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October 15, 2024

Western science structures are embedded in a deeply rooted settler-colonial mindset. Indigenous traditional knowledge has the potential to overturn western systems destined for doom.

As a legislative policy fellow and anthropologist who studies women’s well-being in coastal communities of Chile and Indigenous salmon management in Alaska and Canada, I’ve witnessed how genocidal attempts to eradicate Indigenous peoples and their cultures have also damaged the environment. We see it in current management’s low returns in fish, high levels of runoff and nutrient input into ocean systems, and generally unsustainable levels of resource extraction.

I’ve also seen the opposite: I interviewed managers and biologists in Vancouver, Canada, who described the substantial improvements of Indigenous-led, bottom-up approaches to conservation. They see fish return and people fulfilling their well-being and nutrition needs. They see political and economic reform and a revitalization of social and cultural practices.

Unfortunately this is still not the norm, as we saw in a recent international agreement between the United States and Canada that placed a seven-year fishing moratorium on Chinook salmon to encourage fish populations to rebound. Most people would agree that this is a worthy goal for the conservation of both the species and the people who depend on Chinook. However, the new agreement fails to factor in Indigenous access to resources for ceremonial and subsistence harvest, which is mandated by law, nor did legislators acknowledge public comment that supported that access.

The marginalization of Indigenous peoples today, as seen in this agreement’s failures, can be traced back to colonialism.

The history of colonialism is steeped in human-rights violations such as the outlawing of Indigenous salmon-management practices that settlers later appropriated for their own economic gain. Settler wealth was achieved only through the exploitation of resources and forced relocation of Indigenous peoples out of economically advantageous spaces and acculturation into oppressive colonial ones.

“Settler governments [are] primarily concerned with economic gain,” a British Columbia-based project manager focused on salmon restoration told me during an interview. “Their mandate is to work commercial fisheries or recreational ones that generate economic value for their states, provinces, or countries…That’s the starting point; when human well-being is the starting point — like it is with Indigenous people — then it leads to a very different kind of management.”

A Broader Worldview

Indigenous traditional knowledge incorporates a worldview that recognizes humans as a part of, rather than separate from, the animal family. As the restoration manager explained: “That changes everything if you really think it through, because we’re no longer in control. We’re not in charge, nature doesn’t exist to serve us, nature isn’t there to be exploited for our own benefit.”

For example, the Nisga’a Nation — whose treaty with the government of British Columbia and Canada protects their right to manage and harvest fish species and other resources — place value on what’s left behind, not how much is extracted. Here, colonial extractive ideologies are challenged by traditional regenerative strategies that have sustained fisheries and Indigenous societies for thousands of years.

Incorporating an embedded subsistence culture and traditional knowledge into ongoing and future reconciliation and restoration efforts would benefit from a concept called transformative conservation.

Transformative conservation recognizes environmental contexts as inextricably linked to cultural, social, economic, and political ones, confront issues as they arise, and therefore operate in less limited, binding boundaries.

As the project manager explained: “Epistemologically, western science is very naïve about how the world actually functions. Indigenous people have much more sophisticated (in my view) worldviews that are quite effective in actually integrating western science outputs into their management systems. Western science is by its nature a methodology that’s reductionist. It operates most effectively when it can reduce problems to very simple systems, models, variables and then test them out. It’s a very powerful knowledge creation system but it has real limitations when it comes to then building back up again, to develop an integrated view of ecosystems and how they function.”

We can see this at work in Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. On its website the agency says it “helps to ensure healthy and sustainable aquatic ecosystems through habitat protection and sound science. We support economic growth in the marine and fisheries sectors, and innovation in areas such as aquaculture and biotechnology.” In practice this appears to give little attention to the needs of Indigenous peoples.

My interviewee described the agency’s purpose as obsolete. “There are times when institutions are too far gone to rehabilitate, and DFO’s raison d’etre has ceased to hold true.”

For everything there is a season, and “government organization has a shelf life,” the manager said.

DFO is not alone. Structural change and institutional reform, not merely Indigenous inclusion, are necessary for true representation of Indigenous people in all forms of governance. Writing in the book Pathways of Reconciliation, scholars Melanie Zurba and John Sinclair argue “structural forms of oppression” in state-sanctioned, top-down forms of governance “inhibit meaningful First Nations participation” and wield “Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession” — thus reproducing colonial violence and marginalization against Indigenous people while moving away from ecological resilience fulfilled only in tandem with Indigenous self-determination and agency in decision-making.

In addition to institutional reform, Indigenous self-determination requires capacity building made possible with funding and resources devoted to tangible improvements through bottom-up, grassroots co-management approaches within and between First Nations and Tribes. The Kuskokwim Intertribal Fish Commission is an example of successful co-management between Tribes and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Change Is Necessary

These approaches would serve the needs of both Chinook and people. In this case, there’s great potential for DFO and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to adopt co-management agreements similar to the Kuskokwim to reach holistic approaches to salmon management. My interviewee elaborated: “I’d suggest the best thing DFO and all those other orgs could do would be go to Indigenous scientists and managers and say: ‘You guys set up a system and tell us how we can feed into that, because we trust you.’ That’s how I do it.”

The unwillingness of settler governments to resign their power to Indigenous people has strained the potential of climate adaptation and species and habitat preservation. Complex, multiscale problems require complex solutions — discussion across geographical boundaries and multiple scales of formal and informal governance, a discourse around institutional reform, a sticky un-meshing and remeshing of knowledge systems, and an overall willingness for actors to learn, fail, re-learn, and think beyond self-imposed boundaries with enduring hope.

Current methods are simply not working. It’s time we look to those who view salmon survival through a holistic lens, those who are dependent on salmon both economically and culturally, and those Indigenous peoples who have successfully managed, protected, and cared for salmon for thousands of years. An active rather than passive representation of Indigenous voices and an incorporation of their worldviews into policy and management initiatives will not only establish a starting point to solve complex ecological problems such as climate change but also lead down a long-ignored path toward true reconciliation.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.