Drawing on what I have learnt in my modules
this term I want to focus on two of the three key aspects outlined in my last
post: livelihood and culture. I want to
discuss the ways in which the connection of indigenous people to the land with
respect to these two aspects has changed following contact with the western
world. Both fish and forest resources are integral to sustaining and defining
First Nations communities in British Columbia. However, the emergence of industrial
scale logging and fishing has irrevocably altered these relationships.
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| Triangle showing connections between people and the land: this post focusses on the two aspects highlighted in yellow. |
The first Europeans to frequent British Columbia (BC) were fur traders in the mid-18th century. They came to harvest sea otters and sell their pelts. In the 1820s commercial logging began. Douglas Fir trees, native to British Columbia, are tall and straight, perfect for ship masts and other forms of construction. In the 1850s BC officially became a British colony and in the 1880s the first Salmon canneries were opened and the rise of commercial fishing began.
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| An early European trapper, surrounded by his bounty of furs |
Nowadays, British Columbia is a province of
an independent Canada. The fish canneries have gone (the last one was closed
last year), but large-scale commercial fishing and logging continue and remain
two of the largest contributors to the provincial economy.
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Left:
stacking up Douglas Fir timber near the W. Coast, BC. Right: commercial fishing
boats from Prince Rupert, BC
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Pre contact
Before European settlement, the
relationship that indigenous people had with the land was:
- Knowledgeable
- Respectful
- Sustainable
- ‘Powerful’
Indigenous livelihoods were entirely and
directly dependent on the land. There were no wages, no market economies, no
employers, no tax. Knowledge about how to use, manage and value natural
resources was central to both their day-to-day survival and their cultural
identity. Land-based wisdom and stories
were passed down within communities from generation to generation.
Furthermore, indigenous people
traditionally held earth-based worldviews. They viewed themselves as equal to
all other living things. This meant they treated all the resources they relied
upon with respect. They ensured that they were never wasted, and that their
ecological/lifecycle requirements were taken into account. The arrival of the salmon in the rivers and
the moose in the forests was celebrated each year with large community feasts
and prayers.
The resources were always used sustainably.
In part this was due to the respect that was held for the land. But largely, it
was due to the fact that indigenous people used the land to fulfill their
subsistence needs and some small-scale local trade, not large scale,
international industry.
Finally, since time immemorial the land on
which they lived, fished and hunted was under their own customary control. They
had the agency to decide what could be harvested, how, where and when. Traditional
regulation systems were upheld to prevent environmental over-exploitation and
disrespect.
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Left:
map of traditional First Nation territories in BC. Right: upside down map of
Europe at the same scale, for size comparison (each territory is roughly the same size as a European country!)
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Post contact:
After European settlement, the seizure of
traditional lands and the emergence of commercial resource extraction the
relationship that indigenous people had with the land changed. Arguably, it became:
- Less knowledgeable
- Less respectful
- Less sustainable
- Less powerful
Throughout British Columbia, traditional
indigenous land rights were largely ignored and land was claimed by the state.
Today, 95% of the provincial land base (nearly 900,000 square kilometers) is
categorized as ‘unceded’ First Nation territory. This means that the land
was never surrendered, relinquished or handed over in any way. When this land
was seized, indigenous people were often marginalized and their subsistence use
of rivers and forests criminalized. This threatened both their livelihoods and
their culture. In one of my anthropology classes we watched a video about this
situation (called Laxwesa Wa or ‘The Strength of the River”) and one of the
community elders expressed that he felt as though they had become “trespassers
in their own right, in their own way of life”.
As indigenous communities lost subsistence
rights to fish and use forest resources they were forced to turn to industrial
companies for employment. Their societies were slowly transformed from subsistence,
sharing economies, independent of the outside world to income driven, wage
economies, dependent on external employers and markets.
As a result traditional land-based
knowledge began to lose its importance because it was no longer essential to
survival. Children, teenagers and young adults had to learn the skills of
industrial labour not of hunter gathering. This loss of knowledge combined with
the growing influence of western customs, western worldviews, and western
education has meant that today’s indigenous youth have not necessarily
learnt to respect the land in the same way that their parents, or grandparents
did.
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| Label from a 20th century salmon can |
Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it
is not only the commercial fishermen and loggers that are over-exploiting BC’s
rivers and forests, but often indigenous peoples too. This is because when
these areas were opened up to commercialization, traditional management systems
broke down. Historically, each family within the community had a specific area
of land that they were allowed to fish or gather within. They were not allowed
to fish, hunt or gather at certain ecologically sensitive times (e.g. fish spawning periods)
and they were not allowed to overexploit resources. However, when commercial fishermen and
loggers arrived and did not abide by these rules, the rules become redundant.
Even if the indigenous people obeyed them, the land would still become degraded
– any fish they didn’t catch or trees they didn’t cut down would be caught or
cut down by the Europeans. This created a form of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of
the Commons, in which indigenous people joined the race to maximize the
resources available, despite the knowledge that this would ultimately be unsustainable and ecologically detrimental. In these kinds of situations, as Garrett Hardin
put it: ‘conscience is self-eliminating’.
Looking
forwards – collaborative management:
It is often easy to romanticise the relationship that indigenous people have with the land. We like to think that if we somehow managed to remove industry from certain areas that things would just go back to how they were – small, subsistence, indigenous communities living in harmony with nature: picking berries, spearing salmon and making baskets from bark. However, upon further examination contact with the Western world not only restricted indigenous access to the land but changed their fundamental relationship with it. Even if all industry and non-indigenous Canadians packed up their bags and left, it is unlikely that things would ever go back to exactly as they had been.
Therefore, perhaps conservationists, natural resource managers and social development NGOs need to look forwards to a new future rather than looking backwards to an unobtainable past. We need to focus on achieving balance and collaboration: allowing indigenous people to maintain their cultural heritage whilst also integrating into modern lifestyles and granting them some power in natural resource management whilst maintaining economically critical industrial presence.