The North American Model is just one story of how wildlife conservation can be practiced. In part 2 of this mini-series we tell another: of restorative human–predator relationships and local self-determination.

We're bringing you a success story from the Great Bear Rainforest, and another articulation of how we can relate to wildlife — complete with its own set of guiding principles, naturally.

For musical credits, citations, and more, click here.

Click here for Part 1

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You are listening to season four of

Future Ecologies.

Well, I'll just get started then. I'm Adam.

Mendel.

In the last episode, we discussed the NAM —

short-hand for...

The North American model of wildlife

conservation.

And the NAM is?

Uh.. the NAM is... a set of principles that

guide policy in wildlife conservation in North America,

specifically, the US and Canada... A way that we think

about and allocate wilderness and wildlife, mostly for the

benefit of hunters.

Yeah, consumptive users.

Consumptive users.

Yeah. And so I would say it's a sort of

historical accounting, and also a proposal for wildlife

conservation in North America.

Yeah.

And can you remember any of the principles?

Oh, God... uh... Do I have to do them in order?

No.

Okay. I mean, the general gist of it is that

that wildlife shouldn't be commodified. And that the state

should have control over how it is managed. So taking it out of

the hands of the free market, and putting it in the hands of

the state, in order to make sure that populations are managed,

access is managed, and perverse financial incentives don't cause

humans to crash wildlife populations. Is that more or

less it?

I think that's a really good recapitulation.

Thank you.

And then there's a couple other bits, right, which

are the wildlife are international resources, right.

And that science —

Capital S science is the way that we make

these decisions, not business interests, not spirituality, not

anything else.

That's right. And that, ideally, this system is

democratically available to all citizens of good standing in

North America — that we can all access wildlife as a resource.

Right.

Resource being the key word.

And commonly held!

A public trust resource. So we discussed some critiques of this

model, in the last episode, from the perspective of its

shortcomings around large carnivore conservation. Also,

its lack of inclusivity, both socially and financially, right.

We also discuss some of its successes, including the

billions of dollars raised for wildlife conservation by

institutions associated with the model, and the recovery of many

formerly rare species that are now common.

Specifically ones that we like to eat.

Specifically ones that we'd like to eat.

The fact that wildlife conservation could

intrude upon the religious, political, and economic forces

that gave rise to the United States of America remains, for

me, a small miracle... that the model, in quotation marks,

helped gave rise to.

You remember Shane Mahoney, right?

Yes

He literally co wrote the book on the model. And

he's been a proponent for over two decades now, going back to

when Dr. Valerius Geist first articulated the principles. So

today, we're gonna get into some issues that we didn't have time

to address in the last episode. Because, frankly, they're

enormous. They're big issues. And the first one is the erasure

of Indigenous peoples from the history that the model is

describing and the principles that it articulates, which

mirrors the settler colonial enterprise's attempt as a whole

to erase Indigenous people from the continent.

Hmmm.

It's part and parcel.

What can you say about this history? I mean, you

can say it was repeated all over the place all over the world and

different times and categories. But the truth of the matter is,

it was brutal, fiendish and simply hard to imagine, for most

of us today. And what's even harder to imagine, of course, is

that we have manifestations of those parameters and attitudes

and feelings that are repeated up until the present time.

Yeah, I'll cosign that. There's subtle and

not so subtle echoes of colonization everywhere.

Yeah, it's an ongoing process. And I think

we've discussed it a lot on Future Ecologies. We're going to

discuss it today. Not in the negative but from this

perspective of a bright spot. And that bright spot is right

here in coastal British Columbia. So with that, I have

two introductions for you.

Yeah, my name is Muq'vas Glaw, which means

White Bear in my language. My other name is Doug Neasloss. I

work as the elected chief as well as the stewardship director

for the Kitasoo Xai'xais nation on the central coast of BC.

And I'm Kyle Artelle. I live in W̓u̓íƛ̓itx̌v

Haíɫzaqv or Haíɫzaqv / Heiltsuk territory, just south

of Kitasoo Xai'xais territory where Doug is today. I'm of

European descent. I'm an adjunct assistant professor at the

University of Victoria and a biologist with Raincoast

Conservation foundation.

So Heiltsuk and Kitasoo Xai'xais territory is

part of what is now popularly known as the Great Bear

Rainforest. You heard of it?

I have heard of the Great Bear Rainforest.

That's basically like, pretty much all of coastal BC north of

Vancouver Island.

Yeah. And Doug lives in the community of

Klemtu.

Oh, yeah, Klemtu is a small community on

the central coast. It's home to about 350 people, we have two

different nations that live here. And we're surrounded by

some massive fjords out to the east where all the grizzly bears

are, and islands on the outside where the Kitasoo people are

from. And that's where we get some of the largest populations

of spirit bears.

I've heard of spirit bears. What are they

exactly?

Yeah, Spirit bears are black bears with a rare

recessive allele that gives them a white coat. So they kind of

look like miniature polar bears. They only occur in this part of

the world, mostly just on a few islands. But black bears and

spirit bears aren't the only bears out there. The Great Bear

Rainforest is also home to the grizzly bear — who, even as the

apex predator of the system, are vulnerable to hunting by people.

So I used to be a bear guide. I started up an

ecotourism operation here in my community. I had some guests

from all around the world. And my job was to go and take them

and show them the beauty of the culture and the wildlife and the

territory. You know, we were trying to build a thriving

business in our backyard. And this must have been around 2004.

I just remember, we saw something in the water, it

looked like maybe it was a dead seal. We could just see

something dark. And so we all walked over. It was the first

time I found a dead grizzly bear and his head was chopped off,

his fur was gone. Someone had shot it for sport. That's what I

learned more about trophy hunting, and there was the

industry where people come and shoot something for a sport. And

I just thought that violated everything we were taught and

our culture — to have respect. Violates our values. Violates

everything we believe in. So that totally transformed my

life, and set me on a path to try and do something about it.

What Doug did in response to this experience —

that's what today's episode is all about. It's an incredible

success story that I think can show us another way to think

about wildlife conservation. So from Future Ecologies, this is

Bearly Legal.

Oh my god... [laughs] I can't believe you've

done this. That title... is unbearable.

Just bear with me okay.

Nooo!

Broadcasting from the unseeded shared and

asserted territories of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum

Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples.

This is Future Ecologies — exploring the shape of our world

through ecology, design and sound.

All right, so last episode, we were back in the

late 1800s. This episode we are back in the early 2000s. We have

this regulated trophy hunt of grizzly bears in British

Columbia at the time. By and large, it seems like this is

something that the NAM does accommodate and support. But for

Doug, something about all of this felt wrong.

At that time the province had a legal

obligation to protect grizzly bear habitat. And I remember the

province sent over these grizzly bear habitat maps, and they were

missing all the islands. There wasn't one island a part of

their population for grizzly bears. And so as a bear guide

for over 10 years, I phoned the province and I said "you guys

are missing big chunks of data — there's grizzly bears all over

the islands." They said "What evidence do you have?" And I

said "Oh, I've got video, I have photo, I have GPS" I said "what

do you guys want? I'll send it over." They said "you know Doug,

some people don't know the difference between a grizzly

bear and a black bear." Well, you know, I'd been working with

bears for at that point, probably 15 years because I used

to be a creek walker for salmon as well. They basically said

"you're not a scientist, you're not a biologist, you can't be

making this sort of allegations."

Maybe that shouldn't be as shocking as it

is... but it is.

Yeah, we're kind of already seeing where

principle 6 of the NAM, which is that science should direct

wildlife management.

It's whose science.

Right. it can be weaponized to discredit local

and Indigenous knowledge.

Doug doesn't only know the difference between a

black and a grizzly bear, but he knows them individually. That's

John, and that's Frank or whatever. And Frank is Sam's

son, or whatnot. And so this idea that the response would be,

you know, "you're not a scientist, so you're probably

seeing black bears" is absurd, because it wasn't just that he

saw a grizzly bear, he probably knew which grizzly bear that

was. Science is supposed to be transparent, science is supposed

to be open. So when sort of the claim of science is used as a

blunt instrument, politically, of course, it runs against

respectful conduct with anyone. But it also goes against sort of

the tenets of science itself.

This was a red flag for Doug — for how grizzly

bear populations and this grizzly bear hunt in particular

were being managed in the province. And his counterparts

in the neighboring Central Coast First Nations had seen some red

flags of their own. So in 2012, the Kitasoo Xai'xais, Heiltsuk,

Wuikinuxv, and Nuxalk nations came together to issue a

collective ban on grizzly bear hunting in their territories.

We launched a press release, and we said

"Trophy hunting is banned based on Indigenous law. Don't waste

your money coming here to hunt. Because we'll do something about

it — we'll see you on the water." And it was really some

of the first times I've seen people ban something based on

Indigenous laws.

In so doing, they immediately run afoul of several

principles of the North American model, especially those that

stipulate that the capital S state, in this case, the

Canadian state has the authority over managing and allocating

wildlife. And of course, they run afoul of the state's

interpretation of its own authority.

It ruffled a lot of feathers: we had death

threats, people were very upset about it. And some people were

confused about it. Some people said "the Indians just want the

money for themselves." We try to explain to people it wasn't

about Indigenous or non Indigenous, it was about how we

treat wildlife, it was about bears. So when we launched our

ban on the bear hunt, we had a response from the province and

they said First Nations don't have the authority to issue such

a ban. Of course, on the First Nations side, we think we do.

We've always had a stewardship responsibility to take care of

our territory, take care of wildlife.

The province came out with their predictable response. They said

the hunt is based on sound science, they can take a certain

percentage of the population without affecting the overall

population, even though they don't do any research.

And so to address this issue, Doug and the Kitasoo

Xai'xais, along with the other member nations of the newly

formed Central Coast bear working group, started working

with Kyle and other scientists, with the support of Raincoast

and the David Suzuki foundation, to really dig into the science

that the province was using to justify the grizzly bear hunt.

The province had long maintained "say what you

will about the ethics of the hunt. It's based in science,

it's based in science." And so we took a look at the science

underpinning the hunt. And what we found pretty quickly, when we

were examining how the hunt was administered is that there was

quite a bit of uncertainty. So for example, it isn't known with

high certainty how many bears there even are — here or

anywhere in the province. It isn't known how many bears are

poached. It's known that there's a high poaching rate, but it's

not known exactly how much that is. And it isn't known how fast

populations grow, which is a really important thing to know

when you're when you're figuring out how many you can sustainably

hunt from any population without causing the population to

decline.

Kyle says that this lack of scientific rigor on

the part of the management authority isn't limited to the

Great Bear Rainforest, not by a longshot.

We did a review of the claim of the model that

science is the proper tool to discharge policy, which is a

great way to describe it — discharg is right in that name,

right? I mean, the science is coming right down a barrel. But

anyways, we were looking across all states and provinces in

Canada in the US, to look for some of what you might expect to

see in management that's truly science based. So just looking

at that particular tenant, and found that by and large things

that you might expect, such as clear objectives, such as

transparency in what you're doing, and evidence — whether

you're using evidence — we looked to see whether these

particular attributes were evident from hunt management

plans. And we looked at over 1000 hunt management plans from

across these jurisdictions and found that again, by and large,

these were lacking. In fact, in most cases, most of the criteria

we were looking for were lacking.

So coming back to the Great Bear Rainforest, Kyle

and Doug and their team released their findings.

So the take-home message to that was basically,

there's a lot of risk currently to hunted bears because of

uncertainty and population sizes, poaching rates, and

growth rates. But what we found though, is you could set quotas

that take into account all of those uncertainties and protect

against overharvest,

Which, according to their research, would require

the reduction of the existing grizzly bear quotas. by 83%

And a full third of the province, you could not

have any hunt at all — the uncertainty was just too high to

have any certainty you aren't killing too many bears.

So that assessment came out in 2013, and...

The province actually responded by increasing

quotas not decreasing them.

What?

And then they said "the trophy hunt was based

on economics. Trophy hunting is an important part of British

Columbia's economy." And they were trying to say it was worth

$350 million to the province of British Columbia. That was all

animals that was every animal. So we asked them, well, what are

bears worth in the Great Bear Rainforest? And they couldn't

tell us that.

...It's based on economics, but we have no idea

what those economics actually are...

I think the province was saying the science

is good and there's economic benefits. And you know, Kyle and

Doug and their team had discredited that first argument.

And now, they moved on to the second argument. That second

argument is kind of another core idea of the North American model

that the revenues from hunting provide economic benefits to

communities and ecosystems, right?

Sure.

So Doug and the Kitasoo Xai'xais, they get a

team from Stanford University's Center for Responsible Travel to

do an economic analysis of the grizzly bear hunt.

And they blew the government numbers out of

the water, they basically said that the government actually

spends more money managing the hunt than they actually make on

the hunt; That tourism is way more valuable, bringing in $15.2

million, compared to the $1.1 million from the trophy hunt and

the resident hunt combined. So they had no economic argument to

stand on

Their ecological science found lacking, their

economic argument falsified. You have to look at this thing, and

you have to think, like, why are they so dug in? Presumably,

because policymakers are attached to the North American

wildlife model as being the thing which supports

conservation.

Yeah, that could be one reason. It's hard to get

inside the minds of policymakers, per se. But it's

clear that that cultural attachment to hunting being a

part of our conservation model, and that, like, species that

aren't hunted are somehow less conserved is in there, right?

It's in the mix. And here's Doug and Kyle, they're essentially

hacking away at the economic and scientific justifications for

the hunting of grizzly bears in the province. And it's not clear

that there's any hunting benefit to conserving this species,

unless you count reduced interactions between bears and

the general public, which is kind of a circular argument. So

all you're really left with are kind of the political and

cultural justifications that we were discussing. And Doug wasn't

having any of those.

I mean, wildlife is an extremely

To me, the bear hunt issue for us was larger than bears. Of

important part of our culture. It's in our songs and our

dances, in our stories and our clan systems. So wildlife are

very much ingrained in who we are. And we have a lot of

course, we have a lot of respect for bears, but it was also about

respect, we have relationships with wildlife. That's something

we want to be able to share. But first nations have never had an

opportunity to have a say in wildlife management. Other

Indigenous law.

governments like the provincial and federal governments develop

While it took a number of years, public pressure to end the hunt

their rules and regulations, and they leave us out. Now if you

take something like the Wildlife Act, it was developed in the

late 1800s by hunters for hunters, with very little

conservation mandate and no First Nations input. And that's

still true for 2022.

grew, and eventually the new BC NDP government ended the hunting

of grizzly bears across the province, categorically, in 2017

— including in the Great Bear Rainforest, where of course the

Central Coast First Nations had already banned it in 2012.

We hereby second this ban.

Yes, it took them a while, but they came around.

And Doug says that there's been a huge improvement, especially

for the tourism industry, which allows Kitasoo Xai'xais to offer

high quality employment to people of all ages and genders,

and brings in about $2.5 million in annual revenue for his small

community.

I've seen a huge change in my lifetime. I

remember when I first started guiding when trophy hunting was

big, and all these trophy hunters would come and blast all

the bears. So we would roll in with our little tourism

operation, and you will see the bum of a bear running away. They

associated boats with hunting. So you would be very lucky if

you can get a glimpse of a bear before it ran off. You can sit

there and watch a bear for hours now. It's been night and day.

That's so sweet. It's so amazing that those

animals can be re habituated so quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah. What difference it makes when we make

an honest attempt to coexist.

And, you know, I guess what seems clear is that

the population of bears, at least at this point has not

suffered for lack of hunting. Also, Doug told me that the end

of the hunt is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's

going on in wildlife management across the territories of the

Central Coast First Nations,

Each one of our communities have set up a

stewardship office. It's dedicated to stewardship, which

is pretty cool. So we are driving everything from the land

use planning to marine use planning, we're driving science,

we have watchmen programs, we have language programs, we're

building capacity within our communities to drive the

science. We're doing everything from rockfish research to sea

cucumber research, mountain goat research, bear research, salmon

research. So we are investing a lot of time and effort into

stewardship and sustainability.

And all of this research, and revival of

traditional knowledge, and investment and proactive

management, Kyle says that it's really paying off.

Looking at grizzly bear stewardship among Central

Coast First Nations is a really incredible example of

international collaboration among Wuikinuxv, Kitasoo

Xai'xais, Heiltsuk, and nations coming together for this huge

research project. On top of the things that we've already talked

about, in Nuxalk nation (so Bella Coola Valley), there's

this amazing bright spot for bear human coexistence. I've

spent a lot of time in the literature looking at approaches

to dealing with bear human conflict. And I haven't come

across such an amazing, holistic, successful approach to

dealing with that conflict with bears anywhere else. When bears

come into people's yards in the Bella Coola Valley, Jay Moody

and his Bear Safe group, they'll go — they'll address all the

attractants, you know, if there's fish guts, they'll take

them out and they'll go compost them. If there's a fruit tree,

they'll put an electric fence around it. They'll talk with the

landowners and explain what's happening, and work with them to

come up with a solution. They'll put on a Nuxalk radio so that it

sounds like someone's home. If a fish has been stolen, you know,

if an elder gets a fish stolen by a bear as part of the

conflict, they'll work to replace that fish. Like, they

address this whole conflict from all these different dimensions.

And the bears there do not reoffend. When Bear Safe crew

has gone there and dealt with a bear conflict in someone's yard.

The bears don't come back. It's addressed.

I love this like restorative justice angle for

bear-human interactions, right? Like when things go wrong, we

can fix them.

That's such an interesting way to put it. It is

kind of like a restorative justice framework where the end

point of the process is not one of the parties to the conflict

is dead.

Right, yeah. It's not punitive.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe

it. And if you remember back to the last episode, where we're

talking with Mark Elbroch about the challenges faced by people

who are trying to conserve mountain lions, these are

exactly the kinds of solutions and cultural changes that I

think he was talking about, that could be implemented to address

those kinds of conflicts as well. And just so there's no

misunderstanding here, the folks up in the Great Bear Rainforest,

They're not against hunting, not by a longshot.

Absolutely. I mean, this isn't an anti-hunting

sentiment, by any stretch of the imagination. I think that

there's probably more wild protein consumed here than in

most places in North America. So it's not an anti-hunting thing.

But the approach to taking care of wildlife here, of other

species, was just so much... so much more suited to place, so

much better suited to the wildlife. Because what has

existed here for millennia, has worked for millennia.

So what we can learn from their approach after

the break.

Hey, folks, I want to level with you. A lot of

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Okay, back to the show.

And we are back.

We're back!

Yep. I'm Adam.

Mendel.

And this is Future Ecologies, where we do the bear

minimum to keep you informed about what's going on in the

more than human world.

That's enough. That is the bear maximum of

puns.

Today, we're learning from folks up in the

Great Bear Rainforest, about new approaches to managing wildlife

resources.

Resources in air quotes.

Yeah, to decolonize some of that language

that I think, you know, we might associate with the North

American model, how about how to better reestablish relationships

with our more than human kin? Anyway, two different ways of

saying the same thing.

More life for more things

Right. Kyle and Doug and their colleagues have

actually written up their own set of seven principles for how

to do this. It's set up in sort of opposition to the NAM, but

Kyle says it's not meant to be a prescriptive model.

What we are not doing here is dictating how

communities should interact with wildlife, or how Indigenous

nations should interact with wildlife. Folks are going to

know what's best for their own communities, what's best for

their own nations. And there's governance systems that have

existed for millennia that are quite well adapted to governing

their ecosystem. So where this model comes in is more giving

tenets of how decolonial governance contrasts to the more

colonial model such as a North American model. And it also

provides guidance on those wishing to support decolonized

management.

And why you might ask...

Why?

— is it specifically a decolonial model?

Why is it specifically a decolonial model?

You're so well behaved.

I think one of the problems with the North American

model is that it does seek to dictate a one-size-fits-all

approach to interacting with wildlife that is centralized and

led by the state, you know, whether that's a province in

Canada or a state in the States. Sovereignty, rights and title,

the jurisdiction of communities and nations is completely

inseparable from conservation writ large. So you can't even

talk about conservation, or stewardship, or land use without

addressing whose land is it in the first place? In Canada and

across North America, right, all of these states and provinces

have been imposed on top of Indigenous territories.

Well put.

And so the fundamental argument is that the

NAM, by virtue of its erasure of Indigenous peoples, basically

disqualifies itself. It can't be amended.

It's not about slightly evolving the North

so how do we take this centralized approach

and tweak it here and there in order to better incorporate

various perspectives, or whatnot. But that really to have

an appropriate approach to governance, it's really about

Doug knows best what what works well for Kitasoo Xai'xais,

right? The province doesn't, just just to put that bluntly.

The province could potentially support that work, but that that

would be a very different model if the province was saying "Hey,

Doug, how can we help what's happening?"

Hmmm. Okay, enough stalling. You said you

have seven new principles.

Yep.

Let's hear them.

Sure. The nice thing is I don't really have to

explain them because they're kind of self explanatory. In the

paper that they recently published on this new model,

they come with some really nice illustrations.

Stewardship of resources is inseparable from

the rights title, responsibilities,

self-determination, and sovereignty of Indigenous

peoples.

Bam, there it is.

Adam HugginsNumber two:

practitioners steward

Adam HugginsNumber two:

interconnections among species, people and their environments.

Okay, so it's not each individualized group of

animals or plants. It's how they're connected.

Yeah. Which is sort of the definition of

ecology. I guess. We're stewarding ecologies instead of

species.

Right.

Adam HugginsPrinciple three:

all available knowledge sources

Adam HugginsPrinciple three:

are considered and respected.

Not just capital S science.

Adam HugginsPrinciple four:

environmental stewardship is

Adam HugginsPrinciple four:

placed-based, centered on communities, with collaborations

Adam HugginsPrinciple four:

with other governments as appropriate. The state is a

Adam HugginsPrinciple four:

supporting actor to the local communities, if desired.

If.

Adam HugginsPrinciple five:

practices reflect, support,

Adam HugginsPrinciple five:

and/or are led by local governance structures and legal

Adam HugginsPrinciple five:

systems. So total relocalization of governance here.

practices reflect local values and worldviews.

governance recognizes respects and

addresses the cultural importance of species and

places.

So what's your reaction to these principles? In comparison to the

seven principles of the NAM.

I find it a lot easier to relate to these

principles — that so much about ecology is so context specific.

And of course, it feels self evident that the people who have

the most insight into how to negotiate those relationships

effectively are people who have been on that land for a long

time. Maybe it's not up to us to imbue that authority, but we can

at least acknowledge it. And we can ask the state to acknowledge

it as well, right?

Yeah. And Kyle actually, like, speaks directly

to that, in talking about this model that they've proposed

here. Right, it puts a lot of emphasis on local

self-determination. I guess the devil's advocate argument would

be like, if you totally give control over to local

communities that could result in really bad outcomes for wildlife

in some places, right? And Kyle says, you know, either way,

that's the point.

Certainly, there's millennia, again, of evidence

that the governance systems in place, before centralized

industrial colonial systems were imposed, better sustained people

and ecosystems alike. But that said, it's critical to realize

that people's rights are not contingent on getting a certain

outcome that we want. So we can't say "yes, you know,

Indigenous peoples have the right to govern their own

resources, as long as they do it the way that I think they

should." Eco-colonialism is the term that's given for that, when

you have conservation groups that are happy to support

Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous rights, as long as

nations make decisions that these outside people think are

appropriate. So we try to make very clear, this isn't an end to

a means. It's not okay, support Indigenous authority, and

Indigenous sovereignty, rights, title, because you'll get more

hectares of land protected. That's a really damaging

viewpoint, right? That Indigenous rights, title, you

know, human rights are pre existing and stand alone, and

the requirement to uphold those rights is not contingent on

anything else.

It's such an important point, like if your

ally ship, and your support for indigenous sovereignty, is

conditional on the outcome that you want, or the cars that you

personally support. It's not really about indigenous

sovereignty. You're just treating that as a vehicle to

get what you want?

Yeah, I think Kyle makes that point. And I think it

emphasizes that we have a lot of evidence that Indigenous

knowledge has been extremely successful. Much more so than I

think anyone can make an argument for the more recent and

short-lived models that we have today.

Right.

So obviously, to these two settlers with this

podcast, this seems like an important foundation for moving

forward. But that perspective might be hard to swallow,

especially for some non-Indigenous communities that

have lived off the land for generations. Or for some

conservation groups who are deeply invested in the democracy

of consumptive users.

How that is generally interpreted on the

ground is that all British Columbians have access to all

British Columbian wildlife. And that, of course, erases

indigenous sovereignty of their own territories.

So democracy of hunting, maybe. But then again,

maybe not. Under the decolonial approach, it would depend on the

local community.

I don't know. It's ridiculous to me to think

that like, oh, yeah, I have the same claim to hunt an elk in the

Peace as someone who lives up there.

Yeah. But I've spent some time scrolling

through hunting forums. It's clear that many non-Indigenous

hunters think that Indigenous people already get privileged

access to wildlife, and that's against the principles of the

NAM. Ideally, everybody should be equal in the North American

model universe. It's true that in many jurisdictions, there are

regulations that Indigenous peoples are exempted from. But

the big picture, as we discussed in the last episode, is that

what we know about the depletion of wildlife populations across

North America is that that came largely from the result of

market commodification of wild animals in settler colonial

society.

Right.

And this depletion we kind of hinted at that in the

last episode, but it had catastrophic effects on

Indigenous lifeways and economies — well documented.

Those lifeways in economies were based in large part on wild

animals. Meanwhile, Indigenous people are left out of the

conservation movement. And as hunting and fishing become more

regulated, their traditional harvesting activities on the

land were often criminalized. You know, from Doug's

perspective, his community is just fighting for a small piece

of what used to be the lifeblood of his nation.

I'll give you an example. I've been working on

eight years on a crab file. There was 56 Crowd bays in my

territory. And the commercial and the recreational industry

had access to 100% of it. So my community is trying to say

"well, listen, by the time our small boats can get out there,

there's nothing left. Because the commercial guys will come in

and set their 400 traps, let them soak for 18 days. The

recreational guys, which no one keeps a tab on — so that could

be 50 boats, or they could be 1500 boats. So by the time we

get up there, yeah, there's no crab." We've had to prove that

was no crab, spending $100,000s on research. And I remember one

of the comments from one of the industry folks, they said "if

the First Nations get one crab area, we're gonna protest". I

thought, wow, we're sitting here trying to fight for a few little

bays for ourselves, to feed our community, to make sure that

people have food here.

That isn't an idle threat, right? You might

remember a recent example of this kind of conflict in 2020,

around the lobster fishery in Mi'kmaq territory, Nova Scotia.

In that case, non-Indigenous lobster fishers and community

members reacted threateningly, and in some cases violently, to

a First Nation launching a small, sustainable, offseason

fishery.

Good evening and thank you for joining us.

There is a disturbing development in the escalating

violence of an Indigenous lobster fishery in Nova Scotia

Last night, 200 non-Indigenous commercial

fishermen gathered outside a lobster pound. This Indigenous

fisherman says he barricaded himself inside.

They said they won't let me leave unless

they have my lobsters.

A lobster pound being used by Mi'kmaq

fishers has been completely destroyed by fire. This is all

that's left of the facility.

A supreme court ruling 21 years ago upheld

Indigenous fishers right to earn a so-called "moderate

livelihood" outside of regular seasons,

but no rules were established as to how that

should be implemented. That's led to standoffs on the warf for

weeks.

With each violent episode, calls for peace

become more urgent. Investigations continue into a

slew of other incidents, including this — the most

troubling episode yet.

The fundamental disagreement is over who has the

authority to determine access to wildlife, right? The NAM would

say that the state does. And the decolonial model would put that

power in local control. And in many cases, this would vest it

in indigenous communities. So for Doug, going along with the

NAM is just no longer acceptable.

Yeah, I just see so many flaws in this model

of management. There's a lack of science, there's a lack of

management plans, there's a lack of enforcement agencies, there's

a lack of First Nations input. If you have people in Victoria

or Nanaimo that manage our wildlife, people that have never

been here, never stepped foot in our territory. They'll sit there

and allocate the wildlife to all these different user groups with

zero information.

This is one of the essential things that has

led to revolution in the past, right, this idea that the people

making decisions about how you live your life have no point of

contact with that. There's no representation within your

community. There's no power invested in those places — it's

all exported. If that's threatening your ability to

eat... that's like a critical issue, and nothing else really

matters. And that's come to a head before. I wonder if we can

negotiate that more gently?

Well, I mean, that's why we have this

decolonial model that Kyle and Doug and their colleagues have

articulated, that basically says, you know, the North

American model, we need to completely throw this out. Maybe

it worked for some species, and for some people for some amount

of time, but it's no longer an appropriate or acceptable way to

manage our relationships with the more-than-human world, and

probably never was. And reading this, I can see that influence

of living in a small rural community, and what that kind of

intimate relationship with nature does to you, you know,

does to a culture. And you know who else grew up in a small

rural community?

Who?

Shane. Shane Mahoney. He grew up in rural

Newfoundland.

I know what rural people come to know about

things. I saw it, I grew up with it. And that was over

generations going back 300 or 400 years.

And this perspective gives him a lot of

respect for local and traditional knowledge.

It's easy for me to imagine, as a result of my

experience, what 6000 years of knowledge means, what 12,000

years of knowledge, or 15,000 years of knowledge.

That perspective also means that he too would

like to see local communities have more say over how wildlife

is managed.

I would love to see local, rural, Newfoundland

communities have more say over resources. I argued when I was

in government that we ought to give isolated communities in

particular land to manage for food production, because we know

how to grow snowshoe hare and we know how to grow moose.

Snowshoe and moose? Like, moose the animal?

We can grow moose? Cool. What's snowshoe?

Snowshoe hares.

They're weed species: we can grow them, we

can create explosions in them. So I've long been in favor of

giving local people more say.

And if it sounds like Shane is hungry, it's

because he is, in a way. He feels strongly that food can be

at the center of resolving some of these disagreements among

like-minded people. And in some ways, I think it's actually a

bit of a departure from the NAM, because the North American model

is based on this system of regulated fair chase and

sportsmanlike hunting. This form of hunting has more or less

eliminated market hunting, but it also marginalized subsistence

hunting and the economies of Indigenous and rural people. If

you look at the NAM from the perspective of somebody hunting

for food to feed their family or community, then why the hell

would you care about sportsmanship or fair chase?

You're just trying to eat — and the Teddy Roosevelt's of the

world are telling you that, you know you're doing it wrong. And

by the way, they think that they deserve the same access to your

food sources as you do — for their sport. So, Shane, with his

company Conservation Bisions, has started something called the

Wild Harvest Initiative,

The Wild Harvest Initiative was an attempt to

transcend the differences amongst people by finding a

common language that we could all speak and we all care about.

That wasn't science. And it wasn't climate change. I needed

something much, much more fundamental to bridge this

dialogue. That's food. Natural food, sustainable food, healthy

food, and also foods that you touch — that you have a personal

investment in. Whether that's growing vegetables, picking your

own berries, planting your own meat, raising your own chickens.

This is real. And I wanted to convince people that the

sustainable use of wild foods is not a sideshow. It involves

billions of people, if you include world fisheries, for

example. And if we thought about landscapes primarily as food

provisioning systems — by we, I mean society — it would

fundamentally change almost everything.

So what is he proposing?

Well, right now, he's working with states and

provinces to try to figure out just exactly how much wild food

is being harvested and consumed by families in North America,

because nobody really knows. He wouldn't share any numbers with

me just yet, because he's working on a long time sample.

But he says it's a whole lot.

I will tell you that there literally are

billions of meals being provided. And you have some idea

then, about what this is worth.

And once he figures out how much food is

being provided, right, how much wild food people are eating, and

their day to day lives, he has some questions.

What would happen if we stopped these activities?

What will be the ecological cost of replacing all that wild food?

And secondly, to ask the question, Well, is it possible

for us to very substantively increase the production of wild

foods?

I think that this last question is really

interesting. And I think it's something that Kyle and Doug

would also see a lot of value in because of the importance of

wild, traditional food to coastal communities.

I want to open people's eyes to these kinds of

possibilities. Because, in my view, while we can't ever assume

that we can feed the world only on what is produced in the wild

any longer, I think we could do a much better job of that at a

local, regional, and even at national and international

levels, if we really tried. And I'm interested in really trying,

because as somebody who values his own wild foods a great deal,

and who grew up in a culture where that was extremely

important, I also know how it changes people's views, how it

shapes people's views if they are providing for themselves in

a direct way.

One of the changes that he brought to my attention

that's really stuck with me is that we're much more likely to

share wild food.

Whether it's berries for our grandmother's

pie, or whether it's a moose we harvest for our own meat, we are

compelled to share. We are not compelled to share the foods we

buy. So this tells us something about the profound nature of

this.

If I'm harvesting wild food, I'm so much more

likely to want to share it with other people, or to enjoy it

with other people. And I've had I've had so much of that kind of

food shared with me, in a way that with store bought food,

it's just not the same.

And it took me a while to realize this, but for Shane,

while he does care deeply about wildlife, you know, he's

dedicated his career to it, he also cares just as much about

local human cultures and his own community.

You take rural Newfoundlanders, out of their

fishing, bird hunting, moose hunting, seal, hunting context.

and even if they live on the same island, they're not the

same.

So I'm sitting there talking to Shane, and I'm

thinking about how I'm having this kind of two-way

conversation with people who are living on opposite coasts of

this huge country that we call Canada. You've got Shane in

Newfoundland, Doug in Klemtu, Kyle in Bella Bella, and me over

here on Galiano. And we're all just people living in these

small rural island communities, who want to preserve the ability

to live alongside wild animals, and, you know, occasionally to

eat them. All the rest of this stuff about the NAM, it's...

it's just kind of in the way, in some ways. Like, I don't want to

gloss over the disagreements in this episode. If you put all of

the folks we've interviewed in a room together, I'm certain that

there would be some disagreements, and certainly

different approaches. Some of those differences might be truly

substantial, or even foundational, some of them might

be just in terms of the way things are articulated — which

audience they're speaking to. I don't want to gloss over those

disagreements. But everyone we've spoken to here loves and

values the more-than-human world, and wants a place for

human beings within it. And so what I'm going to do for the end

of this episode is just to cede the floor to these three people,

and give them the closing thoughts. Because I think you've

heard enough of mine

Works for me.

Sometimes in wildlife research, it becomes a

real bean counting exercise, you know: How many animals are there

on the landscape? How fast is the population growing? How fast

is it shrinking? And this is an important dimension for sure.

But I think that sometimes when we only look at populations as

numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, we kind of lose perspective of

the fact that these are actually individuals on the landscape —

that are family units, that have lives. When we think about

things like the North American model, or when we think about

conservation in general, that we recognize that is one story, but

there's 1000s out there. And there's very different ways of

looking at things. There's very different ways of governing

things. And I think that the more that we can recognize that

and the more that we can support and uphold people on the ground,

who have these much deeper relationships with places and

with species, and who have the right to govern their own lands

and territories. I think the benefits will be for all.

So I've long been in favor of giving local people

more say, but there is an inherent challenge. And it is

true everywhere. Communities need capacity. Conservation is

an incredibly complicated piece of business: economics,

politics, culture, science, local knowledge, ecology,

climate change. I mean, instead of being the simplest thing,

which some people seem to talk about it like it is it's the

most complicated adventure in life.

We learn a lot just from watching wildlife, you

know, and wildlife have given us so much. We learned how to

survive, and in our stories it's the bears that taught us how to

survive — what roots to eat, what berries to eat, how to eat

the salmon. Things like bears, I think have a really important

service that they offer their aerating the soil so that more

nutrients can grow, so you get productive estuaries. They're

eating the salmon, they're taking it into the woods, and

that salmon is decomposing into the soil, into the roots of the

tree where you're getting nitrogen 15 that's producing

massive old growth forests. And so my people always say

everything is connected. And it is. People say you can't talk

about bears without talking about salmon. Because if you

remove the salmon, you remove the bear. If you remove the

bear, you remove the forest. And so everything's connected. My

elders always say to me "you can develop all the management plans

you want. You can draw a circle on a map, but it doesn't protect

anything." They said "People do. So get your own people out there

and protect it."

I'll leave you with one small anecdote. I met a

man his name was Louis Melvin. 40 years older than I was, and

he was a big fish. Big fish killer, as we say here. Like a

lot of rural Newfoundland fishermen, he hated whales. And

he hated whales, because the whales, particularly the big

whales, the humpbacks, they got in his cod trap, of course. And

when they got in, they went into a frenzy, and couldn't get out,

and they tore it to pieces. And these are massive things. You

need three to four boats to set them out. And so he would lose

the season. So he really hated whales. After he finally gave up

fishing, he was 78/79. That's when he came out of an open

boat. I caught him down at the end of his garden, one day in

June. We have schools of fish that come in here called capelin

that come in in massive numbers. And the whales and the fish come

in behind them, feeding on them and so on. And the whales will

come in right next to the beaches, and they'll turn on

their sides to fit as much of these fish in, and then blow

them through their baleen plates. Anyway, Louis was down

there. He was fairly deaf at that time. And I hit him and

said "What are you doing, Louis?"

He said "I'm watching the whales." I said "I thought you

didn't like whales, Louis." And he looked at me and he said

"Shane, they were only like us. We were all chasing fish." If he

could invent a completely new philosophy of nature, then I

think it's possible for all of us.

A quick note at the end of this episode, in

March of 2022, the BC NDP government introduced Bill 14 to

amend the Wildlife Act, in order to quote "ensure greater

collaboration and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in the

management of wildlife in the province" unquote. It remains to

be seen how this amendment impacts the dynamics we

discussed in this episode, and we'll be watching.

Future Ecologies is an independent production,

made possible by our supporters on Patreon. For citations and a

transcript of this episode, visit us at futureecologies.net

This episode was produced by myself, Adam Huggins

And me. Mendel Skulski.

It features the voices of Shane Mahoney, Douglas

Neasloss, and Kyle Artelle.

And music by Thumbug. Museum of No Art, Troll

Dolly and Sunfish Moon Light.

Special thanks to Mark Elbroch,

Nuxalk Radio,

Amanda Hall,

Brodie Guy,

Kyle Artelle,

Chris Dairmont,

and to the Sitka Foundation for supporting our

fourth season.

Thank you.

We're also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The handle is always Future Ecologies.

Okay. That's it for this one.

You'll be hearing from us again soon.