Meet the west coast’s Indigenous guardians

Adam Nelson Clip We are just doing our normal patrols we do every every season, checking on all all the boats and seeing how everyone’s doing. Make sure everyone has all their safety equipment and complying with all the rules and regulations.

Jordan That’s Adam Nelson. He’s talking about the work that he’s doing taking care of Canada’s West Coast, but he doesn’t work for the Coast Guard or the Mounties or a local police force. In fact, these waters can go weeks without seeing a single government official, but they are watched over and they are cared for well. The people taking on this job are Indigenous. They are called Coastal Guardians, and although some of them may have powers to issue tickets, for instance, it’s more apt to think of them as stewards of the land. Their land. This is a centuries-old practice, but only recently has it been formalized with approval and funding from the government. It’s a unique approach, and it’s slowly making its way to First Nations across the country. So who are these coastal Guardians patrolling the West Coast? What do they do and why are they so needed? Is this a forward leap in terms of handing control of the land back to the people who have long called it home, or is it another way for the government to outsource a job that they should be doing? How is this approach different from what these waters and forests have seen in the past?

Adam Nelson Clip 2 I’m glad that this is ongoing, and I’m glad that it’s growing even more because we are the protectors of the land and sea, of the resources of the land and sea, and that is very important for her people.

Jordan I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Jimmy Thomson is the managing editor of The Capital Daily , but this piece was a freelance effort that he compiled for The Narwhal . Hi, Jimmy.

Jimmy Thomson Hello.

Jordan Maybe you can begin then, just by telling us about the origins of Indigenous Guardians in general before it became more of a formalized thing, like how far does this practice go back?

Jimmy Thomson This goes back thousands of years. The formalized version is much more recent, but this is a traditional practice that goes back to a lot longer than we have records for. One form of record, though, is if you look at totem poles on the West Coast, there are Watchmen depicted on those. And I spoke with a Haida elder named Guujaaw, and he talked to me about the origin of these Guardians. Before Contact times, watchmen were literally that, they were people who would watch the water for invaders or for returning parties or for just kind of gathering intelligence about the land and the water around them.

Jordan And today, as it’s more formalized, first of all, who does this job and what exactly is the practice? We’re going to get into all the details of the individual things they do, but what’s the goal?

Jimmy Thomson The goal is to be the eyes and the ears of the First Nations that they work for. So that can mean driving out on the land on a 4×4 or a Ski-Doo. It could mean piloting a boat out into the nearby waters. It could mean patrolling by foot. And when they’re out there, they’re projecting the sovereignty of their first Nation. So that could mean a lot of things of course. That could mean taking scientific samples or telling tourists that this is the nation’s territory they’re on, and please respect it. It could mean finding illegally placed crab traps, any kind of thing that you might imagine a Park Ranger are doing, that’s basically what the Guardians will be doing.

Jordan We’ll talk about the practice and how far it spread and where it exists all over Canada. But first, for your piece, who did you spend the most time with and why did they tell you that they do this work and what their goals are?

Jimmy Thomson For this piece I was able to go to Wuikinuxv territory. Originally, I had intended and hoped to go to three First Nations on the coast, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo/Xai’Xais, and Wuikinuxv. Those are all sort of close together on the central coast of BC. Then the pandemic hit, so I didn’t end up being able to go to all three. I went to just the one. And in Wuikinuxv, I spent a lot of time with Adam Nelson and Corey Hanuse. They’re both young guys. Corey, I think he’s around 20, and Adam is in his mid 20s. Adam and Corey were incredibly proud of the work that they do. I went out on the boat with them a couple of times, and they’re sort of chatting with other boats with fishermen. They’re noting down the state of different sites. We spotted some wildlife, and they would Mark that down. We visited a couple of cultural sites, and they checked in on those. So they’re just kind of checking in on the land, just like a park ranger might do.

I can’t really speak for them or especially not for a lot of Guardians, but the reasons that they gave me really had to do with pride and duty. Corey had had this incredible experience where he was a youth in crisis. He was really having a hard time as a teenager, and he went up to Haida Gwaii, where it all started, and he was on a sort of a youth camp there, and he just fell in love with the Guardians. He was so obsessed with the Guardians, wanted to follow them around and see what they were doing. And they just took him under their wing and he came back to Wuikinuxv just feeling like that was his future, that was his path. And he had this incredible amount of pride, whether it was being out there driving the boat or whether it was collecting garbage for elders and bringing it to the dump. He was happy to be there and just seemed to be glowing with pride at what he was doing.

Jordan Tell me about the Wuikinuxv lands and where they are. What kind of territory are we talking about here for people outside of BC or even in BC nowhere near the coast?

Jimmy Thomson Yeah. So if you can picture Vancouver Island, it’s a long, narrow island that goes up the Southern Coast of BC. Just off the northern tip of Vancouver Island is Rivers Inlet. It’s a long Inlet that kind of dog legs up into the coast. And at the end of that inlet is Wuikinuxv. Their territory and their waters extend down that dog leg back out into the ocean. So it’s this incredibly beautiful, quite remote First Nation hemmed in on all sides by mountains. Those mountains were pretty heavily logged. The Inlet was very heavily fished by fishing lodges and commercial fisheries. And north of that is the territory of the Heiltsuk and northwest of that is the territory of the Kitasoo/Xai’Xais. And all of them are in this sort of coastal margin, bog coastal rainforest territory. And if you can picture Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii on the coast, they’re sort of nestled in between those two places.

Jordan You’ve alluded a couple of times now to Indigenous Guardians doing the work that you would normally picture park rangers doing. Who else is supposed to be doing this work? Like, where are the I guess not park rangers, since this is not a National Park, but like the Coast Guard, the people who would normally be patrolling these areas?

Jimmy Thomson One of the things that the Guardians do is rescuing people who might have had a mishap on a kayak or their boat has gotten lost or something like that. And that, of course, as you say, is the kind of work that you might imagine the Coast Guard doing. But it’s incredibly complicated and almost endless coastline. If you imagine all these inlets, all the islands, all the straits and passages, it’s a very complex and endless coast. So the First Nations, they’re right there. First of all, they know that area, but also they’re there. The Coast Guard does not have the resources or the manpower to patrol every single nook and cranny of the coast. It’s not even really reasonable to expect them to in fact. They have boats in Bella Coola, they have boats in Port Hardy, they have boats in Bella Bella. And then they patrol with these sort of 43 meters long Coast Guard ships that you can probably picture in your head. But they can’t be expected to be everywhere at once. And so the Guardians are really filling in that gap that is left by the absence of federal and provincial governments.

Jordan Tell me about the times when having a Guardian at hand, when Coast Guard is nowhere around can make a difference.

Jimmy Thomson Yeah. This is something that comes up again and again and again when you speak with Guardians and with people in First Nations that have guardians. I was speaking with this carver, George Johnson, someone that I had met a number of years ago, and went and visited him in his carving shack in Wuikinuxv when I was there. He’s just a lovely, lovely man. He was going upriver one day to get some wood. He’s a carver, obviously, so he had gotten a contract to do some carving and he knew exactly where to go and what kind of wood he wanted. So he’s coming back with his load, came around the kind of the jetty, not really a jetty, but like the floating dock on the river. And his boat got caught in a line and immediately started sinking. He said he turned around and suddenly the back of his boat is underwater. He had no time at all to react and was suddenly in this very freezing cold water floating downstream. And it’s after sunset. And so he is kind of disoriented, he’s floating down the river. He jams his arm into a Jerry Can and that’s the only thing that keeps him afloat.

And he can hear people who had sort of seen what was happening and they’re running down the bank of the river trying to help them, but there’s not much they can do. And if you can imagine trying to call the Coast Guard dispatch in Bella Bella, which is maybe 50, 60 km away, so maybe an hour by boat, by fast boat. It’s just not going to happen. They can’t get there in time. And so eventually he did manage to get to shore on his own. But the Guardians were right there and they were the ones who got him medical help and who would have been the ones to rescue him. Had he not been able to get himself to shore. I’ve heard of kayakers who have capsized. I’ve heard of body recoveries, unfortunately. The Guardians are the ones who are there in the community and they can respond when disaster hits.

Jordan I’m trying to understand how formalized these jobs are and how much or how little I guess they vary from First Nation to First Nation. Like, do they have official duties, official territory? What is this job on paper?

Jimmy Thomson They do have official duties. They have uniforms and they have training. In fact, the Canadian government is part of delivering that training. They partner with these First Nations and help them get the training that they need in, for example, boat driving or emergency response. So, yeah, the Guardian’s job, it’s a real job. It’s a real career that you can move through, that you can get trained in and get paid for, just like anything else.

Jordan What kind of power do they have? You mentioned just as an example crab traps that should not be planted in a certain place. Can they arrest people, ticket people, just remove the traps? How do they compare to a member of the Coast Guard?

Jimmy Thomson Well, a good example is the crab traps. I spoke with Doug Neasloss, he’s the resource conservation person at the Kitasoo/Xai’Xais First Nation. They have a pilot project on the go with the government where they have been effectively deputized to issue tickets, to have the same kind of enforcement power as a Park Ranger might, or a DFO officer might, just in the sense of being able to issue tickets or confiscate gear because there’s a lot of illegal fishing that happens in their territory. So that’s something that has been talked about in a lot of different Guardian programs. I know that when I was in Bella Coola a number of years ago talking to their Guardians, they were also pushing for that for themselves. And in other places, in the north especially, the Guardians are working with Parks Canada very closely, and they’re effectively taking on the role of Parks Canada staff in places like Thaidene Nene National Park in Northwest Territories.

Jordan I’m going to try to ask this question in a sensitive way. We’ve talked a lot on this program about resources that various levels of government allocate for First Nations and Indigenous communities to police themselves, to protect themselves, protect their land, etc. Often we’re told that it’s nowhere close to enough. And this program sounds amazing, and some of the work you describe going on is amazing. You could look at it from the other side and see this as the Canadian government outsourcing something it should be doing for First Nations communities to the communities themselves and perhaps not paying as much for it.

Jimmy Thomson I think I disagree with that take.

Jordan Well, it’s not a take. I’m just asking the question.

Jimmy Thomson Sure. I disagree with that framing, I think, because what it really is is bringing the jobs that we might imagine sending some person from Toronto or Vancouver up to do, for example, checking on crab traps, and then saying to these First Nations on the coast, what’s your priority? And where do you want to allocate your resources, and we’ll support you in doing that. But is illegal crab shopping really important to you? Okay. Then here’s the training you might need or the authority you might need to enforce the rules that your First Nation has around illegal crab fishing. In doing so, they’re also saving the government a lot of money. Sure. But it seems like a better use of resources, in my opinion, to have people who are already there taking on those responsibilities.

Another thing that they can do, which is a really fascinating growth in the science field right now is something called EDNA. And I don’t know if it’s something that you’ve spoken about on the show before.

Jordan It is not, explain it to us.

Jimmy Thomson Yeah. I don’t know why this would be a thing that would make it onto the show, but I think it’s a really cool development in science, which is effectively the ability to take a sample of water and send it to a lab somewhere, and then they can examine that water for DNA that might be present in it. So you can get an estimate of what fish are there or what mammals have even passed through that stream. It’s incredibly powerful technology, and most importantly, it means that you don’t need to be there to see the fish. You don’t need to put an electro fishing gear in the water and count the fish that come up to the surface or whatever. You can just take a sample of water and then use that to get a representation of what’s actually out there. So that means that people who maybe don’t have that level of training can still be extremely useful in conservation science. So that’s being done by a lot of Guardians programs.

Jordan What happens to all the data they gather from the EDNA stuff and the scientific research, to data on illegal fishing or what’s going on off the coast? I imagine each First Nation keeps their own, but then the rest goes to the government, to a central database. How transparent is the stuff that we’re gathering out there?

Jimmy Thomson This is all owned by the nations, and some of it is shared between nations and with other organizations through data sharing agreements. So in my case, they gave me their patrol data with a data sharing agreement that basically said, don’t share our sensitive sites, sacred sites, and things like that. But they gave me all of this data, which is incredible. I went to DFO, and I went to the coast guard to ask for that same data. Where are you patrolling? How often are you going? Who’s going out there? What are you doing? They laughed at me. Imagine a federal government or provincial government even just handing over data from their patrol. In Canada, we’re so far from that. Our governments are the exact opposite of that. They hold and protect that information so jealously. They won’t even let me talk to someone.

I’m in the middle of another story right now where I’m trying to just get someone from DFO to talk to me about changes that they’ve made to a program, actually after reporting that I did, and I was on this show to talk about the fisheries observer program. That’s still happening, and I want to talk to DFO about it. And they canceled the only interview that they’ve given me in two years. They canceled it 2 hours before it began. So I still have never spoken with anyone from DFO for it. And contrast that with the Guardians, where I asked them for data and three different first nations all said, yeah, sure. What do you need? How can we work with you?

Jordan What stuck out to you when you did get that data and look at it? Without revealing any of the secure sites, what was important in there?

Jimmy Thomson It really shows how thorough they are, every square inch of that territory. I don’t want to necessarily correlate the patrol area to their land claims or things like that, because that’s another area where I think that I could probably get myself in trouble. But they are covering an incredible amount of territory. The Kitasoo/Xai’Xais First Nation, they covered 8000 km² of coast. And that’s just coast. That’s just the people in the boats. The Heiltsuk covered 3000 km² and the Wuikinuxv, and there’s only a few of them, covered about 2000 km² of their coast. So huge amounts of territory are being covered over the course of a few months by these First Nations. And that’s not counting the patrols they’re doing inland. I know that, for example, in Bella Coola, they have huge levels of land based patrols where they’re going and chasing grizzly bears out of the community in the middle of the night, and they’re patrolling for fisheries stuff upriver and all kinds of stuff. So there’s a ton more than what I even got through that data.

Jordan What’s the future of this program and programs like it? You mentioned there’s potential for it to expand to other First Nations, and it already has. It seems like there’s a bigger vision at play here.

Jimmy Thomson There is, yeah. There are currently about 70 of these programs nationwide, and it’s growing all the time. When I was in Northwest Territories, in Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve. That was one of the first, if not the first National Park that is co managed by the local First Nation, by Guardians. They have a Guardians program that’s in Northwest Territories, and that program is effectively the front line of monitoring in that park. That’s happening more and more across the country, up in the Arctic, especially where it’s really hard to get people. When I spoke with Catherine McKenna, the former environment Minister, about this, she said she doesn’t see any new parks being created without First Nations co management, which is a huge sea change. If you imagine Wood Buffalo National Park, for example, in Northern Alberta, that National Park was created by forcibly displacing First Nations people and Métis people. There are stories about cabins being burned behind them as they were escorted off the land. So incredibly traumatic and needless. Now we have parks that are being created specifically in the opposite direction where First Nations are being brought in to manage it to be the front line of conservation in those parks. That I think is one of the key parts of the future. That’s only the parks part of it. There’s also just remote places that are being stewarded more and more by First Nations Guardians.

Jordan The Guardians that you met and spoke to, do they want an increase of the kind of state power we talked about earlier, the potential to issue tickets and seize equipment and that kind of stuff, or do they prefer to steward the lands in a different way, like if they could have more from the government, what form would that take?

Jimmy Thomson I can’t really speak for them, again, but I could say that when I spoke with the Guardians in Bella Coola, they were very eager to have that sort of state power handed over to them because why not? They’re the ones who are there. They’re wearing the uniform, and they’re the ones talking to the fishermen. If they can’t have that enforcement power, if they can’t have that power of the state to issue a ticket, for example, it’s a lot harder for them to project that power. So I think that’s probably the case for a lot of Guardians programs and people in Guardians positions. But yeah, I can’t really speak for them about what they would want. I know that it probably wouldn’t exactly correlate to the way that governments handle their enforcement duties or other sort of stewardship duties out in the territories right now.

Jordan The last thing I’ll ask you is maybe just about philosophy, in terms of if there is any difference between how people working as Coast Guards would see the land versus how First Nations Guardians or Indigenous Guardians would see it. Even if it doesn’t necessarily correlate to different kinds of power and methods, how do they approach this job that’s different from how the Coast Guard would?

Jimmy Thomson I’ve been on Coast Guard ships and spoken with a lot of people who work in Coast Guard jobs, and I know that they love being out on the sea. They love being out on the territory, and they have a lot of respect for the land that they’re working on. So I don’t want to suggest that that’s not present for them. But I think that it’s different when it’s your First Nation’s territory and you’ve grown up there and you’ve learned from the people in your life and the people in your community about this or that site. And you know that at the end of the day, if the crab stocks are kept healthy, then your kids and grandkids will be able to feed themselves from that land. I think that’s the big difference is the ownership and the feeling of belonging on that land. When you’re visiting there as a member of the Coast Guard or maybe BC Parks Patrol, it would be hard to have that same sense of ownership, even if you feel the same love and the same duty to protect it. And so I think that the people working for Canadian governments really do value the protection that they’re doing. It’s just hard to imagine that they have the exact same connection.

Jordan Jimmy, thank you so much for this. Really fascinating.

Jimmy Thomson Thanks so much.

Jordan Jimmy Thomson writing for the Narwhal. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us anytime via email, Thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And of course you can find us in every single podcast player. You pick one. You listen to us. Then like us, rate us, review us, tell your friends, whatever you want to do. We appreciate any sort of organic promotion.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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