Salmon Nation’s Festival of What Works
- Amy Compare
- Nov 21, 2020
- 4 min read
Over the past week, I attended a handful of sessions from Salmon Nation’s Festival of What Works, “a week of free discussions, workshops, film screenings and panels discussing “what works” in our bioregion—from Alaska to California, and everywhere between” with a sharing of “practical, replicable ideas at the leading edge of education, economic development, social activism, health, healing, food production, media making, the arts and environmentalism.” (Many of the session were recorded through Facebook live, and can be found here) I lead a group of 5 AmeriCorps members completing restoration projects all around Pierce County, Washington, and I am lucky that my supervisors value learning opportunities for me and my corps members. We took time away from our usual pulling of invasive blackberry this week to learn about conservation from diverse perspectives of those involved in Salmon Nation (the Pacific Northwest, from Canada through Northern California), including Indigenous people, scientists, and land conservationists. We learned about the implications of farmed salmon on wild populations, carbon sequestration in the 21st century, Indigenous science and its place in conservation, and fire’s role in ecosystems. Each of the sessions we attended provided authentic interaction between Western and Indigenous science.
A theme that many people touched on were the Indigenous values of reciprocity, resilience, and responsibility, values that I am trying to practice in my own life. I think the most impactful moment of the festival for me was an anecdote that a woman named Skye Agustine, a descendant of the Stz’uminus First Nation, shared in the session on Indigenous Science. She talked about clam gardens that First Nations in Canada have used to maintain and increase production of clams. She talked about how clam gardens have been maintained for hundreds and thousands of years where she is from, and how the knowledge to continue to maintain them and care for them (for the benefit of both humans and the clams) have been has been passed down for generations through that time. It is both crazy and beautiful to know that that practice of reciprocity has been protected and shared for such a long time. And knowing that people are out there actively protecting and restoring this practice gives me a lot of hope for the future and what I can do in the field of conservation.
The work that my crew does, especially now in the winter that we are primarily only removing blackberry and scotch broom, is generally pretty monotonous, but I am trying to do things that help them build reciprocity with the land, like learning what we can forage to eat and reflection on what we value about the places we work. I want my crew to leave this year having great resolve around why they do the work they do and not just how to do it.
I have also been learning recently about how indigenous people have been practicing land management for thousands of years, and the "pristine" wilderness that settler-colonists found when they came to North America were actually carefully managed landscapes that had adapted to human use. These practices, like maintaining clam gardens, had been practiced for hundreds of years until settler-colonists took over and made them illegal (for example, low-level prescribed burns) or forced Indigenous groups off of their lands so they couldn’t manage their ancestral lands.
I think one thing that surprised me (that shouldn't have) was many indigenous folks in this conference talking about their tribes historically (and some now) having guardians of the land and rivers - people whose jobs were to watch over the land and make sure everyone else was taking care of it properly. One woman we listened to talked about her tribe having policies in place to prevent people from destroying the land. And she talked about how as much as people gather for ceremonies were/are about spiritual purposes, they were/are also about relaying information, especially around management for the land. An example she gave was like if a salmon population was steadily declining over 15 years, then the guardians of the salmon would relay to everyone in ceremony to not take as many salmon in the next 5 years (and other information/plans like that). I think in general there is still this pervasive thought that Indigenous groups were not nearly as technologically advanced as European settlers, but they had amazing systems in place to be sustainable that the settlers didn't have the context/empathy to understand and really destroyed in a lot of areas.
This led me to look at some of the ways Indigenous groups are conserving land or are now guiding other entities to conserve land. It turns out that land is degrading slower on Indigenous lands than other lands (a better job of managing natural resources, lower rates of species decline, less pollution, etc). I think most importantly in managing land, Indigenous people have an advantage in long-term monitoring of the land we live on - they have been here far longer than any settlers have and have the background, perspective, and context for the impact of changes to the environment and why things are the way they are. Settlers who came in and changed the landscape rapidly did not have any long-term understanding of the land, and used it to their short-term benefit, which is why jobs like mine in restoring ecosystems exist. In fact, according to this National Geograpic article, Indigenous people all over the world, who make up less than 5% of the world’s population, protect about 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Some policy recommendations working with Indigenous groups includes requiring informed consent form indigenous people and local communities for conservation and development initiatives, supporting customary land management practices, bolstering indigenous and community conserved areas, and bringing together different forms of knowledge (including Indigenous and Western science).
There’s a lot more to dive into in regards to this, and I have a handful of articles I’m saving to read for another post.
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