Food security, climate adaptation, and vibrant biodiversity all in one place — welcome to the ancient and diverse technologies of Sea Gardening.

These widespread (but often overlooked) monumental rock features are proof positive of thriving Indigenous maricultural systems all around the Pacific Rim, since time immemorial. These spaces are not only simply stunningly beautiful spots to hang out, they're also a powerful symbol of ecocultural restoration; of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and internationalism; of relationship building; and of the kind of future that is possible as we adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels. We hope you find them as inspiring as we do.

Join us as we visit a sea garden, learn about how they work, and meet a few of the people bringing them back to life.

— — —

Visit futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-2-sea-garden for full credits, links, citations, photos, a transcript, and more.

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You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

Hey everyone, welcome back. No cold open this

time, because on today's show sea garden, we're diving right

in to a story about food security, ecosystem restoration

and climate adaptation.

It's a story going back 1000s of years into

the past, and fingers crossed, 1000s of years into the future.

What does all that look like? Well...

You'll just have to wait and see.

Cool. And we'll get up to speed. [Boat accelerates]

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Uhh where are we? We're at the beach, and we're at

one of the historic, what is now called a sea garden, previously

known as a clam garden wall. And before it even had a name, I

imagine that we would be at a grocery store. We were at my

ancestors grocery store, our dinner table.

ÍY SȻÁĆEL [SENĆOŦEN greeting] Good day, everyone. My English

name is Hannah, and my W̱ILṈEW̱ SNÁ is W̱EM,LEŚELWET, and I'm

from here in the W̱SÁNEĆ territory in Saanich. [SENĆOŦEN]

I'm grateful to be here with you today.

I'm grateful to be here with you.

HÍSW̱KE

This place is so... alive, it's hard to

believe!

Isn't it?

Picture this... low tide on a sunny day, a

gently sloping beach, bright, not with sand, but with coarse

bits of broken shell. All around you, buried clams are saying

hello as they squirt jets of water into the air. The red rock

crabs duck and dart all over the abundant green seaweed. And just

there, behind you on a boulder, a sea cucumber the size of a

shoe, waiting patiently for the tide to return.

I feel extremely privileged this is a work day.

This is what I get to do for work, come and check out the

beach

Including the most prominent feature of this

beach, a rock wall stretching across the entire width of the

low tide line.

All rocks have been placed there gently,

specifically and with a good heart and mind when it happened.

How long have those rocks been there?

Allegedly 3500 years to 4000. I don't know. I

put some rocks on there about a year ago. So there's some new

ones, some old ones. Oh, Carl's got a fork!

What are you doing right now, Carl?

Just digging to see what clams I'll come up with

here. I think right here is mostly butters and stuff.

Hold on... is that... is that a barnacle?

That's an old, old barnacle. Big one, eh?

That's a big one!

My English. Name is Carl Olsen. I'm from the W̱SÁNEĆ

community, Tsartlip. I carry my grandfather's Indian name. It's

ZȺWIZUT.

Go to along the rock wall there and start digging. You'll see.

The clams are... they're healthier. And that's what this

wall provides, too, a healthier environment, and you get much

meatier clams, they're bigger, they're healthier.

Tell me what we're looking at.

What are we looking at? We're looking at

rocks all piled up in wall form. And not only are there rocks in

there, there are different species.

There is so much life in these places. They're

alive.

I feel like I would be remiss in letting this

day go by without having you, our resident marine ecologist,

give me a lightning round of all the species you might find in

the sea garden.

Oh, boy, okay. Well, I mean, there's so many. And if

you start getting into tube worms and shore crabs, I'm not

going to be able to tell you what species they are. You'll

see our superstars, the butter and little neck clams. Those

tend to be the most targeted, harvestable native species.

You'll see red rock crabs, burrowing under the rocks,

moving around under the green seaweed, sea stars, sea

cucumbers, limpets,

whelks,

many different types of sea snails,

all sorts of barnacles, of course,

a lot of hermit crabs,

sometimes little gunnels.

Urchins! urchins is another one. We don't see a ton

of them, but they do exist on the wall.

Lots of creatures, more than I've just mentioned.

Yeah, thinking about low tide, the water

receding out, and you can see the top of the rock wall. That

rock wall emerges, the waves coming offshore, being broken by

that rock wall. And you have a kind of a smooth, clear water

inside the clam garden as the water is receding. And then the

little clams start spurting out — pshc psch pshc — shooting up

little spurts of water, up and down. And then, as the water

recedes and the rocks fully emerge, you can go down and

crawl around the rocks and see red sea cucumber, red rock crab,

chitins, large snails and limpets.

And something that we don't see very often, but we

know exists — that people actually sometimes create traps

for — is Giant Pacific Octopus.

What else can be there? Chitins, mussels, yeah,

the whole works... feast.

A feast on the beach.

Feast on the beach, yeah yeah yeah.

You have this really complex ecosystem that

emerges all within this rock wall system and seaweeds and all

these other traditional foods, and all of this three

dimensional structure, these rocks that are piled up with

little hidey holes in them for other traditional foods to live

in. And so it's this really unique system where, you know,

as an intertidal ecologist, we'll go to soft sediment —

sand, gravel, mud beaches — and look for clams and do our

research there, or we'll go to rocky intertidal, and that's

where we study things like limpets and snails and things

like that. But here you've got both of those things together.

So before I forget, could you introduce

yourself?

Sure, yeah. I'm Erin Slade, and I'm a marine

ecologist working with the Sea Garden Restoration Project at

Parks Canada. We've been working on this project and with these

wonderful communities and sea gardens for just over four

years.

Hello. My name is Nicole Smith, and I am an

archeologist, fortunate to work along the coast for over 20

years.

[Xws7ámeshqen greeting] tse ne-sná7 Marko

Hatch. My name is Marco Hatch. I'm a member of the Samish

Indian Nation and Associate Professor of Environmental

Science at Western Washington University in Bellingham,

Washington.

My name is Eric Kelch, born in lək̓ʷəŋən

territory, here on the West Coast, and work now for Parks

Canada on the Sea Gardens Project.

So just make sure we have it covered, what is

a clam garden? How does it work?

Clam gardens are magical intertidal spaces where

ancestors moved large rocks to the low tide line to flatten a

beach. Just like you could terrace a hill to grow more

grapes, you can terrace a beach to grow more clams. And so these

rocks at the low tide line, sediment then fills in between

them. And so it takes a steep beach and it flattens it out.

What that does is it increases the space in what we call the

Goldilocks zone. So butter clams and other clams live in a really

narrow zone of the intertidal. If they live too high, they dry

out and die. If they live too low, they get eaten by sea

stars. So there's a really narrow window they like to live

in, and these terraces are built in exactly that tidal level.

You've got a rocky ecosystem that was built intentionally by

people moving rocks, and then all that sediment that fills in

that winds up being prime habitat and conditions for clams

to grow. Through the Clam Garden Network, we've been able to

measure and quantify things like two to four times the biomass of

clams in a clam garden compared to a non clam garden area, and

growth rates about 50% or greater.

So sometimes they're actually built up in spaces that

didn't previously have a sandy beach, and by creating a barrier

between two rocky outcrops, you create the space for sand to

start to fill in and creating basically a new beach where

there didn't used to be. So they can be kind of on steep

bouldering slopes. They can be between rocky outcrops on

beaches that already exist, such as the one that we're at today

on Russell Island, or something like the Fulford harbor sea

garden is a big, long wall along a large, already kind of sandy

gravel beach.

And then beyond the rocks, what are we seeing?

I see the bull kelp.

So this is a proper little kelp forest as

well.

You bet

Wow.

Clam gardens are only exposed a few days of the

year at low tide. In the US, a lot of Clam Gardens will be

expected to be around a negative two foot tide. In Canada, you're

generally a meter or less.

One of the major challenges with... Well, I don't

know if it's necessarily a challenge, it's really just a

nature of this type of work. And part of what makes it beautiful

and special, but also limiting and fleeting is that we can only

really access these places for a few days every month, in the

summer and then in the middle of the night when the tides are low

enough in the winter,

with our most extreme tides during the winter

and summer solstice. But those extreme tides in the winter

happen at night. But yeah, being an intertidal ecologist, when

you open your calendar for the year, you put in low tides, and

then you plan everything around that. These areas can be

extraordinarily vibrant, can have high densities of clams,

and also defy what we think is possible — having these clams at

a higher tide line, if you could move the height of those clams

up by 20 centimeters. Now they're probably exposed more

hours of the day, and then more days a year, right? So if you're

thinking about that as your grocery store, we've just, you

know, opened it more days with longer hours, which is huge in

the winter time, and other times when it might be marginal to go

out and harvest.

Why did the name change from clam garden to sea

garden?

Because there aren't just clams that live

here.

One of the reasons that we call these spaces Sea

Gardens is at the guidance of the nations. These rock walls

are multi faceted and multi functional, and they don't just

support clams. They support many other species.

Is there just one type of sea garden?

No, there are many, many different kinds of

sea gardens, and there are around the world.

It's global too. It's not just here on the West

Coast, not just on Vancouver Island. It's everywhere.

There are going to be variations on the sea garden

technologies that may target particular species, or may be

beneficial to many.

On the bays and fjords of Patagonia, Corrales De

Pesca have been maintained by Indigenous Chilean and mestizo

people to harvest and store the abundance of the sea, including

fish, eggs, shellfish and seaweed

Along the humid coastlines of the Taiwanese

Penghu archipelago, monumental stone fish weirs known as Shi Hu

sprawl like enormous petrified jellyfish made of basalt

limestone and coral.

For over 6000 years, the Gunditjmara people

have used volcanic stones to create pools and channels to

capture kuyang or short-finned eels as they migrate to sea and

back through the complex wetlands of southeastern

Australia.

And here, up and down the west coast of North

America, there are fish traps, octopus houses And, of course,

clam gardens. All around the Pacific Ocean, many forms of

indigenous mariculture have been practiced since time immemorial.

I think fundamentally, it's modifying a

beach in a way that provides more food than would have been

there on its own. So this idea that if you take an active part

in restoring or attending a beach, then you could provide

lots of food.Depending on culture, depending on like what

the beach offered you, what is naturally there, you know, I

think people were smart and they they really are emblematic of

deep listening and deep paying attention and deep connection to

a place. Dependent on what that site was, was what you would

kind of modify it to be, and different beaches are going to

need different things.

It's so much more than just a collection of rocks

that creates biomass or biodiversity. It's so much more

than that. It's a revival of a portion of our language, a

revival of the kinship ties between our nations, because

long ago, we were nomadic. You know, we have all these

overlapping shared spaces, and the Gulf Islands is definitely

one of them. [Xeláltxw greeting] My English name is Nicole

Norris, and my traditional name is Ala̱g̱a̱mił. I am a very

treasured member from the Halalt First Nation coming from the

Hul'q'umi'num homelands here on Vancouver Island. I'm a

descendant of Stutson, and there's grand stories of Stutson

being in these places. Stutson, in our greater creation story,

is one of the first four that fell from the sky. It was him

and his three brothers.

Long since Stutson fell from the sky,

Nicole recalled the very first time that she visited a sea

garden wall, walking under a moonlit low tide with her friend

and colleague.

And we got to a certain part in the wall, and I

pulled off my my boots and my socks, and I began to nestle my

feet into the sand, into the ground. And I turned and I

looked at him. It was such a profound moment for myself. I

turned and I looked at him, and I said, I'm standing in

Stutson's footprints. And I leaned over, and I grabbed a

rock off the wall, and I put my hand on top of it, and I said,

I'm holding a rock that Stutson held. I'm holding his hand.

Seeing these massive, monumental rock

features that ancestors had built and tended for 1000s of

years changed my view and understanding of intertidal

ecology. When I was a undergrad, our fisheries professor would

say that there's no way that Indigenous people in the

Northwest impacted salmon populations. There wasn't enough

people, and there's so many salmon, there's no way that

people could have impacted that. And that was just what people

accepted, you know, 20+ years ago. And then you start to learn

about things like stone fish traps and fish weirs, and the

technologies existing to harvest every salmon that came up a

stream. If you put a weir up, it's blocking the stream, and

people are making a decision about which fish get to pass and

which ones don't. Even in big rivers like the Columbia all of

those fish are going up to spawn in small tributaries, right?

Like the technology existed to harvest every single fish that

came up the river. That didn't happen, right? These

environmental abundances that were seen didn't happen by

accident. People had intention in their management. In the

terrestrial realm, I think that that's been accepted a bit

earlier, particularly around burning, tending of camas

meadows, Garry oak. In the marine environment, it's been a

bit harder. And one thing I think is really beautiful about

revitalizing clam gardens and sea gardens is they're very

visual, tangible features. These are monumental rock features,

sometimes a kilometer long, that people have built and maintained

for 1000s of years in a space that our ancestors have been

removed from and our contributions have been ignored.

It ties back into what is natural? How do these ecosystems

get to where they are? Clam gardens give us that really

visual like, hit you in the face, you can't deny that these

1000s of pounds of rocks for a kilometer long, stacked up, were

done by accident.

Operating both in traditional knowledge or traditional

ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge, or

whatever term you want to use for traditional knowledge

systems, and mainstream or Western science has historically

had a lot of tension and difficulties. There's a few

models that we practice that can help provide ways forward, and

one metaphor that's often used is the idea of braiding. So,

braiding traditional ecological knowledge and mainstream science

together. And in the braiding metaphor, each strand maintains

its identity and isn't compromised or compared or held

above or below the other strand. But by combining those knowledge

systems, we can create something stronger than the sum of its

parts.

Traditional science and Western science is

the same. It's just different language that translates it.

Indigenous knowledge is based on generational observation. All of

those teachings come from observing the water, observing

the wind, how it interacts with the land, the water, the trees.

But also observing our relatives of the ocean, our relatives of

the woods and our relatives of the sky. They provide us with

teachings of ways of being. And so the clam doesn't feed just

us. It feeds aquatic loved ones. It feeds the woodland animals

that come onto the beach and harvest. It also feeds certain

birds or relatives of the sky. And so that clam feeds the fish,

it feeds the crabs, it feeds the octopus, it feeds the eagles,

the seagulls, the oyster pickers. What we recognize is

that it's all interconnected, and how valuable that one single

clam is.

So a big question is, how old is this

technology of sea gardening, and how do we know?

Well, from the archeological work that we've

been doing on the coast, it would seem that these sea

gardens or clam gardens are at least 4000 years or so. Now, of

course, in archeological terms, dates are always a little bit

fuzzy. It's tricky because these rock walls, they're made of

rock. It's inorganic, and radiocarbon dating needs organic

carbon to establish a date. If you can imagine that these

walls, sometimes they build up over time. Sometimes the

foundation of them are built in a moment. People will get the

rock from different places. Sometimes they'll get it from

land and they'll bring it to the beach. Other times, they'll get

the rock from the beach themselves, and when they get it

from the beach, the rocks can be covered with barnacles. Now, the

barnacles tend to like to live on the top, but if you can

imagine, sometimes those first rocks will go into the wall, and

if they get turned upside down, and those barnacles then go on

to the underside of the rock, they can get trapped in the muck

or the mud — and in the right conditions, preserve. So what we

found is that we could look for those barnacle scars on the

bottom of the rock.

And so they can date those scars!

In a regular beach setting, they will only last on

the surface of a rock for one to two years, we learned from the

barnacle biologists. Because beaches are actually really

clean places, and when a barnacle dies, there's all sorts

of organisms that are going to come to scrape that basal plate

off. Things like bulldozing limpets will come along and

clean the surface of the rock so that then it's available for new

barnacle larva to settle. So when we find a preserved

barnacle scar, that's exciting, and we know that we have a very

tight time range.

And besides preserved barnacle scars,

archeologists have other evidence that these clam gardens

go back for millennia.

They noticed that the rock walls change where

their location was based on tidal height. Where the rocks

were placed were at a different place on the beach depending on

where the ocean was.

So there's two competing factors. There's

isostatic rebound and sea level rise.

Parts of the coast where the glaciers were really

thick and really heavy, you know, really depressed, the land

down. Some of us might remember water beds. If you sit in the

middle of a water bed, you go down in the middle and the sides

go up. Well, that was similar here on the coast, like around

Kitimat and extending down. But then other parts of the coast,

like Haida Gwaii, didn't have as much, and they were on those

edges, so they popped up.

Isostatic rebound was explained to me by my marine

geology professor as every Thanksgiving his uncle Eli,

would come over, who was a rather massive fellow, and would

sit and watch football on the couch. And then when he got up,

the couch would slowly come back to level. Isostatic rebound is

effectively that for when we had a mile of ice over this area,

that ice is melted and the land is slowly coming back up.

And so where it was weighted down starts to come

up. Where it was up starts to go down.

Compared with sea level rise, which is the whole

bathtub is getting higher.

What effectively happens is you have these

changes in sea level positions. But it's really different,

depending on where you are in the coast. You know, some places

it's falling, and other places it's rising.

And so we see more ancient clam gardens that are

now well above the clam zone, and newer ones are built at the

current tide height. In other communities, we see walls that

are meters below sea level today. And so these technologies

have been used for 1000s and 1000s of years to adapt to local

sea level change.

You know, in the Southern Gulf Islands, sea

levels have been rising for over 11,000 years. When we talk about

the relevance of this type of work moving forward, you know,

these are spaces that have been adapting to sea level rise for

1000s of years.

So I think that's important for everyone to know,

and archeologists to know that, depending on where you are, they

might be really subtle. And we don't want to say that "Oh,

there are none in this area." They just might not be in view.

I mean, there are past shorelines that are now way

underwater, and there are past shorelines that are way high

inland and now covered in forest canopy. So far, our survey has

really been limited to the present intertidal zone, so it's

possible there are older features that we haven't seen,

because we haven't been looking in the right places

There may be hidden gardens below the waves

or behind the trees. And so we can't say for sure how old this

technology really is.

No amount of archeology and carbon dating is

going to be able to prove it, unfortunately. They can say

that, yeah, we've been here for a really long time, and they can

investigate some of the shells and the spaces and theorize how

we used to cook.

Because these rocks have probably been on the

wall longer than just their latest millennia old barnacle

scars.

Oh, totally, that's definitely true, and

that's one thing that we think that they're dismantling and

rebuilding as sea level is rising.

We're the salt water people. We traveled by canoe and

we camped here. We had a food base when we're heading down to

visit our relatives in Lummi, and we'd camp in the San Juan

Islands, do the same thing. We never really had to carry food

with us because the food base was feeding us on our way.

That's the way it should be. You know, when you have like, 4

million people in Canada that are food insecure, and we have

beaches that we could maintain and keep healthy. You know,

having this is food security, and we gotta bring it back.

Yes, we live on an island. There's beach

everywhere. Unfortunately, there aren't clam gardens everywhere

the way that there used to be, but there is beach everywhere we

live on Vancouver Island. And with that, I find it easier to

explain to community what's outside of our back door, and

what would be there without colonization.

It's constantly shocking to me that we have this

intertidal resource that's so bountiful, that's so healthy for

us, that's so like, you know, free in a way, with rising food

prices, and we don't take care of it. We don't take care of it

properly. You know, there's closure maps everywhere, and you

can't harvest and why aren't we treating this like a resource

that we could all benefit from? To have, like a food that can be

that can be processed, that can be dried, that can be traded,

that is always going to be productive if you take care of

it. You know, the teaching that if you take care of these

places, they will take care of you, I think, speaks volumes.

We've seen some communities reactivate clam

gardening after experiencing food scarcity and shortages

through COVID 19. And so for a lot of remote communities

external food is barged in, and if that barge doesn't show up

that's a real concern. Those communities have taken conscious

effort to revitalize traditional food systems and clam gardens

being a part of that, of ensuring that there's that

resilience within the community in case external food doesn't

show up. That they have the knowledge, the technologies, the

gatherers, the processors within their community, that they know

where to go and how to get to work.

Unfortunately, the question of where to go is

sometimes complicated by a second question...

Are the clams even safe to eat?

I think it's important when you're managing

closures for seafood safety or human health concerns to think

about how are people actually consuming those. Knowing how

things are prepared, what parts are discarded, changes an

individual's exposure level. So butter clams is a large clam

that in this area people dried and traded. And depending on the

community, there are different ways of processing the clam. A

lot of communities will take the black tip off the siphon. So the

siphon is where the clam brings water in and ejects water.

Butter clams have a black tip of that siphon. A lot of

communities cut that off and discard it, citing that that's

where the toxins are stored.

So-called Red Tide is caused by population

booms of a naturally occurring microorganism, a dinoflagellate

called Alexandrium,

which produces saxitoxin, a potentially lethal

neurotoxin.

It's existed forever, but in recent years,

both the frequency, how often we get these red tide blooms, and

the duration and the window of opportunity have all increased,

and so it's happening more often and with stronger red tides now

compared to 500 years ago. But we were curious, looking at a

butter clam, can we measure the amount of toxin in each body

part? And we found that both the siphon tip and the siphon

disproportionately held more saxitoxin. Now, this isn't to

say, you know, if there's a red tide closure, go out there and

chop the neck off a clam, siphon off a clam, and you're safe. But

it does show that those parts of the body have a higher

concentration of Saxitoxin compared to other areas. And so

that's where we're trying to operate, of not testing

traditional ecological knowledge, but trying to see, is

there ways we can quantify it as it relates to how we open and

close clams. And certain communities have actually been

able to do that, where, working with government agencies, when

they go into test butter clams, they'll test the whole clam, and

they'll test the clam without the siphon. And so there'll be

certain times of the year where clams are deemed safe to eat if

you discard the siphon. And that's an example of

incorporating that traditional ecological knowledge into the

way that we measure and manage traditional food as it relates

to seafood safety.

So you might be wondering, when the clams aren't

safe to eat, is it still worthwhile to work in the

garden?

Even though we're not digging clams and having a

clam bake on the beach, there's so much more that comes from it.

These are places that need to be cared for on an

ongoing basis. You need to tend the beaches. You need to care

for the rock wall, and, as shared, these are places that

you care for like you might a family member.

It's not rocket science. This is simply how it's

done — to really humanize our aquatic loved ones. When I talk

about that point of view from a clam, I talk about noise

pollution, I talk about our loved ones in the in the woods,

in the sky, right?

And so it's this wonderful way of seeing people

in relationship with the environment around them as

equals, as opposed to being separate from.

So you mentioned the nuancing of clam gardens to

sea gardens to open up this more general space for different

creatures. I'm curious about the garden part of the name.

I think the really important part of garden is that

it's really speaking to tending and caring for places. One of

the dominant narratives was that First Nations, communities up

and down this coast are hunter gatherer populations. And in the

textbooks, you would see how they would be described as

living in very bountiful environments where the resources

essentially swim to them, instead of understanding the

agency and the care and the engineering that has gone into

shaping these landscapes.

We used to think people mean they're degrading

the environment, and so we need to take people out of the

environment to protect it. That's what we... that's what

the Western kind of world used to think about conservation, and

now we're learning — hopefully, we're learning... at least, I'm

learning — that places need people, and these ecosystems

weren't created by accident, and people were involved in making

them bountiful. And so by people being here and tending a sea

garden in all sorts of ways. It actually increases the

biodiversity of a place. Like, what a concept. And so people

being here is what they need to thrive. And we see places where

it's not thriving, it's kind of dead. There's a lot of empty

shells. There's not many clams because it hasn't been dug up.

When we come back, a lesson in gardening... after

the break.

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Where we left off, Erich was reminding us that

these spaces need to be nurtured — for their own sake, and so

that they can nurture us in return.

What happens when a clam garden bed is not really

maintained, and it hasn't been for years and years, the build

up of the amount of clams in this bed gets so great that they

just start dying off. And that's what you're seeing.

Traditional teachings around if you don't

tend to beach, it dies. If you don't dig a certain way, and you

don't put your sediment down a certain way, you don't harvest a

certain way, it'll harm the beach.

If you're hand tilling the beach, you want to

turn over the substrate so that it aerates, so that water can

filter through, and all of the years of silt can wash away.

In an anoxic or hypoxic, no to low oxygen areas

of the sediment, aerobic respiration doesn't happen —

respiration using oxygen like we do. So you have anaerobic

respiration, which is typically done by sulfate reducing

bacteria, which produce hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct, which is

both toxic to juvenile clams and gives that rotten egg smell. And

so if we don't tend to beach, you get a lot of fine grain

sediment, which tends to be organic, which tends to reduce

oxygen, which sets up those conditions for hydrogen sulfide.

So by tilling it, we're physically turning the sediment

over. Or the way that we dig clams and leave the sediment

out, gives that opportunity for the fine grain sediments to wash

away.

It's like cultivating a garden. You

cultivate it here too. You turn it over so it keeps the ground

loose, and you know, at low tide, the air gets into it.

These rock walls kind of break down just because of the waves

from the boat or the movement of the tide. You got to keep

maintaining them. We clean off the seaweed here. One of the

elders explained that some of the seaweed best to get it taken

off, because it's like having a piece of plastic over.

When we're doing restoration work, that seaweed

gets scraped off and brought up to the bushes back here for a

little bit of fertilization, as well as to help keep the clams

breathing. They, like us, need oxygen to breathe.

We use potato rakes to hand till the

substrate. That process needs to be so mindful, because that's

somebody's home. My Uncle George Harris always talks about

getting your mind right. So when you're there for a helpful

purpose, your intention is to help. We're helping the

ancestors finish their work, because they're not here to do

it anymore, and so you got to be careful. La'lum'uthut is what

they call that — be really careful.

There are some people I've come down seeing

walking along the wall, where it's... you just don't know. You

don't know what you don't know. So sharing the you know, we stay

off the wall. We treat it with respect. We treat the beach how

we would want to be treated.

Culturally, there are certain times in the year

that we're not supposed to walk on the beach, and maybe to share

that information, so that people are more mindful when they go

into these places. At the time when the herring spawn, you

know, when the waters are just a little bit warmer, when the

clams spawn, or the sea urchin and the oysters, when they're

doing their thing. You know, that's the time when you stay

off the beach.

My grandparents always used to say, watch the

birds when you go down, like seagulls or crows, we'll bring

the clam up and drop it on the rocks to break it open and eat

it. If they're doing that, they said, the clams are good to eat.

And they say, watch the birds. If they stop eating the clams,

then you stop eating the clams, they'll tell you, everything is

connected. There's a connection to everything, because

everything has a life, and when you use it to feed yourself, you

give thanks for it to the Creator. If you take care of

everything, it's going to take care of you.

If you're looking for a mnemonic, just

remember WATCH.

We All Take Care of the Harvest. Yes, yes. I love

that acronym as well. You know, how are we being there and

taking care of it? And that's, that's what these places need.

You know they need people. Makes them happy.

Could you tell me a little bit about the

balance between tending and harvesting and the sort of the

practice of gardening in these spaces? What does that look like

for communities through time?

It's not like you build a wall and leave it. That

might be what some of us do in our yards, or in our cities or

towns. These are places that need to be cared for on an

ongoing basis.

And what I really appreciate about it is it's not

looking for a short term solution, meaning we went out

and restored the beach, and next year we expect 10 times more

clams. It's a long term investment. People are doing it,

not because they might see direct benefit, but that their

children and grandchildren will be re-engaged out there, will be

part of the ecosystem, will be on the beach harvesting healthy,

abundant clams. If we think about clam gardens that we've

dated that are 3+ thousand years old, that's 3000 years of

continuous tending with a small pause recently. That's a big

commitment. That's a different commitment than I'm going to go

out and remove invasive plants for a couple weekends a year or

I'm going to go out and plant some native trees. That is a

long term, multi-generational commitment that has to be

weighed and taken seriously. You know, start with one, invest our

time, build those relationships, improve that beach and see what

comes.

You know, this work takes a lot of hands and a lot

of hours, and so we have a pretty enormous volunteer list

at this point. So we have lots of extra hands, but this is work

that's led by the Nations, and it's important that people from

community are here leading that work. And so it's just a matter

of getting enough people, being organized enough in advance, and

people having enough space and time spread across the few days

that we have to actually do the work, because these low tides

are fleeting.

The work that Erin is referring to are beach days,

but not the kind that you or I might have grown up with. These

beach days are all-ages community gardening and teaching

events, organized under the auspices of the Sea Gardens

Project.

What is the Sea Gardens Project?

The Sea Gardens Project is a collaborative

effort between Parks Canada and guided by W̱SÁNEĆ and Cowichan

nations to restore the beaches of which we're standing at one

right now, to provide food for Indigenous peoples into the

future forever, to restore the sea gardens provide food and

then to make sure that they're tended as they once were for

millennia into the future by First Nations.

We're between Sidney and Salt Spring Island, on a

little island called Russell Island.

These gardens that we're looking at here haven't

been tended for maybe, maybe 100 years or so. They were not

tended until this project kind of restarted about eight years

ago. And so what we don't really know is, what is the effort

required to restore a sea garden that hasn't been tended? That's

kind of a new question, I guess. And so by having two sides of

the beach, we have a side here that we actively manage and

actively tend and restore, and then we have a side here to our

right that we don't do anything with. And so we're curious, you

know, what is the difference? And it's tricky, because we

never want to be in a place where we're having to prove

Indigenous science. Indigenous science is is knowledge on its

own. And we don't want to be testing that or trying to prove

that.

It's just something that we know, but we

have to prove it all the time.

There's like, maybe another way to speak to a

different kind of language, I guess, like, we can use other

methods to share that story also.

The pathway that has been created between the

Hul'q'umi'num, the SENĆOŦEN, and Parks Canada has really become a

worldwide demonstration of a better way of being together,

about marrying indigenous knowledge with Western science.

My title is a restoration officer. I lead a

lot of the ecological monitoring that we do, and so as we conduct

this restoration work that's guided by community, we're also

monitoring how that work is impacting the ecosystems, and

particularly the bivalve — the clam species. The clam

communities and all of the seaweeds and invertebrates along

the walls, we monitor how those are changing over time. We've

also, over the years, been trying to monitor how the

geomorphology, how the topography of the beach, is

changing over time, because we do expect to see that the beach

will slowly shift in slope over time.

From this rock this way, I believe it's what's

being restored with Parks. And from down that way, down that

side of the beach is not being restored.

So this is like the dividing line between the

restoration project and the and the control.

Yeah.

The design of the project was put together with

community members and people were okay with starting things

off as an experiment. And part of that is because, you know, we

do live, currently still live in a society where a lot of the

most respected knowledge that is used by government to guide

decision making comes from the scientific community. And so in

order to speak that language, doing an experiment supports us

being able to kind of provide that type of knowledge, to

provide evidence towards this work being important and

impactful and effective.

We have to be able to prove to Western science

that our methods also work. We know that they work because that

clam garden is 4000 years old, and that is the way it's always

been done. Without scientific research and the data and the

hypothesis behind it — you know, the language that translates

that — how are we to get somebody who isn't so

culturally, emotionally and generationally tied to that

space? How are we to get them to see it as important, or to see

the reasons why we need to do certain things? Like, have more

restoration days, or put more money into the program so that

we can even get there. That data is going to support the

underlying reasons as to why we want to do that, which is, it's

a food source. We need to cultivate it, and we need to

nourish it. And here's the reasons why.

But... it's challenging because, you know,

people come here and spend a lot of time observing and working in

these spaces, and care a lot about them, and having to only

work on one half of the beach, only tend one half of the beach,

that doesn't sit well with people.

You know, it's like having a hamper full of

dirty laundry and you only wash half of it. We have a cultural

obligation to take care of these spaces, because it's what takes

care of us. That's really what it comes down to.

The timelines for seeing the impacts ecologically

are not short, and they're also not entirely clear. But we know,

you know, like the life cycle of clams, it takes a while to start

seeing the response in the clams, and then to start seeing

that in the juvenile population.

I didn't know this until just this past year, but

clams have these kind of, what are they called, like sporadic

seeding events, where they seed in large numbers, and those

happen every like three or five or seven year marks.

And what we expect to see is kind of with the

settlement of juveniles coming from a stronger adult

population, we start to see a new crop of adults, and that can

take many years.

We are seeing a comeback of some of the biomass,

which is fantastic. We're seeing other aquatic plants starting to

grow, vegetation starting to grow there, which is fantastic.

But I said to them just last summer, I'm done with this test.

Okay, I want the whole beach. And I was getting pretty

forthright. They were like, Oh well, the test, this, that. And

I pushed back. And I said, Listen, I want the whole beach.

I want to turn over the whole beach. I want to measure it. I

want to section it off. I want to start seeding. We only have

this many years left. And I said, you know, stop

pussyfooting around. We need to get this work done. And I said

to my colleagues at Parks Canada, I feel like I'm wasting

my time. This is lip service. Either we're going to do it or

we're not. Some of these spaces we've been working at for a

decade. We've been turning them over for a decade. So the site

beside us, that's the controlled site, is going to take the same

amount of effort when we should have been doing the whole thing

all along.

Well, I think that's, you know, it's one of

the challenges in working in ecology is, you know, like

having the humility to recognize that you can't... these systems

are not entirely unknowable, but they are not entirely knowable.

This isn't like a lab experiment. When you work with

ecology, you're working with complex ecosystems that interact

with each other. And you can never have, well, not never, but

in most circumstances, you're not going to be able to control

all of the factors in order to be able to sort of distill

things down into one particular mechanism or function or

species. It bleeds into the Indigenous way of knowing that

we respect that these spaces cannot be entirely known, but

what we can do is spend time in them and build relationships

with them and find ways to care for them that follow what we do

know. And in doing so, having less rigidity and more

adaptability is just generally the way things are done.

The other thing that this has demonstrated is

this is an act of reconciliation on behalf of a federal agency.

Parks Canada and their humble friendship making with the

Hul'q'umi'num' and the SENĆOŦEN is really an act of

reconciliation. Our original relationship was with the land.

It wasn't with government. And they have provided us an

opportunity to regain access, and even though some of these

places are more than likely deemed as a heritage site,

they've allowed us to operate them as active management sites

— recognizing that this is going to revive a food source and

create food security and food sovereignty for nations along

the coast, and this really falls in line with the right to self

determination.

And beyond the interface between the

Hul'q'umi'num', the SENĆOŦEN and Parks Canada, sea gardens are

now truly a place of international relations.

One of the greater things about some of

this work is we've gone through a process with our sister

nations about knowledge repatriation.

The Pacific Sea Garden Collective is this really

amazing network of Indigenous people and allies that work

closely with them from all around the Pacific, from

Washington State, coastal BC, southeast Alaska, Hawaii, Guam

and Palau that get together every year or two and share our

ancestral technologies and restoration work that we're

doing, and through this network, we're learning from each other,

but also understanding that we're experiencing a lot of the

same struggles and issues. As a clam gardener going to Hawaii in

2020 and seeing the fish pond restoration, it really opened

our eyes to what could be possible.

More recently, lots of nations have started their

own initiatives to restore and rebuild, or build new clam

gardens or sea gardens up and down the coast.

Many of us share this hope and goal that there

will be communities who are digging in their clamming

beaches and restoring their clam garden walls, or building new

clam garden walls. I mean, we're seeing that already, and it

really is connecting people with tradition. It is addressing

issues of food security, issues of climate change. You know, I

just, I feel really hopeful for what sea gardens can offer and

help us with as we go forward.

Swinomish came to spend a lot of time with us, and

they built the first modern day sea garden. The Swinomish are my

immediate relatives, and I'm so exceptionally proud of them.

What really opened my eyes was the amount of permits that they

needed, the amount of other entities that needed to say yes.

They built their own wall about a year ago and

had to jump through many, many hoops due to the government and

whatever else they had to go through to put rocks on their

own land. And it was a week of being Indigenous together, not

just Coast Salish people, they're all indigenous people

just by being together in an Indigenous collaborative with

no, I don't know, what would you say... maybe hidden agenda that

the federal government had when they came to Indigenous lands

sparked enough inspiration and drive for everyone to get back

onto their own lands to take care of it in the way that they

know how — whatever that looks like. Whether that be lunch on

the beach and just spending time or getting your hands dirty in

the water, moving rock. I really, really try my best

anytime I come out here, not only to just bring myself, but

to bring someone from my community, in a younger

generation, to show them that it's okay and it's probably the

right thing to do to reconcile and work together with Parks

Canada and the federal government in order to restore

our practices and work together as one to take care of the land

that we're all here on now. Whether we like it or not, it's

this is our reality... and it's a good one, it could be a good

one if we make it.

Marco shared a story from a time he was

visiting Bella Bella, Heiltsuk territory, where there are clam

gardens that have been continuously tended until much

more recently than the site at Russell Island. He and his local

guides were traveling by boat.

And it was getting later in the day, and the tide

was up pretty high, and off to our right, I saw a small, little

rock wall on this bedrock feature. So just hard bedrock,

and a little rock wall, and then white, broken shell hash behind

it. So I was like, "hey, just drop me off here." I grabbed all

my survey equipment, and it's not high tide, but it's above

low tide, so clam gardens are well underwater. And the butter

clam zone, now the tides above the butter clam zone, so I

wouldn't expect to see butter clams there. And I was looking

around just broken, dead shells everywhere, butter clams and

some horse clams, and all these different species. I was like,

wow, this is really amazing. And I reached down and just filled,

just both my hands scoop up a big chunk of the sediment, which

is all just white, chalky, broken shell, and it was full of

butter clams. I've never seen that many butter clams.

Normally, a butter clam is, A) lower on the beach, but also

lower in the sediment, where you'd have to dig down a good

six centimeters or 10 centimeters before you get to

the butter clams. Here it was a layer of clams, and below that

layer was another layer of clams, and below that layer was

another layer of clams, and it was just chockablock full of

clams. And so here, just this highest density to this day, of

clams I've ever seen in this little feature that's too high

based on the textbooks for clams to live in. Now they're not just

living there, but they're thriving in this immense

density. And so I was just blown away. I was doing all my

measurements just with my head, like, literally in the sand,

like, freaking out about all these clams. And I start to

think, "oh, man, I wonder... I wonder if they're gonna come

back and get me." They were out of sight around the corner. I

couldn't hear the boat or anything, so I'm looking around

the corner, and I see off in the distance, like, well, there's a

stone fish trap over there. And I'm stuck on this bedrock

outcropping, and I walk to the other side, and I see an abalone

shell. And you can look down in the water, and it's a steep

cliff of bedrock in crystal clear water, with fish and kelp

and abalone habitat all around in the same area as well, and

you can look up and see the fruits and berries that the

uplands been managed as well. And it was that point that kind

of hit me, that I've spent a lot of my time with my head in the

sand just looking at clams within clam gardens. But if you

move your head up and look around, you start to see that

this is one very important piece, but one piece of the

puzzle, one piece of the traditional food system of

mountain top to sea floor bottom.

Our ancestors had this figured out, and I am

thankful for my ancestors. And that's why I got to be passing

it on to my grandkids and to my kids, so that they know the

history of this place. They know the stories of this place. They

know why we maintain these clam garden beds, and why these rock

walls were built and were known as clam gardens. The more that

you talk about it with anyone, the more people will understand

first nations and how they survived. And I think it's

really important.

And really what it is, is it's about trying to

prepare a table for our great, greats that are yet to come.

I have a little great, great grand neice that's

been out here already, learning about what's in the water there.

And it sticks with them. You know, even at that age, you

know, they'll learn more as they grow older, but they need to be

here.

One of the things that I say when we have new

visitors is, if you listen carefully on those paths, you

can still hear the songs of the people that were there before

us. That Stutson's words still vibrate among those leaves, and

eventually my words will vibrate there for my descendants.

As sea levels rise, our window to rediscover

many long since tended gardens is closing. So at low tide, keep

your eyes peeled,

and if you spot one, or if your community would

like some guidance on how to revive or build a new one, get

in touch with the Clam Garden Network at clamgarden.com

To learn more about the many other types of

sea gardens in the Pacific Sea Garden Collective, visit

seagardens.net

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Goes without saying.

This episode was produced by me, Mendel Skulski,

with help from Adam Huggins and Eden Zinchik,

Featuring the voices of Hannah Morris, Carl

Olsen, Erin Slade, Nicole Smith, Marco Hatch, Erich Kelch and

Nicole Norris,

with music by Jonathan Kawchuk, Daniel Lapp,

Thumbug, Adi Gortler, Gamelan Bike Bike, and Sunfish Moon Light

And of course, cover art by Alé Silva.

Special thanks to Sky Augustine, Erich Kelch

Courtney Greiner, Miranda Post, Jenifer Iredale and to everyone

out there bringing Sea Gardens to life.

Okay, that's it for this one. See you at the beach.