{"id":466,"date":"2018-01-22T00:40:16","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T00:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=466"},"modified":"2018-06-25T00:41:36","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T00:41:36","slug":"salmon-rebellion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=466","title":{"rendered":"Salmon Rebellion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published in Sierra<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Last year on August 24, Ernest Alfred, an elementary-school teacher and hereditary chief from the ‘Namgis, Lawit’sis, and Mamalilikala First Nations, boated out to Swanson Island, British Columbia, and began to set up tents with a small group of other First Nations activists.<\/p>\n

A few days earlier, Alfred had been sitting in an emergency community meeting about the problem of the fish farms of the Broughton Archipelago. Many people, including Alfred, were certain the pens were the reason behind the long decline of wild salmon in their homeland. Decades of grassroots organizing and lawsuits had shifted the balance of power between BC\u2019s First Nations and the Canadian agencies that had leased the areas to the fish farms in the first place. In June 2018, several leases in the waters of the Musgmagw Dzawada\u2019enuwx First Nation would expire, and hopes were high that the leases would not be renewed.<\/p>\n

But Marine Harvest, the Norwegian company that held those leases, wasn\u2019t acting like they were expiring. Instead, it was making plans to restock the farms with smolts\u2014young Atlantic salmon that wouldn\u2019t be ready to harvest when the leases ended. Alfred didn\u2019t think that the community could risk any more delays. Last fall, the wild salmon run in the archipelago had been frighteningly low.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe probably have two years,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cWe are not just talking about food security and what we eat. My brother is a guide. He takes tourists who come from all over the world, and he takes them to watch the grizzly bears. And the bears couldn\u2019t catch any fish. There are probably cubs that went to sleep for the winter that didn\u2019t get fat enough and won\u2019t wake up next spring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alfred and his niece, Molina Dawson, stood up at the meeting. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in this process anymore,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to write letters. I\u2019m going to pack my bags and take my tent and go out to this farm, and I\u2019m not going to move until something happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the group reached Swanson, they informed the Marine Harvest employees on-site that they were being occupied, then asked where to set up tents. \u201cThey thought it was pretty cute,\u201d said Alfred. \u201cThey didn’t take us too seriously at the beginning.\u201d (Marine Harvest did not respond to an offer to share its version of events.) The occupiers set up camp on a floating walkway above the salmon pens.<\/p>\n

The next day, a site manager for Marine Harvest<\/a> seemed annoyed that they were still there. He came up to Alfred and told him he was trespassing. \u201cNo, you<\/em> are,\u201d Alfred said.<\/p>\n

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Alfred and a fellow occupier brandish jars of wild salmon. | Photo courtesy of Swanson Occupation<\/a><\/p>\n

The waters of the Broughton Archipelago are home to at least two dozen salmon farms, according to a 2013 survey<\/a>, but Alfred had chosen Swanson Island for one very specific reason: The island itself is the traditional territory of his mother\u2019s ancestors. As long as Alfred stayed on the island, he was virtually untouchable. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be right for me to go to someone else\u2019s territory and say \u201cget out,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cBut I also chose it because it had not-too-bad cell coverage. Internet was very important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Internet was very important because Alfred did not intend to leave Swanson Island until he knew for certain that John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, was not going to renew the leases in June. Still, even as Alfred stayed connected through the rest of the world via telecommunications<\/a>, living on the island was an adjustment. \u201cAt this hour, baby seals on the island next to us sound like zombies out to get me,\u201d Alfred wrote on his Facebook page one evening in September. \u201cI’m going to bed!\u201d<\/p>\n

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A supply boat arrives with shack-building materials. | Photo courtesy of Swanson Occupation<\/a><\/p>\n

When the fish farms arrived in the 1980s, residents of the archipelago did not welcome them with open arms, despite promises of jobs and money. \u201cOur people from the very beginning were very skeptical,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cRight off the bat, the old people\u2014a lot of people call them \u2018elders,\u2019 but in my tradition the word that we use literally means \u2018old people\u2019\u2014said, \u2018Why would we do this when Mother Nature grows salmon for free? We would be acting as gods.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t up to the First Nations. The farm leases had been negotiated with the Canadian federal government. Over the next few decades, a series of court rulings gave legal backing to something that had always been historically true: Many of Canada\u2019s indigenous tribes, particularly those in the western provinces, had never signed treaties giving up control over their territory.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Carrier Lumber submitted a proposal to the BC government to log forest on Xeni Gwet\u2019in land<\/a>. In response, the Xeni Gwet\u2019in declared the forest off limits for all logging, mining, and road building but said that non-natives were welcome to ask permission to \u201ccome and view and photograph our beautiful land.\u201d It took the case decades to reach its conclusion, and when it did in 2014, a new legal precedent was set: Any First Nations land that was never formally ceded to the Canadian government could not be developed without the consent of those First Nations that have a claim to it. That included land that had been used for hunting or foraging, not just land that had been continuously occupied.<\/p>\n

By then, BC\u2019s native salmon population was in steep decline. \u201cIn the mid ’90s\u2014that’s when my dad sold his fishing boat,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cThe farms went in in 1989. We started to see effects almost right away.\u201d Commercial fishery catches between 1995 and 2005 were the lowest in recorded history, and then the catch halved again between 2006 and 2014<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There were several theories as to why the salmon runs were diminishing. Salmon farms around the world were struggling with an epidemic of sea lice: tiny crustaceans that latch onto salmon in ocean waters and feed off their blood and tissue. Were fish farms providing year-round habitat to a parasite that normally would have limited opportunities to latch onto juvenile wild salmon as they emerged from streams and headed out to the open ocean? Scientific research showed that sea lice from fish farms could infect nearby wild salmon<\/a>. Was that one reason why so few fish were coming back from the ocean each year?<\/p>\n

Salmon farms were also facing periodic epidemics of piscine reovirus. A study by Alexandra Morton, a whale researcher who began studying fish farms after the area\u2019s orca population declined,\u00a0found that 95 percent of farmed Atlantic salmon had the virus<\/a>, and that about 40 percent of wild Pacific salmon that spawned near the salmon farms, like those in the Broughton Archipelago, also had the virus. In areas of BC that were farthest away from salmon farms, the incidence of the virus was only 5 percent. Piscine reovirus causes heart damage<\/a>, and some biologists surmised that it could be preventing wild salmon from making it to the ocean, or from surviving the long journey upstream to spawn.<\/p>\n

But none of this changed the fact that, in the more than 20 years since salmon farming began, farmed salmon had become a $1.2 billion industry<\/a> and BC\u2019s largest agricultural export<\/a>. A third of those salmon were coming from the Broughton Archipelago. Alaska had managed to ban farmed salmon, but it did so in the 1990s, before the industry got too powerful to overcome resistance. Meanwhile, companies like Marine Harvest had begun to hammer out agreements with some local tribes, which made agitating to remove the fish farms more politically complicated.<\/p>\n

To Alfred, there\u2019s no amount of compromise that would be worth hammering out. \u201cIt is a lot of money to these impoverished communities, but it\u2019s a drop in the bucket to these companies,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who have signed those agreements are not proud of them.\u201d According to Alfred, some tribal members believed that just getting the farms to operate differently might work: for example, moving pens farther away from traditional salmon migration routes, or closing down the farms periodically to break the lifecycle of any parasites or viruses.<\/p>\n

But those changes were hard to monitor, hard to enforce<\/a>. Alternative solutions to closing down the farms, like moving them far away from wild salmon and into facilities on land, weren\u2019t happening fast enough. BC\u2019s First Nations had started their own above-ground fish farm, Kuterra<\/a>, which began farming in 2013, but no similar operations had followed. \u201cThe most important thing to remember is that it\u2019s been done and we\u2019ve proved our point,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cIts only downfall is that it doesn\u2019t actually make money.\u201d (Kuterra recently began to turn a profit but is unlikely to recoup its start-up costs.)<\/p>\n

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Marine Harvest’s salmon farm seen from Alfred’s cabin. | Photo courtesy of\u00a0Swanson Occupation<\/a><\/p>\n

A few weeks into the occupation, Alfred and the other occupiers (there have been anywhere from two to 18 people living on the island at any given moment) moved into an enclave of deserted cabins on the island, which had a good view of the Marine Harvest operation.\u00a0Swanson Island is not the only occupation. Another Marine Harvest location, Midsummer Island, was occupied in September by a group of Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw and Namgis, including Alfred\u2019s niece. They agreed to leave in November after Marine Harvest filed an injunction against them in court<\/a>. In October, the Matriarch\u2019s Camp, led by Tsastilqualus Umbras, a Ma’amtagila grandmother, set up outside the offices of BC premier John Horgan in Langford, relocating at one point to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.<\/p>\n

Gradually, it began to look like the occupations were having some effect. In October, Lana Popham, the BC minister of agriculture, sent a letter to Marine Harvest,\u00a0<\/a>warning it not to stock any more salmon at its farm in Port Elizabeth, whose lease was set to expire in June 2018, because \u201cwe are entering into sensitive discussions with some of the First Nations in the Broughton Archipelago who remain opposed to open net pen salmon farming in their territories.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few days later, Horgan\u00a0said at a salmon farm industry meeting<\/a> that companies needed to remember that their leases were \u201cnot in perpetuity.\u201d Marine Harvest objected to this messaging. “If there’s a better way to do business, we’re always interested,\u201d Marine Harvest Canada spokesman Ian Roberts told CBC News<\/a>, \u201cbut today they are very, very good sites for growing fish.”<\/p>\n

Then, in November, a state senator in neighboring Washington announced he was planning a bill that would phase out all fish farm leases there. With the state spending hundreds of millions of dollars preserving wild Pacific salmon runs, said Senator Kevin Ranker,<\/a> \u201craising invasive Atlantic salmon that we classify by state law as a pollutant makes no sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill was almost certainly the direct result of the September escape of over 160,000 Atlantic salmon from a fish farm run by a company named Cooke Aquacultlure<\/a>. Atlantic salmon have been used for West Coast fish farming because they are believed to not be able to survive in the Pacific Ocean on their own, and because they could live closer together than their Pacific cousins without attacking each other. Months after the escape, however, fishers in Washington are still reeling in Atlantic salmon. In December, Washington\u2019s Department of Natural Resources terminated the lease on the farm where the escape took place<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Alfred spent New Year\u2019s Eve on Swanson Island. \u201cSwanson Occupation Day 131!\u201d he announced cheerfully, camera trained on the orange-yellow Wolf Moon rising over the bay. \u201cHappy New Year from everyone at Swanson Island Occupation!\u201d He, some friends, and their children took all the pots and pans outside and banged them together in celebration. It wasn\u2019t what he had planned a year earlier, but then, a lot of things had happened in 2017 that he hadn\u2019t planned on, beginning with his decision, in August, to take a leave of absence from teaching and to occupy a fish farm instead.<\/p>\n

As a hereditary chief, Alfred was raised with a particular responsibility to keep alive culture and tradition, and to carry it forward. \u201cI quit my job so that I could have peace of mind,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to lie to my students anymore about being stewards of the land when I wasn\u2019t doing it.\u201d A group of his former students, now high schoolers, organized two school walkouts in solidarity and demanded that the local supermarket not stock farmed salmon.<\/p>\n

Alfred has heard that Marine Harvest will restock the pens off of Swanson soon. There are rumors afoot that the management of Canada\u2019s fish farms would be taken from the Department of Fisheries, and Alfred remains optimistic. He suspects that early on in the occupation, Marine Harvest had tried to get a permit to evict him but then realized that his ancestral relationship to the land made that impossible. “They know,\u201d Alfred said. \u201cThey know they are going to lose.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in Sierra. Last year on August 24, Ernest Alfred, an elementary-school teacher and hereditary chief from the ‘Namgis, Lawit’sis, and Mamalilikala First Nations, boated out to Swanson Island, British Columbia, and began to set up tents with a small group of other First Nations activists. A few days earlier, Alfred had been sitting… Continue reading Salmon Rebellion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}