![]() The group’s first project was to stop a steep clay bank, Stoltz Bluff, from sliding into the river and causing high levels of silt and smothering chinook eggs in the gravel downstream, recalls Rickard. And the Cowichan Tribes presented a “valuable and well-thought-out document that formed the basis for the eventual Cowichan Chinook Rebuilding Plan.” The discussions involved the local Catalyst Paper mill, which owns a water licence and controls the river flow, he says. The group began a series of workshops - later called the Stewardship Round Table - to “talk about where the fish spawned, reared, and how they returned back up the river,” says Rickard. “We had to put the salmon in trucks and truck them upstream,” he says. Wildlife Federation Wilf Luedke, the DFO area chief for South Coast Area Stock Assessment Tom Rutherford, the then DFO community adviser, and others in the community who cared about the salmon.Ī drought in 2003 that left insufficient water in the river for the salmon to swim upstream was the catalyst for action, Rutherford recalls. It was against this backdrop of poverty and the importance of chinook as a food source that the Cowichan Tribes elders and biologists collaborated to save the salmon with Paul Rickard, a volunteer with the B.C. More than a quarter of adults have not completed high school, according to Statistics Canada. Most of the industry has gone and alcoholism is rampant, according to the Provincial Health Services Authority. Today, Duncan, B.C., the town beside the Cowichan Tribes Reserve, is one of the poorest towns in British Columbia, with average household incomes of just over half the provincial average. “There would be 15 of us doing all the preparation, gutting and hanging.” But “when the salmon were in, everyone was involved,” he says. “It wasn’t the most popular task,” says George. ![]() The second youngest of 12 children, George’s job was to collect the fish guts in a wheelbarrow and bury them in the ground. It was the late 1960s and the smokehouse had rafters 15 feet high and could smoke 200 fish at a time. George remembers smoking chinook in his family’s smokehouse on the Cowichan Tribes Reserve on Vancouver Island. And you are going to let us take 200 pieces?” “That number is not realistic,” George says. It used to be more than 200 chinook per family that George remembers. It’s a model of co-operation that experts say should be put to use by other groups across Canada.īut even though chinook stocks have returned to historical levels for five consecutive years, the Cowichan Tribes are still being denied the right to catch them - permitted to harvest just 200 annually for ceremonial purposes by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), says George. George and a team of people who care about the chinook salmon in the Cowichan River - local residents, recreational anglers, industrial stakeholders and three levels of government - have worked for more than 15 years to bring the Cowichan peoples’ traditional food source back from the brink of extinction. We are trying to move past the Indian Act, because it’s terrible,” says George. “We are trying to get land back that was expropriated from us in various ways in the past century. But the Tribes must now cope with the harsh impacts of climate change as well as the enduring effects of colonialism. Cowichan Tribes, the largest First Nation band in British Columbia, have “lived on the river and the foreshore forever,” says George. The floodwaters may have receded somewhat, but life by the river is more difficult than ever. George, the Tribes’ director of land and government is assessing flood damage, helping evacuated residents settle in hotels and communicating a boil water advisory - his steady voice hiding the distress he feels. The Cowichan River, heartbeat of the First Nations community, breeched its banks after heavy rain this month, forcing many families from their homes. North Saanich, B.C.-Larry George is working flat out helping his Cowichan Tribes community on Vancouver Island cope with devastating flood damage.
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