'More than the loss of a resource'
In few places has there been as dramatic a collapse of eulachon as in B.C.'s
Bella Coola Valley, where it has been culturally devastating

MARK HUME

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June 20, 2007

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BELLA COOLA , B.C. -- When the Nuxalk band gathers on the banks of the Bella
Coola River, it is usually to celebrate the blessings of nature. But this
spring, instead of singing to welcome back the salmon or casting eagle feathers
on the water in thanks, tribes from the central coast of British Columbia
gathered to hold a Feast of Shame and discuss a growing crisis.

At the gathering, elders from 10 B.C. bands, including the Nuxalk (pronounced
new-hawk), Kitasoo, Oweekeno and Haisla, spoke with anger and sadness about the
loss of a small, herring-like fish, known as eulachon, that until recently
returned in such numbers they turned the river black.

In 1995, when the last big run came in, there were millions of eulachon, so many
they spilled out onto the gravel bars in writhing waves. Since then, the river
has been nearly empty of fish.

"Every year we wait. Every year the seals, the sea gulls, the ducks, the swans,
the geese, they sit along the river waiting," said Oweekeno Chief Frank Johnson.

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There has been a coastwide collapse of eulachon over the past decade, but in few
places has it been as dramatic as in the Bella Coola Valley, where the run
disappeared almost overnight.

Rudolph Ryser, chair of the Center For World Indigenous Studies, a U.S.-based,
non-profit research and education organization, said the loss of eulachon is
culturally devastating for tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest. "It is
essential to the people of this part of the world ... the eulachon is essential
to life."

At the "crisis gathering," as it was called in posters tacked up on telephone
poles in Bella Coola, 400 kilometres north of Vancouver, elders told stories
about the days of plenty and issued a plea for help to government. They want
scientists to find out why the eulachon have gone from B.C.'s coast - and they
want a fisheries restoration project to bring back the runs of small, silver
fish prized for their rich oil.

Native leaders are discussing sending delegations to Victoria, Ottawa and the
United Nations to draw attention to their plight. Without eulachon, they feel a
culture that has survived 12,000 years is crumbling.

"It is very painful when you lose something that has been the backbone of your
people," said Percy Starr, hereditary chief of the Kitasoo band. "... It's about
more than the loss of a resource. It's about the loss of a culture. The loss of
eulachon is spiritual. ... This is the foundation of a people."

Looking back

Spencer Siwallace is 28, a newly elected Nuxalk chief who recently returned to
Bella Coola with a university degree in forestry and a fierce desire to change
things. He opened the gathering, telling of sitting by the river recently and
dreaming of a boy running to the water to get a bucket of eulachon for dinner.

"The river wasn't clear. ... It was black with eulachon. Dozens of families were
scooping eulachon with their bare hands. ... They looked so happy, so healthy,
so content.

"I opened my eyes and looked out at the barren river. There were no children
catching eulachon with their bare hands, no families working together. ... There
were no eulachon. The camps were all deserted. The stink houses and cooking
boxes were collapsed and overgrown. As I sat there I realized I had been looking
into the past.

"I was the boy sent down with the bucket to catch dinner," he said, before
lowering his head to sob as about 100 elders and chiefs looked on silent and
grim-faced.

They took turns then, passing a microphone around the gymnasium in the community
centre, trying to describe the magnitude of the damage. Gwen Pollard said she
was raised on eulachon oil, which was used in bread-making and eaten daily as a
dipping sauce, but now there is so little found in the village people guard it
like gold.

"It is a real big disaster," said Glenn Clellaman, who had just come in from
fishing the Bella Coola River for spring salmon. But because of high water, and
declining stocks, there were so few caught the Nuxalk could not serve salmon,
the traditional main course at feasts.

Mr. Clellaman said the riverbanks had once been "filled with small, little
houses. We called them stink boxes and that's where we fermented the eulachons.
You look there now and ... it's bare, eh. But you still see a little bit of the
remains of the boxes left and now it's overgrown and dying."

"We can no longer tolerate what we have been through," said Ross Neasloss, Chief
of Kitasoo from Klemtu, a small village on Swindle Island, north of Bella Coola.
He, like many others, blamed commercial fishing for reducing not only the stocks
of eulachon, but also salmon, herring, abalone and halibut.

"Our pantries are empty," he said.

Keystone species

Anthropologists and native-rights lawyers describe eulachon as a "cultural
keystone species" vital to the identity of native people.

When Alexander Mackenzie became the first European explorer to cross North
America over land to the Pacific in 1793, he followed the grease trail, a native
trade route used to get oil from the coast to east of the Rocky Mountains.

Early missionaries gave eulachon religious currency by noting it returned at
Easter, and some native bands referred to it as "the saviour fish," because it
ended months of winter hunger.

At the Feast of Shame - so named to reflect shame on the government - one
speaker recalled how everyone once ran from church to fish in their Sunday best
when the eulachon arrived.

Eulachon thrived until relatively recently and then, about a decade ago, began
to decline from California to Alaska.

Few rivers have had as stunning a drop as the Bella Coola, where a run of
several million fish fell to an estimated 1,200. Researchers netted only 50 this
year.

Megan Moody, a young Nuxalk woman working on her master's in the Fisheries
Centre at the University of British Columbia, said the Bella Coola run collapsed
in 1996, the same year the federal government opened a shrimp trawl fishery in
Queen Charlotte Sound.

Bella Coola is on the mainland at the head of a deep fjord that leads to Queen
Charlotte Sound. The shrimp trawl nets took an estimated 90 tonnes of eulachon
on the central coast that year. While the shrimp fishery was later closed in
Queen Charlotte Sound, it has continued in Bella Coola and Rivers Inlets.

Ms. Moody said the impact of the trawl fishery, climate change, increased
predation and alterations to river hydrology, caused by logging, are all
suspects in stock declines.

She said shrimp trawlers off the west coast of Vancouver Island are netting
eulachon as bycatch, leading to estimates there are thousands of tonnes of
juvenile fish at sea. But that doesn't square with the empty rivers. "Why are
they not coming back? What's going on here? Are these estimates incorrect?" she
asked.

"It's an enigma," said Doug Hay, a retired Fisheries and Oceans Canada
scientist.

The impact of the shrimp fishery isn't understood because eulachon, which have
no commercial value, haven't been studied enough, said Mr. Hay, who was
"shocked" to hear trawling is still allowed in inlets around Bella Coola.

Mr. Hay said his best advice for restoring eulachon runs is simple: "Make sure
they have good spawning habitat ... make sure they have good marine habitat and
... stop killing them at sea."

Asked what an eulachon recovery program might cost, Mr. Hay gave a rough
estimate of $650,000 annually to work on B.C.'s 13 eulachon rivers.

Krista Robertson, a Victoria-based lawyer who specializes in native-rights
cases, said tribes could have grounds for suing the federal government or
seeking a judicial review of the shrimp trawl fishery.

"Legal action is not the answer necessarily ... but being ready to litigate can
get you action," she said. "I don't think it would be hard to prove a profound
native dependence on eulachon."

Indeed, the courts may soon hear that argument. Kevin Doyle, a Victoria lawyer,
said in a recent e-mail that he has been instructed by the Komoyue band on
northern Vancouver Island to pursue legal action against the federal and
provincial governments for the loss of eulachon from traditional diets.

Human error

During a break in the gathering, Lance Nelson and his brother, Chris, who both
teach Nuxalk language and culture at the local school, walked to the banks of
the Bella Coola River to beat drums and sing.

Below where they chanted, the Nelson family stink house was slowly being
consumed by vegetation after nearly a decade of disuse. Inside the stooped
building were old, broken nets and unused storage jars.

"The reason we don't have eulachon in our river is clearly human error," Lance
Nelson said. "The river is our mother. She feeds us. ... Through prayer we may
get these gifts back."

Below him the empty Bella Coola River flowed past. "We used to fish for eulachon
right there," he said. "No more."

A EULACHON PRIMER

The fish

The eulachon is a small species of smelt that spawns in the lower reaches of
coastal rivers from northern California to Alaska. Immediately after spawning,
eulachon return to the sea.

When the eggs hatch, the tiny eulachon larvae are immediately washed downstream.
It is believed they rear in the estuary before migrating to the open Pacific.
They return to spawn after three years.

The runs

In British Columbia, eulachon have spawned in 33 different rivers, but have
regular runs in only 13. They favour rivers that drain glaciers or snowpacks and
that have spring freshets.

Nearly all eulachon runs have declined over the past 20 years, especially from
the mid-1990s. In B.C., stocks have crashed in the Fraser, Bella Coola, Stikine,
Skeena, Kitimat, Kitlope and other rivers. Only the Nass River, on the north
coast, maintains near-normal runs.

The Fraser River had the largest run in B.C., which supported a commercial
fishery from the 1870s until 1997, when it was closed over conservation
concerns. The Fraser run has been in decline since 1994.

The Columbia River, in Oregon, had the world's largest eulachon run, but it
declined in 1993. The oil

Eulachon are nearly 20 per cent oil by weight, so rich in content that a dried
fish can be lit, earning them the common name "candle fish." A three-step
process is used to extract the oil from eulachon.

In the first stage, the fish are stored in "stink boxes," where they are left to
decompose for one to two weeks. After that, they are transferred to small
cooking pots where they are slowly heated. After simmering several hours, the
contents are stirred to further break down the flesh of the fish.

When a layer of thick grease forms on the surface, it is skimmed off and
processed in a third step, in which it is boiled, repeatedly skimmed and then
passed through a fine filter. Traditionally, natives filtered the oil through
cedar baskets and stored it in wooden boxes.

NUXALK NOTES

The Nuxalk, who live in the coastal town of Bella Coola, B.C., are drawn from a
collection of several smaller coastal villages that were amalgamated in the
1920s.

When Alexander Mackenzie, the first European to cross North America overland,
arrived in 1793, he found a rich, powerful Nuxalk (pronounced new-hawk)
community near the mouth of the Bella Coola River. It was the biggest native
settlement he'd encountered and he named it Great Village.

Today, about 700 Nuxalk live in Bella Coola, where they still rely heavily on
fishing and hunting. The Nuxalk are not engaged in the treaty process in British
Columbia, arguing instead that they remain a sovereign nation with their own
traditional religion, language, land base and laws.

They speak a Coast Salish dialect known as Bella Coola and follow cultural
traditions that have been passed down through generations.

Among the feasts they still practise are the potlatch, an event in which clans
demonstrate their wealth by holding feasts at which they give away most of their
possessions.

Mark Hume

mhume@...


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