The Tla’amin (TLAH-ah-mihn) people have inhabited the region now known as British Columbia, Canada for “thousands of years living in harmony with the land,” according to their nation’s website. Their ancestors were here long before Europeans colonized North America and have lived here for as long as the Tla’amin people’s collective memory extends. Their place along the northwest coast has made the marine environment especially important for their culture and for nourishing a healthy population. Using their longstanding knowledge of this environment, the Tla’amin developed innovative methods of capturing seafood, which remain visible across the coastlines of British Columbia today.

Like other Indigenous people across North America, when European settlers arrived, they subjected the Tla’amin to colonization and its impacts, including the spread of disease, the exploitation of critical resources and the erasure of Tla’amin culture. Along with diminishing culture, colonization risked erasing traditional fishing methods. In the late 1800s, British Colombia joined the Canadian confederation and adopted Canadian fishing regulations, which responded to overfishing associated with colonial extraction, prioritized the canning industry and was largely settler owned. This shift from localized governance to a more centralized governance greatly restricted the Tla’amin’s traditional fishing ways, with laws against using fish traps. Later developments took away many of the places where they caught fish and gathered clams.

Today, the Tla'amin are working to regain access to their traditional resources and harvesting locations. They are also turning to traditional knowledge to learn how to manage their marine environment. One way they are doing this is by asking their elders how Tla’amin people used marine resources in the past. Another way is by teaming with archaeologists, who can unearth artifacts to supplement the elders’ knowledge. This information provides insight into how the Tla’amin traditionally managed and used the once-abundant marine resources of the region.

The Tla’amin record their past through oral history, a record-keeping method used by many Indigenous cultures to retell events and stories. Children learned the right way to do things by listening to and observing their elders.

Archaeologist Dana Lepofsky from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and her colleagues, worked with the Tla’amin First Nation to rediscover some of this knowledge and history, studying ancient fishing and clamming techniques used by Tla’amin people over the past several thousand years.

Lepofsky’s team found the Tla’amin managed clams and fish to get large, sustainable harvests. To increase the number of clams, they collected rocks from the beach, providing the clams with more space to grow and flourish. The rocks were rolled to the low-tide line to create a wall. The pools held relatively warmer water, creating a better environment for the organisms on which clams feed. The walls gave clams more room by building up the beach at the low-tide line.

Tla’amin clam beaches still exist. Elders remember clearing beaches as children, but no one remembers making the rock walls. Based on the age of the archaeological sites nearby, some of these gardens may be thousands of years old, noted Michelle Washington of Tla’amin First Nation.

Fish Traps

The archaeology team is also studying fish traps used by the Tla’amin. Fish traps were built from stone and wood. The Tla’amin built fish traps in shapes designed to lure and keep fish inside. To catch more fish, the Tla’amin set traps in the intertidal zone, an area covered with water during high tide but exposed to the air during low tide. When the tide came in, the natural tidal currents would guide the fish inside the traps. Once they were in the traps and the tide receded, the fish would seek deeper water and the trap walls would prevent the fish from swimming out again.

The Tla'amin built all sizes of fish traps. "I'm fascinated by the variety and scale of some of these fish traps. Some of them are huge—hundreds of meters," said Megan Caldwell, a student who works on the research team.

Caldwell wonders how many fish the Tla’amin were able to catch with the traps. She also wonders what they did with big catches, because the Tla’amin did not have refrigerators to keep the fish from spoiling. Caldwell believes the ancient Tla'amin used holding ponds to keep the fish healthy until they could either eat or preserve them.

On April 5, 2016, following 20 years of negotiations, representatives of the Tla’amin, the province of British Columbia and the government of Canada finalized a treaty that acknowledged and legally restored ownership of a little more than 8,300 hectares (20,510 acres) of government land to the Tla’amin.

Co-management agreements and shared harvest areas provide Tla’amin the opportunity to manage some important ocean resources in their territory once again. The archaeological research has helped the treaty process, said Washington, who is part of the Silammon Treaty Society that negotiated the treaty. In addition, local governments are more aware of the importance of preserving archaeological sites. Local government protection becomes very important because laws that are supposed to help protect archaeological sites are very weak, Washington said.