product of human activity –that is, what Gitxaała people were doing in terms of harvesting and watershed maintenance directly contributed to the level of fish available for harvest.
The Canadian Fisheries act made modification to waterways, use of barricades and traps a criminal offense as access to and ownership of the resource was transferred to the control of the colonial state and their corporate proxies (commercial fish canners). Our research documents extensive human intervention in the very creeks in DFO statistical area 5 identified by the Sierra Report as facing declining stock levels.
Gitxaała community members engaged in a series of practices that formally included practices that today might be referred to as watershed restoration and salmon enhancement. Rather than recognizing this history of aboriginal practices along the coast the Sierra Report (notwithstanding a nod toward our importance on page 26-7 of the report) focuses on the family-based commercial fishing fleet as being the primary cause of sockeye depletion. If only that was the ‘real’ source of the problem.
An effective solution would transfer control of the salmon fishery to the hands of the family-based fishing enterprises and First Nations community members –the people who are directly involved with and reliant upon the salmon. Local control combined with a return to an intensive programme of watershed management that draws upon the local ecological knowledge and traditional technologies can ensure sustainability for people and fish.
