Live Science reports on new combinations of indigenous traditions and advanced science to keep the environment (and the food supply) healthy:
Now, the Heiltsuk are using traditional knowledge in concert with modern scientific approaches to monitor wildlife, count salmon, and maintain the health of waterways in their traditional territory. From the outset, the HIRMD stewards decided that Ǧvi̓ḷás would guide how they managed their resources, as well as influence how they would work with other government offices, industry or other outside parties.
This has led the Heiltsuk to braid relatively new techniques, like DNA analysis, with ancient ones, like the use of traditional fish weirs, so they can study — but not impact — the ecosystem. Their work has revealed shifting bear habitats and climate change impacts on salmon. Both have led to increased protections for creatures that are critical to the ecosystem.
“We’re going back to the value system that our ancestors implemented for thousands of years,” [ Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department Director Dúqva̓ísḷa William] Housty told Live Science. “In our eyes, it is for the betterment of everything.”
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For many decades after colonization, federal and provincial agencies controlled fishing quotas, logging operations and other resource management decisions that directly affected the Heiltsuk. However, that started to change in the 1990s, and a small team of Heiltsuk began doing field assessments on the health of the streams and salmon in the Koeye watershed, 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Bella Bella. The team presented data to the Heiltsuk land use committee, which would use that information to craft conservation management plans. One key goal was to protect grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) habitat.
If “you protect grizzly bear habitat, you’re protecting black bear habitat, wolf habitat, deer habitat and many other species,” Housty said. “When you have lots of bears, it means you have a healthy ecosystem.”
The Heiltsuk began monitoring bears directly in the Koeye watershed in the early 2000s.
The number of Heiltsuk researchers grew, and in 2010, the Heiltsuk formed HIRMD. That same year, they partnered with University of Victoria wildlife scientist Chris Darimont, who is also the science director at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, and his graduate students. The academic team expanded the monitoring across a larger region of the Heiltsuk territory in a way that aligned with Heiltsuk values.
“A lot of the concepts were relational in that they were about how wildlife were like relatives to the Heiltsuk,” Darimont said, “and ought to be treated accordingly.”
Instead of catching grizzlies, sedating them and attaching tracking collars to them, which eventually fall off, the researchers took an entirely different approach: They created knee-high salmon-scented bear snares — barbed wire corrals around trees — and set 30 in the Koeye and more than 100 throughout the larger study area. Lured to the smell, the bears left hair samples, and the Heiltsuk used their DNA to track their movements. The noninvasive method didn’t disrupt the bears’ usual habits; the bait provided no rewards to the bears, so the grizzlies didn’t become dependent on the snares for food.
Monitoring the bears, collecting scientific data and collaborating with academic scientists are proving critical to the Heiltsuk’s involvement in management decisions, Housty said. Historically, when they didn’t have the scientific resources, government organizations controlled the management of natural resources. “It is our partnerships and the science that has really given us the legs to stand on for joint management,” Housty said.