Bull Kelp illustration by Sarah Jim
Summary
Ecological science has had a persistent blind spot: the deep involvement of Indigenous peoples in managing their lands and waters. The return of Sea Otters from the brink of extinction, while celebrated, was enacted under a framework of settler colonialism. As voracious predators themselves, otters compete with humans for all of the same sea foods. One shellfish in particular has become a flash point for fisheries – a modest mollusc, Haliotis kamtschatkana: Northern Abalone.
This is part two of our three-part series on kelp worlds. Listen to Part One: Trophic Cascadia, or carry on to Part Three: In the Balance.
Abalone shells by Mendel Skulski
Show Notes
This episode features Kii’iljuus Barbara Wilson, Dr. Anne Salomon, and Dr. Charles Menzies. Be sure to check out www.coastalvoices.net. Also, if you’re interested in Kii’iljuus’s masters thesis, you can find it here.
Music in this episode was produced by Sour Gout, Loam Zoku, the Western Family String Band, and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, and Simone Miller
This podcast includes audio recorded by soundstack, vewiu, jeremjuru, ermine, tschapajew, dmunk, jayfrosting, klankbeeld, dr_skitz, and gottlieb, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, including academic literature and great journalism from a variety of media outlets, and we like to cite our sources:
McLeish, T. (2018). Return of the sea otter the story of the animal that evaded extinction on the Pacific Coast. Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
Menzies, C. (2010). Dm sibilhaanm da laxyuubm Gitxaała: Picking Abalone in Gitxaała Territory. Human Organization, 69(3), 213–220.
Menzies, C. R. (2015). Revisiting “Dm Sibilhaa'nm da Laxyuubm Gitxaała (Piicking Abalone in Gitxaała Territory)”: Vindication, Appropriation, and Archaeology. BC Studies, 187, 129.
Menzies, C. R. (2016). People of the saltwater: an ethnography of git lax moon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Pinkerton, E., Salomon, A. K., & Dragon, F. (2019). Reconciling social justice and ecosystem-based management in the wake of a successful predator reintroduction. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 76(6), 1031–1039.
Salomon, A. K., Wilson, K. I. B. J., White, X. E., Tanape, N., & Happynook, T. M. (2015). First Nations Perspectives on Sea Otter Conservation in British Columbia and Alaska. Sea Otter Conservation, 301–331.
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Future Ecologies is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Mendel Skulski 00:00
Hey everyone. Just so you know, this is part two of a three part series on kelp worlds. If you're just tuning in, we encourage you to go listen to part one first. Everything will make a lot more sense that way.
Introduction Voiceover 00:18
You are listening to season two of Future Ecologies.
[Sound of waves breaking]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 00:28
So, so the, the blue line is the, the intertidal. So this is, this is below or low tide. This is the beach. Okay? These are our ancestors. We come from the ocean where we believe we're ocean people. So the seafood and the fish and everything else are very much a part of our food. And so what's happening to the ocean is, is critical for us.
[Warm synth music over ocean sounds]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 01:11
And this, of course, is sea otter. And in the old days, the sea otters were harvested by the [speaking in Haida], or our hereditary chiefs. And they were the people that were able to wear them, to use them as inside our homes, and to keep the cold out during the winter.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 01:41
It just tells who I am.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 01:45
I'm the head woman. My brother next to me is our chief. And in the old days, the only people who would wear these things were people of high standing. With the coming of Europeans and the fur trade, it, uh, blasted that part of our world apart. And so, bringing these things back is a part of us revitalizing our world.
Anne Salomon 02:19
It's a really significant thing to see this headdress in front of this matriarch that has sea otter on it. Shows her standing and it shows the connection to the entire ecosystem and her people. So there's so much symbology and protocol and law associated with that piece and it's amazing that you guys just got to record that and it's and see it and she'll wear it tomorrow at convocation.
[Warm synth music ends and is replaced by the sound of a wave]
Mendel Skulski 02:54
Associate producer Simone Miller and I find ourselves in a room with two incredible women, transfixed by this beautiful ceremonial Haida headdress. It's a woven band with white and red and blue topped with the softest fur I've ever touched. Sea Otter. I'm admittedly feeling a little nervous because we are about to have a very serious conversation.
Anne Salomon 03:25
We want the deep tones of our voice.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 03:27
Our voices. My deep tone. [Laughter]
Adam Huggins 03:32
It does indeed sound very serious Mendel. Uh, so who are these extraordinary women and how did you come to be sharing a room with them? Sharing this room with them?
Mendel Skulski 03:44
Yeah, a room makes it sounds saucy.
Mendel Skulski 03:48
While you were off in Santa Cruz catching up with Jim Estes and his career studying sea otters, I thought I'd look into what was happening with kelp here on the coast of British Columbia. And you can't research kelp in BC without quickly coming across Dr. Anne Salomon's work.
Anne Salomon 04:05
My name is Anne Salomon. I'm an applied marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University and an associate professor there.
Mendel Skulski 04:13
And our other guest who honored us by sharing her headdress.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 04:17
What part of me do I introduce?
Anne Salomon 04:20
All of it.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 04:21
All of it? I'll be here till tomorrow.
Anne Salomon 04:23
True, there goes our hour. [Laughter]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 04:26
My name's Kii'iljuus. My English name is Barbara Wilson. And I am just graduating with my Masters in education. I, I did my thesis on climate change and the impact that it's having on our world. At home, I'm a grandmother. I'm a mother. I'm an elected representative of our village to the Council of the Haida Nation. I sit as the chair for Indigenous Justice and Residential Schools. I'm a matriarch for our clan, the [speaking in Haida], and we’re the Eagle clan from [speaking in Haida] on Haida Gwaii.
Mendel Skulski 05:19
And I would like to congratulate Barbara on her convocation the day after we recorded this interview last fall.
Adam Huggins 05:26
Congratulations. Okay, and just for our non-Canadian listeners, what is Haida Gwaii, Mendel?
[Rhythmic, suspenseful music starts playing]
Mendel Skulski 05:34
Haida Gwaii is a large island archipelago off the coast of Northern BC, just south of Alaska. Elder listeners might actually recognize it more as the Queen Charlotte Islands. They're the ancestral homeland of the Haida Nation, and have been historically surrounded by hugely productive waters and kelp forests. Today they're known around the world for their distinctive artwork and especially totem poles produced by Haida artists and carvers. I think that's all we need to say for now.
Adam Huggins 06:07
Yeah, that's, that's enough for now. Okay, so you mentioned abalone at the end of the last episode, and I am so curious, what are we going to talk about with these delightful guests?
Mendel Skulski 06:18
Okay, so last episode, you took us on a grand tour through Jim Estes career and the ecological insights we've been able to glean from that tough love triangle of sea otters, kelp forests, and urchins. We covered a lot of ground. We talked about keystone species, trophic cascades, hysteresis—some pretty heady stuff.
Adam Huggins 06:41
For sure.
Mendel Skulski 06:41
Yeah, a lot of real ecology. But we didn't really talk about the role of human beings in the coastal ecosystem.
Adam Huggins 06:50
We, we had human beings detonating nuclear bombs underground and other human beings counting starfish, and hunting whales to near extinction, and uh human beings arguing over how to interpret data.
Mendel Skulski 07:04
Okay, granted, but those were almost all modern scientists or fisher people. I'm talking about day to day human relationships with kelp ecosystems, going back to time immemorial. But I don't fault you for neglecting this aspect of the story. You're far from alone.
Anne Salomon 07:24
It seems so basic. And yet many, many scientists applied scientists in my field usually don't really think of humans as part of the system, nor some of these key species interactions. And so we will go a long way if we just start by doing those few things.
Music 07:44
So today, we're going to go a long way, by doing just that. Looking at kelp and shellfish ecosystems as if our lives depended on them. And in some very real ways, at least here on the coast, they very well just might. At least, that's how it's always been for the Haida and other coastal peoples. This episode, we're going to put aside those fancy ecological ideas and talk about what it's like to be in relation to otters, sea urchins, and kelp. And what happens when colonial government upset a balance that's been maintained for thousands of years. This is part two of our three part series on kelp worlds. I'm calling it Ocean People.
[Theme music starts playing]
Introduction Voiceover 08:32
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, this is Future Ecologies, where your hosts, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, explore the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
[Theme music fades out]
Mendel Skulski 09:10
So we've been talking a lot about kelp from biological and ecological perspectives. So I couldn't help asking Anne what does it feel like to be in a kelp forest?
[Ethereal music starts playing overtop ocean sounds]
Anne Salomon 09:24
Kelp forests are beautiful.
Anne Salomon 09:27
They're like liquid forests of the sea. And when you come up to them, depending on the ocean conditions, you can often see blades of golden kelp on the surface of the water. And if you're about to dive in them and explore them underwater, you usually have a couple of feelings associated with that beautiful view. A little bit of anxiety because you've got to gear up and usually the boat is jostling you around. You've got to find all your gear, and then you can relax again once you have all of your gear on. And you go over the side of the boat, dive into the water, and…
[Sound of object falling into water]
Anne Salomon 10:04
…then all of a sudden you're surrounded by those beautiful blades of kelp and bubbles as you descend. And depending on what kind of kelp forest you're in, if you're in bull kelp forests, you start gliding down along these beautiful stipes. These stipes are like golden ropes, because at the top is the air bladder from which the fronds, the blades, the leaves of the kelp are at the top of the surface, right? So you're going down those long stipes, down to the bottom. And if you're in a giant kelp forest and you see blades all the way down, and it's pretty different. And if it's a blue sky on a sunny day, you often see glimmering shafts of light going through the water and bouncing off the blades and it's gorgeous and it doesn't stop there. Because as you get to the bottom, then you see all these understory kelps. And they're all different sizes and shapes and beautiful hues of golden browns and golden golds. And they're just gorgeous. And, and I guess what also makes them so gorgeous is they're so fluid. They're moving with the current and the swell and, and it is beautiful. And then of course there's all the animals that live amongst this beautiful liquid forest. So, with fish darting around or some moving quite slowly, and usually at the bottom, you tend to see this beautiful, bright pink crustose coralline algae. So it's a really beautiful contrast. And on that coralline algae, you often see lots of different animals. So that's what I think of when I think of kelp, from the surface of a boat and below the water. But there is one other place you often see lots of kelp, and like Barb told you, it's pictured on her head piece there. And that's in the intertidal. And what's beautiful about the intertidal and all the kelps there is it's accessible to so many people. That undersea world it's really accessible to, you know, seals, sea lions, fish, lots of beautiful invertebrates, and a few people that get to scuba dive. But the intertidal is accessible to so many people and you can walk down to the seashore at low tide and see many of the things I've just described to you. They're just flopped over instead of standing up and moving with the current.
Adam Huggins 12:29
That's an experience of kelp those of us who live on the coast are more familiar with. Basically washed up on the beach, where it's easy to harvest and take home to eat.
Mendel Skulski 12:38
[Laughs] Yeah, you and Barbara are on the same wavelength. Get it? [Laughs] Wavelength.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 12:48
Kelp. To me kelp is food and a very important food. I've learned through my years of research that it provides extra enzymes to people who are ocean people. And that extra enzymes allow us to extract vitamins and minerals from all the foods we eat, as we are ocean people. So when we get herring spawn on kelp…
Adam Huggins 13:24
Herring spawn on kelp?
Mendel Skulski 13:27
Yeah, it's considered a delicacy around the world and it remains a highly valued traditional food to the Haida, who know it as [speaking in Haida], the Haida and Coast Salish people in general, are often spoken about as salmon peoples, but judging by the remains discovered in middens, up and down the coast, herring peoples might be even more appropriate. This mighty little forage fish travels in these enormous schools. It's basically the basis of an entire oceanic food web here in the northwest. Literally everything eats them. Salmon, whales, seals, sea lions, birds, and people. In the last few decades, most of the commercial herring fisheries have crashed here on the coast. But that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that herring like to lay their roe on kelps and that the Haida have been harvesting and eating them together for thousands of years. But in recent times, an extractive commercial fishery for [speaking in Haida] has made even this mainstay of Salish cuisine much less common.
Adam Huggins 14:35
It sounds delicious.
Mendel Skulski 14:36
It sure does. And the value of kelps as food is only one aspect of their importance to the Haida.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 14:43
It means that if we're rowing or if there's a big storm and there's lots of kelp around, there'll be a safe passage on the inside of the kelp. And so it has a different relevance to ocean people than people who come to extract it for commercial value.
Adam Huggins 15:06
Right. So it acts, kelp acts as a natural storm break.
Mendel Skulski 15:12
Exactly. I got the sense that these two could talk about kelp all day. So I wanted to make sure that I asked them about that kryptonite to the kelp forest. That bizarro world. What is an urchin barren actually like?
[Ethereal music ends]
[Ominous music starts playing]
Anne Salomon 15:31
Picture this. A blanket of red on the sea floor where you have just high high high numbers of sea urchins. Spiky, red, and purple, and sometimes a green, um, invertebrates that have these long spines. Some of them longer than others. And they're shoulder to shoulder. And because these are some of the rocky reefs' most notorious grazers, there's very little kelp around. So imagine shoulder to shoulder red spiky balls. Underneath they have these things called Aristotle's lanterns. And they're these mouth parts that can graze away at kelp and many, many other things. And underneath this blanket of mostly red, sometimes red and purple, sea urchins, shoulder to shoulder, you tend to see this bright pink crustose coralline algae. And so, if there's any space in between the urchins or as their spines are hitting each other, you can see it through those spines. Imagine just then, a bottom carpet of pink. And often urchin barrens, they can be patchy, but around Haida Gwaii, at least, they're vast. And so when you're diving and you look up, sometimes you just see, when the visibility is decent, red and pink that goes on for a long time.
[Ominous music gets louder]
Mendel Skulski 16:53
This is where we as audio producers are supposed to play the ominous music and tell you that urchin barrens are bad and kelp forests are good and here is how you can help the kelp.
Media Clip 17:07
[Unspecified high-pitched voice] Kelp me!
Mendel Skulski 17:08
Oh my god. [Laughs]
Adam Huggins 17:11
I had been urchin for a place to stick that pun in.
Mendel Skulski 17:13
No! [Laughs] But as regular listeners to this program will find unsurprising…
[Ominous music ends abruptly]
Mendel Skulski 17:22
…it just isn't quite that simple. For Barbara, urchins are also an important cultural food.
[Moody synth music starts playing]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 17:29
For me, when I think of [speaking in Haida], [speaking in Haida] is what we call the big red sea urchins. I think of food because before they were commercialized and separated us from that, that was a very large part of our food.
Adam Huggins 17:49
I can sense a pattern here.
Mendel Skulski 17:52
Totally. It's, it's actually the gonads of the sea urchin that you eat. And this food is also a traditional Haida mainstay that's valued as a delicacy around the world. And with that has come more commercial extraction.
Adam Huggins 18:07
Right. So would it be fair to say that urchin barrens are actually a boon for sea urchin harvesters?
Mendel Skulski 18:13
Well, not exactly. There are just so many urchins and not enough kelp.
Media Clip 18:17
[Unspecified high-pitched voice] Kelp me!
Mendel Skulski 18:18
Noo. [laughs]
Anne Salomon 18:18
Because they're shoulder to shoulder and because there's not a lot of food around, if you crack them open, there's not a lot of food inside of them. They're—the gonad is really minimal.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 18:19
[Whispers] Skinny.
Anne Salomon 18:19
Skinny. That's right, exactly. Skinny and not worth eating much because there's not a lot of gonad in there. If you go up to the feed line in the shallow waters, where it's wavy, and there might be some kelps because the urchins, you know, they're affected by waves as well, and so they can't graze as efficiently, and they get jostled around up in the shallows and so kelp can grow up in the shallows. That's where you can get some urchins that have pretty decent gonad because there's food there. But in those urchin barrens, you know, they're high density of sea urchins, but they're like skinny little sea urchins. They're not filled with a lot of gonad.
[Moody synth music becomes playful]
Mendel Skulski 19:09
So, in urchin barrens, most of the urchins are too starved to be good to eat. It's only really near the shoreline where some kelps can survive due to wave action that those large urchin persist. But often, commercial harvesters beat your average community member to that harvest. So sea urchin barrens are a pretty mixed bag.
Adam Huggins 19:30
Oh, okay, so can I play the ominous music now?
Mendel Skulski 19:34
I guess. Just a little bit.
[Playful synth music is replaced by ominous music]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 19:38
Sea urchin barrens are a result of the extraction of the sea otters from our waters. And so what's happened is, all those sea urchins have been commercialized and it means that more is taken from our waters without balance and so it's quite significant, what's happening all around the world with the extraction.
Adam Huggins 20:10
Okay, so it's not the urchin barrens per se, but the attitude of extractivism. Whether it's sea otters or urchins, or or [speaking in Haida], or even grey whales that really disturbs both the ecological and social balance.
Mendel Skulski 20:25
Exactly. And, and this is where Barbara's story and the scientific story we heard from Jim last episode—that's where they really line up. Too much extraction causing trophic cascades and having all of these unintended but predictable consequences for people and ecosystems. But now, we're coming to the part where these two stories have historically diverged in a big way.
[Ominous music fades out]
Mendel Skulski 20:58
So there's a really important species that lives off kelp that you neglected to mention last episode.
Adam Huggins 21:03
Famously.
Mendel Skulski 21:04
Called abalone.
Adam Huggins 21:06
Right, so what is abalone?
Anne Salomon 21:09
When I think of abalone, um, it's a beautiful marine snail.
Adam Huggins 21:15
It's a what?
Mendel Skulski 21:17
[Laughs] It's a marine snail. It's a gastropod.
Anne Salomon 21:21
And it's got these really cool respiratory pores around the edge. And they shoot sperm and egg out of those respiratory pores.
[Party horn unfurling sound]
Anne Salomon 21:34
Which is pretty cool.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 21:35
Yeah.
Anne Salomon 21:36
And when they're close enough you can, and underwater, when you see the sperm and the egg in the water swishing around, right, that's where, that's how they reproduce. They reproduce, like, these broadcast spawners reproduce this way, and it's pretty amazing to see.
Mendel Skulski 21:52
If you've never seen an abalone then you've probably at least seen their iridescent shells, which are well known for their nacre, or the pearly inner layer of the shell. And, like almost everything else that we've discussed around kelp forests, abalone are a delicacy that's prized in Haida culture and around the world.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 22:13
Abalone is is another animal that grazes on the bottom of the ocean. And we use it for food again. Or, we used to. It's amazing if you eat it right out of the water. I remember, as a young girl, my father would take us out and we'd get abalone, and you didn't dive for it. You just took what was along the shoreline at low tide. It was a way of conservation. And so now, when people are diving, even though they're protected, they're not. But they're very important.
Adam Huggins 22:58
What does she mean by protected?
Mendel Skulski 23:01
Northern abalone, which is the species that occurs along the BC coast, is currently listed as endangered under the Species at Risk Act. And to tell the story of how it got that way, I'm going to bring one more person into the conversation.
Charles Menzies 23:15
I'm Charles Menzies. I'm from the north coast of British Columbia. I'm a member of Gitxaała Nation. I'm a faculty member at University of British Columbia, and I spent most of my adult career either catching fish or, as I'd like to jokingly say, writing about fish.
Mendel Skulski 23:31
Charles is actually selling himself short here. He writes about shellfish too. And specifically, abalone, or in Sm'algyax, the Tsimshianic language spoken by the Gitxaała, bilhaa.
Adam Huggins 23:44
Bilhaa.
[Party horn unfurling sound]
Mendel Skulski 23:48
Charles has lots to say about bilhaa.
[Playful xylophone music starts playing]
Charles Menzies 23:53
Well, it's a - it's tasty. [Laughs] I have to say it's one of the most delicious sea creatures one can consume. People sometimes think it's kind of tough and hard, and there's an element of that because you're eating the foot of an animal. And so, that in terms of the way, that it's like a snail with a single shell over its back. And there's this real strong kind of suction cup-like foot. And that's mostly what you, that not mostly, that is what you eat. You peel it out of the shell, you scrape off the little bit of the viscera that's there, you clean it a little bit to get the black around the edges. And then you kind of—some people like to tenderize them but you don't really have to. You just, you can slice them and fry them, steam them, uh, dry them. The older women—I've talked to some of the older matriarchs in the community, and they will talk about the old days, the old times of drying abalone and where they first steam them in a pit at the beach. And then after they were steamed to cook and taken out and skewered on little cedar stakes and then hung in the in the smokehouse. And so you can almost imagine, you could kind of hear them clunking if you were banging them together.
[Xylophone clinking sounds]
Charles Menzies 25:03
I mean, as a kid, my dad, I mean, I write about this one of my papers, but as a kid, I remember we'd always get, a few abalone would turn up. Somewhere, somehow. Either dad would bring it home from the boat or somebody would drop it off. And I can remember him saying it because, of course, he's the old style kind of guy. So he only cooks certain things. It was kind of like steaks or he carved the turkey and prepared the turkey. So basically, my mom did most of the cooking. But when abalone, or fish, like eulachon turned up, he did those. But I remember he'd stand, of course. He had a big production. He'd take these and he'd hit them with a mallet, he'd drop them in an egg wash, he'd put them in flour, and he'd throw them in the pan. And you know, and they really kind of taste like, they do, literally do kind of melt away. Um, and I know my comparatives tell you what it tastes like, isn't necessarily going to help because I think it tastes like the lateral muscles in a sea cucumber. [Laughter] So, you know, how is that going to help people understand?
Adam Huggins 25:57
I actually have eaten the lateral muscles of a sea cucumber so I think I get the idea.
[Playful xylophone music stops]
Mendel Skulski 26:04
[Laughs] I can only imagine, because, dear listeners, we were unable to sample bilhaa in preparation for this episode, due to the fact that it's endangered and therefore illegal to harvest.
Adam Huggins 26:16
Right. So how did that happen?
Mendel Skulski 26:19
Charles says that important cultural foods that weren't commercially viable to settlers tended to remain largely within Gitxaała control, under the radar, so to speak. And up until the 1970s, settlers weren't that interested in bilhaa.
Charles Menzies 26:35
In a weird way, there was no pressure on abalone stocks up until the 70s. And they were kind of sitting there. Um, people would harvest them. There was a recreational harvest. There was a kind of modest commercial harvest.
Mendel Skulski 26:51
But then, in the 70s, there were major changes in the fishing industry. This was about the time that Jim was first heading up to the Aleutians, and when whaling was really picking up in the north Pacific.
Charles Menzies 27:02
The Japanese fish markets started to expand in a different way and there's a lot of investment into Canada and other parts of the world. And abalone became a species of interest. And within about 15 years, abalone were destroyed as a commercial fishery. And it's every single maneuver that was made to abalone in terms of controlling and regulating them led to increased catches. Led to greater chasing them down and lower diminishing stocks. And by the time they get to the mid, somewhere around the late 80s, they basically shut it all down and made it illegal for anybody to capture abalone.
Mendel Skulski 27:39
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed the abalone fishery in 1990. But they didn't just close the commercial fishery. They closed all fisheries. But as Barbara points out, it hasn't worked.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 27:50
Even though the law is supposed to protect it, it's a commodity that's very precious and goes into the black market. And people who are diving for other things are speculated to have access to those things at the same time. And on Haida Gwaii, because we have big islands and big water around us, it's hard to keep track of what's happening everywhere.
[Meditative music begins playing]
Mendel Skulski 28:28
Once the abalone stocks were depleted by extractive fisheries, it doesn't take a lot of illegal harvesting to keep them from recovering. At the same time, First Nations people like the Haida and the Gitxaała, who highly prize abalone, are now criminalized if they attempt to harvest it. Even though it wasn't their fault, the stocks were depleted. A whole generation of young people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, like ourselves, has never tasted the signature food of the kelp forests. And for the elders who remember eating it, it's even harder.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 29:01
When our people get old and they're in their last days, that's usually one of the foods that they ask for. They would like to have abalone before they pass on and so it's very emotional for us. And we talk about it all the time, on how we'd like to be able to bring them what they want.
Anne Salomon 29:32
And you can't easily because of the Canadian government right now.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 29:36
I know.
Anne Salomon 29:36
Yeah.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 29:37
It's ridiculous.
Anne Salomon 29:40
That's one of the big problems, right? I mean, these kind of implications of these extractive events have ecological implications, they have social, cultural implications, and they have emotional implications.
[Meditative music fades out]
Mendel Skulski 29:58
I could tell, speaking with Barbara, just how devastating this loss is. On top of all the other challenges faced by her people under colonization, and colonial institutions have a nasty habit of adding insult to injury, in this case, while government biologists closed down the fishery, in an arguably well intentioned effort to prevent further declines, archeologists and ecologists were arguing that actually, abalone was never an important food for coastal First Nations until very recently.
Adam Huggins 30:33
Why? Why would they argue that?
Mendel Skulski 30:36
I'll let Charles explain.
Charles Menzies 30:38
The interesting thing is when First Nations communities then start saying in the middle that, ‘well we have a traditional right to harvest abalone. You shouldn't inhibit our customary harvests. We agree that the abalone stocks have been knocked down but it's you guys and your dive fisheries and your targeted fisheries and your bad attitude about management that's caused the problem.’ Then you start hearing things like well, ‘you never used to eat abalone.’
Mendel Skulski 31:00
The implication being that if you can't prove that you ate abalone historically, why should you have any rights to it now? Now that we've uh [bleeped] the fishery.
Charles Menzies 31:11
And this introduces what I like to call the kelp forest parable.
[Upbeat music starts playing]
Charles Menzies 31:20
One of the things that's really big in the ecological world today, in marine ecology, is about biodiversity and the kelp forests. And the story is told sort of in this way. Wantonly destructive humans in the late 1700s in the early 1800s, Indigenous and non-Indigenous cooperating together, decimated sea otters.
[Sound of collective sad groan from audience]
Charles Menzies 31:44
Why do we care about sea otters? Besides the fact they're being exported to the Asian markets for great riches in the pelt? Because sea otters are said to keep down the pernicious sea urchins.
[Sound of collective boo from audience]
Charles Menzies 31:55
And, as a kind of collateral damage, they push the abalone below the low mean tide mark, where no human without adequate technology could ever encounter abalone. And then you have this massive diversity. And then after you extirpate the sea otters, the urchins start to roar back in, they mow down the kelp forests, you have a massive decline of biodiversity. You then see the abalone, the bilhaa, start to kind of climb up the beach because there's no natural predator for them. And they get closer and closer. Because, my favorite line about these things is if you call, you know the biologists call them cryptic, crevice dwelling critters. And it's too many alliterations there. But of course they start to reveal themselves. And to carry their story along, some Indigenous person is walking on the beach and sees this object and goes, oh, what is this? Let me take a look at it and of course reaches down, picks it up off the beach and decides to taste it, says I love it and starts eating up abalone.
[Upbeat music ends abruptly]
Charles Menzies 32:52
Now, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek and facetious and a little bit nasty with the way I'm recounting this, but the point of the story is that well, ‘hey, look guys, Indigenous people might be—you might think they're ecologically sound. They're not. They destroyed the sea otter. And then as a consequence of that, they derived an unmerited benefit of abalone turning up into their diet. And then over 100 years or so people have kind of gotten accustomed. They think they have always eaten abalone only when we know they haven't. And any abalone they did have came from California with the Spanish fur traders, they'll point out.’
Adam Huggins 33:27
So what Charles is saying, is that Jim Estes' foundational research on kelp forest ecology has been sort of weaponized to argue that before the sea otters were hunted to near extinction, they would have eaten all the abalone along with all the urchins and that Indigenous people would never have had access to abalone until recently as a result.
Mendel Skulski 33:49
Yes, except, of course, as a result of trade.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 33:53
I think one thing that's important to acknowledge is the fact that our ancestors traveled up and down the coast, and they traded for abalone.
Mendel Skulski 34:04
There's one species of abalone here in BC. But there are seven in California. And some, like the red, are quite large.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 34:13
The buttons that we use on our ropes are made out of abalone shell. And so, in the old days, our ancestors traveled down, as far as we know right now, as far as California and maybe farther south and traded for the gwúlxa. The big ones are called gwúlxa. They're like this. Ours are, are like this and are very thin and brittle. The big ones are very thick, and they're easier to make things out of. So you'll see it in jewelry or you'll see them in sculptures and things like that these days. And some of it comes from other places. But our main source for the big ones was California.
Adam Huggins 35:11
That sounds like a trade that way predates the Spanish fur traders, right?
Mendel Skulski 35:16
Definitely. Abalone had clearly been important here since before the sea otters were wiped out a couple of centuries back. But the main reason some archaeologists and historians would argue that coastal First Nations didn't eat abalone until recently is that they just hadn't found any in shell middens.
Adam Huggins 35:34
So you're saying that nowhere, in any of the middens on the coast, amongst all of those herring bones and oyster shells and salmon bones and what have you, all of that evidence for what people have eaten throughout time—nowhere have they found any abalone shells?
Mendel Skulski 35:49
Apparently not. But as a Gitxaała person, Charles knew that archaeologists were wrong about the historical importance of abalone and he also knew that northern abalone shells are actually quite fragile, which is why, as Barbara explained, California abalone were used for regalia. So Charles decided, what the heck? If the archaeologists couldn't find them, then he would.
[Optimistic music starts playing]
Charles Menzies 36:16
One of the things that kind of drove my, kind of, curiosity was like, how come nobody's finding abalone? So I'd send these emails out to different famous archaeologists up and down, who'd do work in BC and Alaska and Washington State, and I'd ask them and they all assured me no, there aren't any. And it's one of these things I just assumed, of course, it's there. So my first email went out and people said no. No, it was never done. So I said, okay, what do I need to look for? What am I thinking of when I see this? What are people—are people seeing things that they're not recognizing because it doesn't meet the pre-existing criteria? And then also, where do you need to go? What's the likely spot? So, obviously, on the interior of the Gitxaała territory, you're not gonna find abalone. It's a different environment. You need the kind of highly aerated, rocky shoreline with all kinds of crevices and things like that for these animals to survive.
Mendel Skulski 37:05
So Charles took a team to an old village site at the south end of Banks Island on a hunch.
Charles Menzies 37:10
And I actually remember the first time we came up though, because we were the, we do these auger tests, and we put the auger down. And it's about a foot long device. It's about four inches across at the top and it's just like a hole, a fence post digger. And you screw it into the ground, 10 centimeters at a time, and you pull these out. So I, we use, actually, a kind of a splicing fitted wheel thing that kind of looks like a long narrow point in the front and a curved piece of open cylinder that you put—anyway, I don't know if this makes sense to people, but it's a kind of long, pointy piece of metal with a nice comfortable handle. And you kind of poke it into the bucket of the auger to get the soil. And I remember sitting there with people around. We're pulling this kind of first one out, and we've gotten a couple. And I got a Rubbermaid tote and I'm dumping the soil and stuff out onto it. And I said, wow, it's abalone! It's just shiny. You could see it shattering and shimmering everywhere. And there was this kind of quiet pause as the archeological grad students and the archaeological faculty colleagues who were with me, just kind of quietly looked at it, kind of going hmm, interesting. Hmm. And then they said, well, because they didn't want to out and out, tell me you're wrong, that isn't abalone. But they also wanted me to not get too excited, because I was wrong. That wasn't abalone because it didn't have any distinguishing characteristics. It just was mushed shell. So I'm looking at, saying, I know that's abalone. I say there's just no other way. And then there's all kinds of suggestions or providing insights. So I got a little bit kind of quiet myself and said, we'll just keep doing this and you know, and kind of the moment carried on. And then we heard this kind of yell from a distance. A kind of like…
[Person yells]
Charles Menzies 38:57
Because one of my graduate students, and I'm gonna name him. I mean, he was wasn't my student, but Kenzie Jessem. Great, great guy. He kind of crawled on the face where the village hits the beach. There's always, where, when an erosion of the front of the village. This massive growth of, web of, organic materials like roots and stuff caught from a kind of matte blanket, which as shell underneath kind of - bleed - erodes out. It just wraps down like a cover. So you can kind of crawl under if you're brave enough. It's not necessarily the safest thing to do. Well, I thought maybe that something had collapsed on him. So we all go charging to hear the sound of this muffled yell and, no. He said, you got to come in and look. What he found was an abalone in the full shell, in the cliff face of the front of the village. It was undeniable. People couldn't say from that moment on that there was no abalone. In fact, it was there. And so we went with that and said, okay, this is really kinda neat. And then we did the scientific stuff, where you measure everything and you do everything that's proper and etcetera, etcetera. And you know, take the samples.
[Optimistic music ends abruptly]
Charles Menzies 40:04
It's like a lot of things. You change your technique of measurement, you change your outcome. But if you don't have a reason to change your technique, you won't get any outcome. And the earlier generation of archaeologists in the 60s and 70s were all interested in big things. Big bones, big carvings, spear points, harpoon points, all this kind of stuff. So they sieved their sites they did with like a half inch or a quarter inch maximum, but typically about a half inch. And then you can kind, if you expunge or use up all the publishable data, and the next generation that came out in the 90s started thinking, maybe we should use a smaller sieve. What would happen we go back? Because you know, we've been realizing there's a lot of fish in these sites. Fishbones can be really small. So they start sieving down to an eighth of an inch, you know. And all of a sudden they find, instead of it being mostly salmon, these sites, it's like 30%, 40% herring bones. And so they change a technique and they get a different image of what's happening. And of course that's all driven by this independent scientific model that's going forward. If they talk to people before, at least in these cases, because there's a human memory of these places, they would have said, you're going to find herring, you're going to find salmon, and maybe there's other things that we don't remember. You're going to find a lot of fish stuff you need to look for. And it's like, you know, sometimes we get, when we're doing the archaeology, people would often say, colleagues or when we publish stuff, is this Indigenous archaeology? Is this archaeology with an Indigenous direction? Is this…? And I just said, well, I don't know it's like a fishing trip.
[Cheery string music begins]
Charles Menzies 41:36
We're just going fishing except we added a new thing. We're now taking soil samples. [Laughs] What is this? I mean, why else would a person be there? I mean... [Laughs]
Adam Huggins 41:49
I'm gonna go ahead and say that I think Charles has his priorities straight.
Mendel Skulski 41:54
Agreed.
[Cheery string music is replaced by chill synth music]
Adam Huggins 41:56
So we've put to rest this argument that abalone weren't an important part of the Indigenous diet pre-colonization. Which really leaves the government with no excuse for closing the First Nations traditional fishery and criminalizing Indigenous people who continue to engage in it, right?
Mendel Skulski 42:10
Yeah, not just criminalize, but aggressively policed. It's a lot easier to camp out near the rez and wait for someone to go picking abalone at low tide than it is to enforce the fishery closure on commercial dive vessels.
Adam Huggins 42:23
Right, that makes sense. So, uhh, I guess that brings us back to what Barbara was saying, that it's, it's ridiculous for the government to deny First Nations people access to an important traditional food that the government itself failed and continues to fail to protect from over exploitation where and when it really matters.
Mendel Skulski 42:43
Yeah. That's right.
Adam Huggins 42:45
So a good solution would be to say, I don't know, have First Nations manage abalone in their own territory, how they want to, and focus conservation efforts on dive vessels and illegal poaching, right?
Mendel Skulski 42:58
Yeah. Totally. But there is a complicating factor.
Adam Huggins 43:04
There always is. [Chuckles] What is the complicating factor?
Mendel Skulski 43:08
Well, while it might not have been true that sea otters prevented Indigenous people in the past from accessing abalone, it is a fact that when sea otters are present in an area, they can gobble up all of the big accessible abalone near the shore.
Adam Huggins 43:23
Oooh.
Mendel Skulski 43:23
And remember those sea otters that were dropped off on the west coast of Vancouver Island in the late 1960s during those atomic tests on Amchitka?
Adam Huggins 43:31
I do.
Mendel Skulski 43:32
[Laughs] Well, the government of Canada didn't tell the Indigenous people of the coast that they were going to reintroduce sea otters.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 43:41
They did not consult with the Nuu-chah-nulth at all. They just brought them in and they dropped them off.
Mendel Skulski 43:49
And those transplanted sea otters took some time to get established. But once they did, they had no predators and nearly unlimited food. Their populations began to expand and eventually spread to the Central Coast of BC as well. And they ate lots of urchins and brought back more kelp. But they didn't just eat urchins. They ate abalone, and they ate all sorts of other shellfish as well.
[Chill synth music fades out]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 44:12
About 1990, the first time I was out there, one of the old men rowed me out into the middle of the bay one morning. And he showed me the bottom of the bay and it was sandy. And all you could see were big pocks everywhere where the sea otters had gone in and taken all the clams out of the sand. And they talked to me about how their food was disappearing.
Mendel Skulski 44:44
Once sea otters get established, they can single handedly clear whole areas of harvestable shellfish—those easy ones that you can get pretty casually. A couple of decades later, Barbara and Anne decided to travel up to a village called Sugpiaq in Alaska, where sea otters had become established decades earlier.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 45:02
They have had it in their waters for 60 years. When we went there, a group of us went there to visit with them, and to see what they were being able to eat. It was quite sad, because the darkies, which are the little Katy chitons, they're no bigger than my finger, was their delicacy. And a lot of their generations, probably three or four generations, had never seen other seafood. Because everything was cleaned out by the sea otters that are in their waters, and the only place they would find the darkies were in the crevices.
[Melancholy music starts playing]
Mendel Skulski 45:54
Sea otters aren't like people in that they don't wipe whole populations out. There are always some shellfish hiding in the cracks. Abalone and urchins and other shellfish can survive happily in kelp forests with sea otters. But they're less abundant and more cryptic. Thus, they're really hard for people to harvest. Anything edible that's within reach of people, guaranteed the otters will get to first.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 46:19
And the beach that was at the head of the inlet. They told me that they used to clam dig there all the time. And they um, there were no clams there anymore. And so people were having to go, and these are people that don't have full-time employment, you know? And they can't, they can't gather food from the ocean like their ancestors did. They would have to take a boat and then drive for three hours to go buy store bought food. Junk, junk. Because they couldn't afford anything else. You know, that's just despicable. You know? That a government would put people in that kind of situation, and deprive them of absolutely everything. You know, it just makes me boil.
[Melancholy music is replaced by meandering music]
Adam Huggins 47:36
That's really distressing that on the one hand you have this widely known success story of sea otters returning from the brink and getting established again here. And then there's this ugly flip side that I think most people are probably not aware of.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 47:53
The other side of the story is is the concern that happens when sea otters come into an area. And we have this this balancing act of, you know, how much is enough? And how do we control them? With SARA, the Species at Risk Act.
Mendel Skulski 48:14
We've talked about SARA before on the show in our episode on southern mountain caribou 2.1. It's Canada's endangered species legislation. And in the case of caribou, it's really failed for almost two decades to afford them the necessary protection. In the case of sea otters, at least at this point, it might be overly protective for areas with large populations.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 48:37
There's no ability to keep the balance. And if you think back about the different Nations along the coast, and remember that we're ocean people, we lived from the ocean, about the ocean, on the ocean. And so our food sources come from the ocean, as well as we believe our ancestors came from the ocean. So when the sea otters were originally in our waters, there was a way of determining which areas you would allow the sea otters to be in and which areas would be saved for human food. So you had this active management regime that was based on clan systems and believing that everything has a right to food. Okay? So you didn't just exclude them. You allowed them to live in other areas.
Anne Salomon 49:51
I want to give you a really specific example that highlights what Barb's saying. Um, if you look at our Species at Risk Act and the policies associated with trying to do good, these are typically single species policies. Right? So we're trying to manage for the conservation of abalone as an endangered species. And we were trying to manage for sea otters, which were an endangered species. They were brought back and they have recovered quite well, so they got downlisted to threatened status, downlisted again to a species of special concern where they are now. And yet, here we are managing them with these singular policies, and typically, you know, single studies of their species abundance, and yet they interact. Right? One is a predator of another. And guess what? Humans interact in that system too. And yet, we tend to exclude humans from the picture and not even consider these very strong species interactions. So there is a lot that we can learn by thinking about some of the, you know, hard earned lessons that would have developed these deep time laws that is thinking about the entire system with humans as a central component to that system.
Adam Huggins 51:08
Okay, so um let me, let me see if I can get this straight.
Mendel Skulski 51:13
Okay.
Adam Huggins 51:14
In the present, it's illegal for coastal First Nations people or anyone to harvest abalone. And it's also illegal to harvest sea otters. In both cases, for conservation reasons.
Mendel Skulski 51:29
[Laughs] Yea.
Adam Huggins 51:30
Because basically colonial practices allowed these species to be depleted.
Mendel Skulski 51:35
Yep.
Adam Huggins 51:36
But somehow, before Europeans arrived on this coast, First Nations had laws and practices that allowed for sea otters and abalone and other shellfish to coexist in enough abundance to support wealthy, healthy societies?
Mendel Skulski 51:50
Yeah, you got it.
Anne Salomon 51:51
If you look through deep time in archaeological faunal remains, middens, you know, shell heaps, that you can see what people ate in the past. You can see mussels that are, you know, three, four times the size as those that you would see in Kyuquot now, where there is otter predation, suggesting that in deep time, just like Barb said, sea otters were kept out of some areas so that shellfish could thrive so they could be eaten as food, right? And this whole idea of a spatial mosaic of sea otter presence and absence, there's quite a lot of archaeological evidence for it. There is ethnographic and…
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 51:55
Stories.
Anne Salomon 52:06
…oral stories about it. And these are things that could be done again today. And it is a way, spatially, of getting the best of both worlds, of thinking about some of those key ecosystem interactions and the trophic cascade I described but also the people. The people that are dependent on shellfish resources, that have stewarded them in the past. So there's… I see this as an optimistic way forward. By learning from, deep time learning from these stories and trying to make things right again.
[Meandering music is replaced by optimistic music]
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 53:15
The laws from different Nations. The laws were set up so that we would be decent human beings. You know, it was about respect. It was about responsibility for everything. But it was also about sharing and looking after each other. And when you look at Canadian law, it's very adversarial. It's all about what you can do. Whereas our laws were about how we, how we create resilience, and live together and look after all things. Not just the human aspect of our world, but everything.
[Optimistic music stops playing]
Adam Huggins 54:06
I'm struck by this idea of a spatial mosaic of areas with and without otters maintained by people with detailed ecological knowledge and rich protocols. It reminds me so much of our discussions about spatial mosaics and fire ecology and traditional management. The parallels are so striking. And the consequences of ignoring that knowledge are really devastating. So where do we go from here? It's often the end of the episode question.
Mendel Skulski 54:36
[Laughs] We're not quite done. Anne and Barbara continue to do research together and are part of a project called Coastal Voices. It's made up of hereditary chiefs, researchers, and Indigenous people from up and down the coast.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 54:49
We're just the face.
Anne Salomon 54:51
Yeah, right? Exactly. [Laughter] The beautiful faces.
Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson 54:54
Yea. [Laughter]
Mendel Skulski 54:58
And you can go online to coastalvoices.net and watch the short film they produced and the interviews with the knowledge holders. It really shows you how much more there is to the story of otters and urchins and kelp.
Adam Huggins 55:10
And abalone.
Mendel Skulski 55:11
[Laughs] Of course.
Adam Huggins 55:13
Couldn't forget.
[Bright music starts playing]
Mendel Skulski 55:19
In the next and last episode of our three part series on kelp worlds, we're going to take you on a journey to Haida Gwaii, where Barbara's ancestors have lived and eaten lots of seafood since time immemorial. Sea otters were hunted to extinction there. And it's one of the places on the BC coast where they haven't yet returned.
Adam Huggins 55:39
We'll be headed to Gwaii Haanas, or the Islands of Beauty, where researchers are looking for answers to these questions and digging into some mysteries that get at the very heart of what it means to be an ocean people.
Mendel Skulski 55:52
That's next time in part three of our series on kelp worlds.
Adam Huggins 55:59
Thanks for listening. This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by myself, Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 56:04
And me, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 56:06
In this episode, you heard Kii'iljuus Barbara Wilson, Dr. Anne Salomon, and Dr. Charles Menzies.
Mendel Skulski 56:14
We'll be back next month on the second Wednesday. Please rate and review Future Ecologies wherever podcasts can be found. It really does help. And we love reading what you have to say.
Adam Huggins 56:25
Special thanks to Simone Miller and Jim Estes. Music for this episode was produced by Loam Zoku, Sour Gout, the Western Family Stringband, and Sunfish Moonlight. Also, we're super excited to announce that we've reached our first goal of 50 monthly supporters on Patreon.
[Party horn unfurling sound]
Adam Huggins 56:44
Which means that, in addition to stickers and patches and the exclusive monthly mini episodes that patrons receive, patrons will also now have access to special interview segments that we love but just couldn't fit into our main episodes and the new Discord server where patrons can chat with us and musicians from our show and even some of our interviewees. So if you'd like to help us make the show, you can support us on Patreon. Your support and positive feedback is what keeps us going. So thank you.
[Party horn unfurling sound]
Adam Huggins 57:16
And now we're going to have to come up with a new goal. What should it be? Drop us a line.
Mendel Skulski 57:21
You can get in touch with us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and iNaturalist. The handle is always futureecologies. You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes, and links on our website, futureecologies.net.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, and edited by Laurel Sleigh and Victoria Kline