A team of scientists partnering with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, one of the Coast Salish peoples that have inhabited the northwest coast of North America for millennia, has uncovered how local Indigenous communities managed salmon fisheries for thousands of years without exhausting them. Based on ethnographic surveys and genetic data from ancient remains: the key was that fishers harvested mostly males, the researchers report November 10 in Scientific Reports.
“Without the DNA stuff, we wouldn’t be able to trace the history of this Indigenous practice,” says Simon Fraser University archaeologist and lead study author Thomas Royle. “And without the Indigenous knowledge, if we just discovered a bunch of male salmon, we wouldn’t have known what happened.”
“These types of collaborations are the future of ecological studies and require an investment of time and an openness to new ways of seeing the world around us,” Lia Chalifour, a salmon ecology and conservation ...
