The Thriving of Wild Salmon

by Simon Lucas

(The following is a transcript of the remarks made by Simon Lucas who at the time of this speech was co-chair of the BC Aboriginal Fisheries Commission and the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. He was speaking to participants of the Suzuki Foundation's Wild Salmon conference held November 18th, 1988.)

I have a vision of the future for the west coast of Vancouver Island. And it is a vision, too, in my grandfather's eyes and my grandchildren's eyes. In my vision I am sitting in my boat, Karmar 1, drifting in Shelter Inlet on a cold, drizzly fall day. Suddenly, there is a sound like a gunshot, and I look out and thousands of dog salmon are breaking the surface at the same time. That special sound and that special sight have not been heard since my grandfather's time. In my vision, thousands of chinook salmon from 50-pound smilies to small jacks again fight their way up the Tahsis, Gold and other rivers on the west coast of the island as they once did. In my vision, the steep mountains around Kennedy Lake are beautifully green, not as they are today—almost bare and wasting away to the rivers. Yes, there is logging in my vision, but logging in small patches, spaced among growing and mature timber. And in my vision, hundreds of thousands of sockeye swarm again in Tofino River and the Kennedy River. They spawn in Kennedy Lake and its tributaries. And in my vision, seiners and gill-netters, spaced out along Browning Passage and Tofino Inlet, respectfully sharing in the bounty of the sockeye returning to Kennedy Lake as they once did. Native and non-native fishermen sharing this abundance as freely as they once did.

Let me tell you about our communities in our vision. We have communities like Kyuquot, at the entrance to Kyuquot Sound, and the Mowachaht community at the mouth of the Gold River. The community of Ahousaht guards the door to northern Clayoquot Sound and the community of Opitsaht, across from Tofino, is home to the Clayoquot people who care for Kennedy Lake and its salmon. In my vision, our communities thrive and prosper through the careful management, sharing and use of fisheries and other resources like they once did. You see, my vision is not based on the survival of salmon, but on the thriving of wild salmon. My vision is not based upon the survival of our people and our communities, but on their thriving. Most importantly, my vision is based on the complete interdependence between our people and wild salmon. Our communities are spread along the coast and we cannot thrive unless wild salmon thrive. Equally, I do not believe that wild salmon will again flourish, unless and until our communities flourish again. This is why we can share a common cause and struggle together—for our communities and for wild salmon to survive and thrive.

I want to speak to you briefly about our history, because I think we learn something about the total interdependence between our community and wild salmon from our history before contact. It's important for you to understand why it's important to us, that we were economically sound before contact. There was no such thing as unemployment. You have to understand that. You can't just keep telling us that it happened 120 years ago. We still look back. Our communities were strong and obviously self-reliant. And I believe that salmon and other fisheries thrived under careful management. Many non-Indian people think that salmon and other resources were not as heavily utilized as they are today and therefore that little management was needed. It is a mistake to think that we did not use the resources to the fullest extent possible. You need to recognize that our populations were probably at least ten times larger 200 years ago. And you should understand that in my tribe alone, the Hesquiaht tribe, the biggest clan was well over 1,000. So it's easy for us to estimate there was 3,000 of us Hesquiahts. And you think about that and the way we live today and you go back some 200 years, all the meals we had—we had snacks between our meals—but all of those were fish. We never had to eat anything else. There was no Kraft Dinner or bologna. We were totally surrounded by fish prepared in many different ways. For example, archaeological evidence indicates that 15,000 to 20,000 Nuu-Chah-Nulth people lived in Barkeley Sound alone and similar numbers in Kyuquot Sound. There are 300 in Kyuquot today.

If you think about the quantities of fish and shellfish required to feed populations of this size, largely dependent on seafoods, you will soon see that our ancestors were harvesting more of the salmon resource and other resources than are being harvested today. If you went to our site, it would probably go twenty feet deep. You would be digging up nothing but whalebones, clamshells, fishbones. Obviously we had an effective management system to ensure that harvests of this size could be sustained. It's ludicrous to think that we had no plan...

History shows us the interdependence between our communities and salmon stocks, as the decline of salmon stocks is exactly parallel to the decline and impoverishment of our communities. Four thousands of years until the last short 100 years we did not know of unemployment in our communities...

The coming of fishing industries and other industries meant increasing unemployment in our communities. As the resource suffered, so have we. We can talk about many examples: Canadian Fish in Nootka Sound, a flourishing cannery. Nelson Bros. in Ceepeecee. Flourishing. A lot of our people were working. But somebody decided centralization was the answer to the economy. The vision which I have described to you must be based on clean rivers, estuaries and ocean waters, and on careful protection and management of wild salmon and salmon stocks. Here we must be careful on the words we use—"wild" salmon used to mean wild spawning, wild parents, non-hatchery stocks. Since salmon farming has come to our coast, wild salmon has come to mean non-farm salmon, whether they were spawned in a hatchery or a river.

If we are going to rebuild our wild stocks, we have to think about all the things that we have inherited. You and I could stand here for days about the inheritance. Lakes, rivers and creeks, and salmon stocks large and small, no matter how many hatcheries we have, they can never begin to match the abilities of our rivers and creeks and wild stocks to produce fish. If we protect them we have to say "no" to industrial pollution and to the idea of safe levels of poison chemicals. How long are we going to continue to self-destruct? If we befoul the rivers, streams, creeks and lakes, we are befouling ourselves. We have to say NO! We keep seeing government after government allowing pulp mills to be built before safeguards. They are in place, finally, and we say "what about the pollution?" "Oh, but that's going to cost $40 million to see that we're pollution- free." Right now we have "safe levels" for our people in this country. We've got to say "No, no more." Otherwise, all of us are just paying lip-service to wild stock. My vision of the rebuilding of the Kennedy Lake sockeye stocks is an impossible dream if we add the insult of spraying toxic chemicals alongside the stream, as they are doing today, in addition to the painful injury of steep, clearcut slopes. Our inlets will not provide the environment needed by our young salmon to grow and survive if we allow the salmon farming to grow unchecked. We have many examples: pulp mills, lumber mills, the Fraser River is an example.

If we had the power to transform ourselves into a fish, how long do you think you and I would be under there? We must manage fisheries and habitat to rebuild our wild stocks. We must use enhancement as one tool of management with a goal of rebuilding stocks. The vision I have described for you must also be based on more and better knowledge and information about our rivers, streams and estuaries. For example, the rebuilding of chinook salmon stocks is one of the goals of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The rebuilding program must be based on reliable information about the status of chinook stocks and about the capability of our rivers in the inlets to produce chinook. Yet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, there is only one chinook indicator stock to tell us if the rebuilding program is working for that area. Compare this to the eight indicator stocks on the Western Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The reason they have so many indicator stocks in Washington State is because individual tribes have cared enough about their rivers to develop and maintain a sound information base. We need to care enough about all of our stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island to recognize that what is happening to the Robertson Creek hatchery stock is not the same as what is happening to wild stocks elsewhere. Our tribes are in the best position to provide the information required for better management, as the tribes have done in Washington State.

I will give you a few examples of how we can provide the information to support the rebuilding of our wild stocks. The Kyuquot tribal communities are next to the northern entrance to Kyuquot Sound. Many important chinook, chum and coho producers flow into Kyuquot Sound and for the last three years young Kyuquot peoples have been working hard to estimate spawner numbers in these streams and rivers.

In Ahousat, north of Tofino, another group of young people have built a counting fence on a small local chum and coho producer. They want to use the spawner count they get from this one stream as an indicator of chum and coho returns from other streams in the area. Young people in every Nuu-Chah-Nulth community want to become involved in protecting, managing and enhancing their rivers and streams. This work needs to be done elsewhere and the department does not have the money or they would do what needs to be done. We fully support our young people in their efforts, but we cannot do this in the long run unless we can share in the benefits.

This point about sharing and the benefits of efforts to better manage and enhance our wild salmon resource is an extremely important one which I want to explain carefully. At the very heart of fish conservation is not catching fish today so there will be more fish to catch in the future. We have demonstrated time and time again our respect for the salmon. When the time has come for conservation, however, departmental policies prevent native so-called food fishermen from sharing in the benefits of conservation efforts.

So I think I'm getting close to the heart of the issue which divides you and I. We are willing to share the fisheries resources with you as we've demonstrated. You know that. We've demonstrated that since your forefathers came. But now the share we have left is not enough to sustain our communities. You are concerned about maintaining your work and your way of life and you're worried that restoring our rightful share will mean less for you, but it does not have to be this way. We can create a win-win-win situation, a situation where native and non-native people and the salmon all win. But to do this we have to work together to rebuild and expand the wild salmon resource. I am not saying that we don't have some serious differences. And we have shown those differences through the media. Let us recognize those differences and work together to ensure that wild salmon flourish once again or else there will be no wild salmon and our differences will be irrelevant.

I believe that wild salmon can once again thrive and that our communities can once again flourish. We are committed in each of our communities up and down the coast and along the rivers to work with the salmon in their struggle to survive and thrive. We will continue the efforts we have already begun and we want to double and redouble our efforts for the wild salmon stock. These efforts will benefit the salmon and all of us, native and non-native alike. We would like to share fairly in the benefits, as this is our heritage.

In closing, I want to say to the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, thank you very much for not joining with the Pacific Fishermen's Defence Alliance in their efforts. They are saying that in our efforts to help our communities thrive once again we are a threat to the fisheries resource. They are saying that they want justice and equality for all Canadians. I say to them, what about the fish? I say to you that our communities must flourish for the wild salmon to flourish. We can and we must work together in harmony so that wild salmon will again flourish. If we can work out a way to work together, my grandchildren will live to see and hear the vision of my grandfather.