Here is another article that provides some background to the collaboration between the SFU Archaeology Department and the Sliammon First Nation:
Our once teeming shores
BY RANDY SHORE, VANCOUVER SUN JULY 24, 2009
SLIAMMON -- The herring are all gone. Most of the chum, too. Clams and oysters lie uneaten on the beach, made poisonous by the industrial encroachment a few miles up the beach in Powell River.
Those foods were once the currency of a sophisticated marine economy for the local first nation, the Tla’Amin people. The life they supported exists now in the memory of village elders, those who are left.
On this day a handful of elders attend a community day planned by Simon Fraser University archeologists Dana Lepofsky and John Welch and their students, but there is sadness in the air. The village is planning a funeral for Bessie Peters, an elder who has died.
It is the ninth funeral this year, each a devastating blow for a small community of 700 people struggling to maintaina relationship with its past.
Welch and Lepofsky are here to help flesh out the oral history using the archeological record. They are conducting surgical excavations of the human habitations that have ringed these bays for at least 2,000 years.
The elders’ living memories are of a time when the beach turned white with herring roe each spring, when
carefully constructed pools on the beach were so thick with fish they could be harvested by the basket.
“We used to come every year when the tide went out to branch for herring eggs,” said Tla’Amin elder Charlie Bob.
As a boy, Bob helped weight and sink cedar boughs and tree tops just below the low tide mark so they wouldremain submerged.
Desperate to spawn, the herring mistake the cedar for kelp and lay their eggs in thick layers on the branches. Hemlock boughs were sometimes used too, but Bob disliked the needles that would inevitably get mixed in with the roe and usually used cedar for its sturdier foliage.
“We’d have it anchored out there and leave it maybe two nights and the eggs would pile up on it,” he recalled, looking out into the bay where he once harvested his family’s food from a dugout canoe. “Then we would pull them all out and dry them.”
Bob learned to harvest all that the ocean had to offer from his grandmother and other village elders and spent most of his days as a young man hunting and fishing.
They also taught him the Tla’Amin tongue, which he had forgotten because he was forbidden to speak it during eight years at a government-run residential school.
He still speaks the language and teaches it to the children in Sliammon along with the basics of wood-carving three times a week.
The beaches now are empty of herring roe, its harvest a lost art.
Empty, too, are the fish traps and clam farms that spread like a lattice-work across the beaches here, on Harwood Island and at camp locations throughout Tla’Amin territory. The traps are carefully engineered complexes of holding pools and guideways that concentrated the fish on the beach or in holding areas just below the water’s surface.
Rather than living passively with the topography provided by nature, the Tla’Amin people terraformed and
managed their lands and beaches intensively, said Lepofsky, who is in Sliammon for a second summer of study with the community.
The archeological team has already unearthed evidence that the Tla’Amin moved large amounts of earth to build foundations for their longhouses and that their provenance is ancient. A line of boulders on the beach stretches for several hundred metres, the remains of a fish trap that would have been buttressed by an equally long row of wood pilings. The beach on the point north of Sliammon village is entirely covered with a complex of traps that catch fish, trap cod roe and warm standing water to encourage clams to grow there.
“The memory of the place is of incredibly rich, diverse ecosystems and with that a deep ecological knowledge,” said Lepofsky. “There was very specific timing to do things, like not fishing the herring until the water turned white with the spawn.”
A time of plenty
The people moved from place to place in ancient times to intercept runs of herring, chum, sockeye and pink as they came into season.
Everywhere they went fish traps were built and maintained, with similar design features repeated in far-flung locations but adapted to local currents and conditions.
Some crossed streams, others were placed below the low water mark while others still were higher on the beach, suggesting that different kinds of technology and different parts of the intertidal zone were used for different prey or at different times of the year.
“The knowledge about the fish traps is fairly limited today,” Lepofsky said. Living memory of the traps is nearly gone, however, the archeological record points to continuous, systematic harvest of a whole range of sea life stretching back many centuries.
Some traps were still in use as late as the 1950s.
“I remember going with the grandmother down there to scoop baskets and take out herring,” Emily August said, nodding toward the pools revealed by the day’s low tide. “We would bring it all up the beach in a wheelbarrow and everyone would get their share.”
Herring was smoked on the beach for consumption throughout the year.
As a member of the chief’s family, August would have to wait as each family in the village took a share of the catch. “That was the way that Chief Tom did it and his dad, too.
“We always went last because as chief it was his job to look after his people,” she explained.
It was a time when a man didn’t need a job to provide for his family.
“It was peaceful and people shared,” said elder Peter August, Emily’s uncle. “If you couldn’t get it for yourself someone got it for you, you didn’t need money.”
“Now we have to get our food from the Safeway,” he said. “But it’s not the same.”
Sliammon Beach was once speckled with shacks and cedar racks that were used to process, smoke or dry oysters, clams, fish roe, herring, salmon and ground fish. Today the foreshore is a soccer field and a children’s playground built of red and yellow plastic.
“We used to get all these things on the beach here before the water was contaminated,” said Bob. “You can’t even touch it now.”
Clams were steamed and then skewered on sticks and fire-dried. Roe was cured in the sun on the racks. Both could be rehydrated for eating by an overnight soak in water and both were used for trade.
“We would take it over to Cape Mudge and trade it for oolichan oil, medicine or women, like a wife,” Emily August said. Marriages between first nations were often sealed with the delivery of a dugout canoe loaded with preserved food.
August’s great-grandfather, hereditary Chief Tom Timothy was betrothed as per tradition to a woman from Cape Mudge with a boat full of plenty, but caused a scandal when he chose a younger sister of the woman to accompany him home.
“That was a very bad problem,” she said, though his descendants are able to laugh about it now. “The one that he paid for got the boat and the paddles and all the food and he got a wife that didn’t speak a word of our language.”
The beginning of the end
Herring catches in B.C’s coastal waters exploded in the 1950s and 1960s and the commercial fishery grew unchecked until the unthinkable happened: The fish were gone.
The commercial catch peaked at more than 250,000 tonnes in 1966 and dropped to zero in 1967. The fishery remained closed for four years to allow stocks to recover and some did. But the resident stock at Sliammon has never returned to its historic abundance.
The herring catch in recent years for the whole coast of B.C. averages around 25,000 tonnes, though it dropped as low as 12,000 tonnes in 2007.
“The seiners came in and cleaned [the herring] all out,” said Bob, who watched from the beach as commercial fishermen emptied the waters of his people’s staple food. “I think there were 300 of them.”
Though the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Tla’Amin have long disagreed about the existence of a local resident herring stock, recent DFO studies indicate that herring populations in B.C. run the full continuum from entirely resident to entirely migratory.
“If it wasn’t a resident stock, why didn’t they come back?” asked Peter August. “This used to be one to be one of the richest places for herring, salmon and bottom fish.”
The seiners returned in the 1980s and took what was left.
“Back in the ’80s was the last time we saw herring in this area,” said August, once a fisherman himself.
A 2003 agreement in principle for a treaty negotiated with the provincial government conceded that the Tla’Amin would likely have to go outside their traditional fishing area to obtain herring afforded them under the treaty.
The Sliammon fish traps rarely produce today and haven’t been actively used for decades. But when a school of chum was stranded in a trap on Sliammon Beach the whole village came out to see them. Then they had a barbecue, just like old times.
The creek that flows through Sliammon was once overloaded with chum, elders say. Today a fish hatchery operates in an effort to rebuild what has been lost. But without the herring as a food fish, it seems unlikely that the salmon can ever fully recover.
“It’s hard to fix once it is destroyed,” he said.
The hatchery has been working to help the chum and coho recover for more than 25 years and Sliammon Creek has a few thousand returners some years, other years not as many. A community smokehouse on the site was built to help the community’s young people regain the art of smoking their own fish. Chum emptied of their eggs are used for smoking.
Looking back to look forward
The archeology project at Sliammon is a collaboration between SFU and the Tla’Amin people. For Lepofsky and Welch it is a chance to study a first nation that academia has largely ignored. For the Tla’Amin it is a chance to recover some of what has been lost.
“When you look, there are herring bones everywhere and they supported people for thousands of years and created an elaborate fishing technology and now there’s none of it left,” she said.
The number of dwellings identified around the bays at Sliammon indicate a population much larger than exists today, Lepofsky opined. “We are finding there were huge numbers of people here,” she said. “But those settlements have passed out of memory.”
The regular impressions left by the longhouses are easy to spot and make popular building sites even today as they are already level and angled to face the bay and each other. Many of the longhouse excavation sites are cut into people’s back lawns.
At a time which has yet to be determined, many of the longhouses suddenly ceased to be dwellings and were covered with midden material, which suggests the locations were used for shellfish processing. The remains of clams, oysters and surprisingly thick layers of urchin shell, banded in both green and purple, are clearly visible in the excavations.
A smallpox epidemic in the mid-19th century killed about 80 per cent of the first nations people in B.C., Lepofsky said. A theory circulating among archeologists points to another pandemic several hundred years earlier, meaning the smallpox epidemic of 1862 killed most of what was already a decimated population.
Swift death by disease devastates the knowledge base of a society based on oral tradition as those with the history and the expertise are lost before they can pass on what they know.
“These cultures were harmed in ways we can’t even get our heads around,” Lepofsky said.
In addition to the archeology students working on the project are two young Tla’Amin: university student Lisa Wilson and Tanner Timothy, a descendant of Chief Tom Timothy.
Wilson hopes to return next summer as a student rather than an employee of the project, but for now she is happy to begin to uncover some of what has been lost.
Wilson spent her summers in Cowichan as a child and didn’t learn as much of the traditional knowledge as she would have liked. After each day on the project, she rushes home to tell her father what she has learned.
“It’s amazing because I am sharing history with him,” Wilson said. “We’re learning it together.”
Wilson is constantly surprised by what the archeological record reveals about the complexity and inter-relatedness of the ecological knowledge of her ancestors. “It’s all-encompassing,” she said. “I feel so blessed to be able to come home and use my abilities and share what I know with my friends.
“They are getting excited about archeology and what it means to our community looking forward,” she said.
rshore@vancouversun.com
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