Archeologists tracing history of B.C. First Nation and its former bounties Canada

Submitted by coldrum on Monday, 10 August 2009 Page Views: 7376

Country: Canada Clams and oysters lie uneaten on the beach, made poisonous by the industrial encroachment a few miles up the beach in B.C.’s 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.

A handful of elders attend a community day planned by Simon Fraser University archeologists Dana Lepofsky and John Welch and their students. Welch and Lepofsky are here to help flesh out the oral history. 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.

As a boy, Bob helped weigh and sink cedar boughs and tree tops just below the low-tide mark so they would remain submerged. “We’d have it anchored out there and leave it maybe two nights and the eggs would pile up on it,” he recalled. “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.

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 latticework 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.

Everywhere the people went, fish traps were built and maintained, with similar design features repeated in far-flung locations, but adapted to local currents and conditions. Some traps were still in use as late as the 1950s.
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. “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.”

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.

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.

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 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,” Lepofsky said. The number of dwellings identified around the bays at Sliammon indicate a population much larger than what exists today, Lepofsky opined.

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 basedon oral tradition as those with the history and the expertise are lost before they can pass on what they know.

In addition to the archeology students working on the project are two young Tla’Amin: university students Lisa Wilson and Tanner Timothy, a descendant of Chief Tom Timothy.

Wilson spent her summers in Cowichan, B.C., as a child and didn’t learn as much of the traditional knowledge as she would have liked. 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.

For more, see the Ottawa Citizen.

Note: West Coast Canadian village shows traces of fishing technologies used in ancient times up to the recent past. Now dying because of pollution and marine die-off.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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