It’s Delaney Mack’s first time pulling crab traps and she is unsure what to do. Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the multifaceted job, which might on any given day include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation. But winching crabs up 100ft from the sea floor was not in the manual.
Soon, however, the four-person operation is humming along. The crab survey is a vital part of their work as guardians of this Indigenous territory in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable.
It is the quintessential guardian assignment: remote monitoring work of immediate importance to a small community, far beyond the gaze of administrators at understaffed government agencies.
The watchmen are the eyes and ears of their First Nation community on the lands and water of their territory, which spans about 18,000 sq km (7,000 sq miles, roughly the size of Kuwait) on the central coast of British Columbia around the town of Bella Coola, 430 mountainous kilometres northwest of Vancouver.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the multifaceted job, which might on any given day include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation.
It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable.
The teams carry out monitoring projects such as the crab survey; environmental DNA collection; and distress call responses that could take hours if left to distant authorities.
The primary Nuxalk reserve is at the mouth of the river, where signs warn fishers not to throw entrails back into the slow-moving waters lest they attract grizzly bears.
Cruising slowly around the reserve in a white truck, pointing his spotlight into back yards, he could be mistaken for his former police officer self, but in fact he is looking for the grizzly bears that tend to be attracted by the fish-smoking shacks common in people’s gardens.
For Neasloss, the potential Fisheries and Oceans Canada powers are part of a bigger plan, another step toward the ultimate goal of First Nations being able to enforce their own laws.
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