From Paper to Implementation: Working with First Nations in the Great Bear Rainforest

Last week I danced in a bighouse and ate eulachons in the land of the Wuikinuxv people.  The Wuikinuxv (pronounced o-WEE-keen-o) First Nation is located in Rivers Inlet, a long narrow fjord that stretches like a finger of ocean deep into the Great Bear Rainforest.  At the end of the fjord is a lake, so very long and deep that local legend gives rise to a lake monster emerging from the depths.  Where the land pinches in slightly between the lake and the fjord, with snow-capped mountains on either side, is where I was, in Wuikinuxv village.

I was there to organize an Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) Learning Forum.  What is EBM?  That is what we were there to talk about.  In the Great Bear Rainforest agreements, signed in 2006, the coastal communities committed to implementing ecosystem-based management.  EBM is a small acronym to refer to a big concept that essentially changes how any and all resource management is done on the coast.  At its most basic, EBM comes from a recognition that we are all intricately dependent on the health of the ecosystems that surround us.  And so, the goal of EBM is to maintain and restore healthy ecosystems, while improving the well-being of First Nations communities on the coast.

But how to you actually do any of this?  Getting from paper to implementation is the name of the game, these days, and it’s not easy.  Over the past few years we have been working to support the First Nations folks on the ground who are the ones implementing EBM.

Who comes to EBM Learning Forums? These are the people responding to referrals from forest companies who need to ensure the new forest regulations are being properly used to protect cultural and biodiversity values. These are the people leading cultural ecotourism operations who have a wealth of knowledge about the coast.  These are the people developing management plans for their new protected areas, and monitoring what happens in them. These are the people exploring economic opportunities from non-timber forest products, to provide new sources of revenue to their communities.  These are the people doing marine use planning in their communities, who understand so clearly that you can’t separate what happens on land from what happens in the ocean.  These are First Nations who live and work in the Great Bear Rainforest, who want to see a viable future for their communities.

Last week in Rivers Inlet, participants from the central coast, north coast and Haida Gwaii shared stories and experiences from their own work.  EBM is about maintaining and restoring ecosystems while supporting community health.  It is about doing things differently than we’ve done them in the past.  And those were some of the stories we heard.  We heard about a cooperative of chanterelle mushroom pickers, where pickers get paid a fair wage.  We heard about bear-viewing that protects bears and provides economic benefits to local communities.  We heard about new forest regulations on Haida Gwaii to protect the big old cedars trees that are so important to their culture.  We heard about a research project that collects grizzly bear hair and tests the DNA, in order to learn more about how many bears are in each watershed and how far the bears travel.

Participants shared these stories with each other inside the beautiful Wuikinuxv bighouse.  At each corner, a carved house pole.  Everywhere, the smell of cedar.  And at the end of each day, we feasted on salmon and halibut and clams and crabs.

Organizing a workshop in a bighouse was definitely a first for me, but hopefully not a last.  Given that so much of EBM is about recognizing and respecting the rights of First Nations to make decisions about what happens in their territories, it seemed appropriate to be inside their traditional house of governance.

Footnote: Sierra Club BC as part of the Rainforest Solutions Project has been working in partnership with Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative for a number of years to organize these forums.