Canadian First Nation deploys ROV in push for stronger marine protection

When Sellemah was a girl, in the days when the Tl’ches archipelago was still inhabited, the tide pools were full of urchins. The Songhees Nation elder, who also goes by the English name Joan Morris, learned from her own elders how to harvest the plentiful red and purple sea urchins that lived among the handful of small, rocky islands just off Victoria, capital of the Canadian province of British Columbia. On a visit nearly 70 years later, however, she noticed there were few to no urchins in the shallows where she used to explore and play.

Her observation inspired a question: what else had changed on Tl’ches?

Starting in 2017, the Songhees Nation began working with researchers from the University of Victoria to find an answer. Using a small underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), they documented culturally important wildlife around Tl’ches — including urchins and rockfish, octopus and oysters, seals and shellfish of all kinds. The survey established the first scientific catalog of the islands’ habitats and marine life. The team published its results in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science last August.

The survey opens a door that could enable the Songhees Nation to reclaim sovereignty over the archipelago. It’s also emblematic of a larger shift in the scientific community, toward greater collaboration, and shared respect, between Indigenous and Western knowledge.

“Having this information is so useful. It’s a start in our goals to help protect, manage, maintain and preserve our culture ways, and teach our youth for future generations,” Kathy Bryce, Songhees Nation lands manager and a co-author of the study, said in an email to Mongabay. “[This] gave us the bigger picture of how our people survived with such rich food, such a beautiful underwater world.”

Salmon people

Known to Canadians as the Chatham Islands, the Tl’ches archipelago comprises the last undeveloped land within Songhees territory. The rest has largely been built up in the orbit of Victoria. The Lekwungen people, the Indigenous group to which the Songhees Nation belongs, lived on these islands for at least 3,500 years.

In the 1950s, the islands’ only source of fresh water ran dry, forcing its last residents to decamp to the mainland. Morris was one of them. She is the last living member of Songhees Nation to have called Tl’ches home.

Paper co-author Elena Buscher described the islands as “a snapshot of what things were like before the settlers arrived.” They are still home to intertidal root gardens, burial plots, and culturally modified trees, the bark carefully removed for weaving objects or building shelters, or with sections cut away to test for rot.

Yet Songhees Nation members are concerned the islands won’t always be this way. Commercial fishing vessels ply the waters around Tl’ches. The archipelago is popular among boaters, anglers, and kayakers, who often disregard rules that forbid landing. Nation members often find trash and the remnants of illegal fires on Songhees land. Complicating the matter, the southern half of Discovery Island, one of the three largest islands, is a public marine provincial park. A private homeowner owns another small parcel on Discovery.

The Songhees Nation saw a potential solution in the Marine Plan Partnership for the North Pacific Coast, a collaboration between 16 First Nations and the British Columbia government that developed plans to manage the province’s northern coastal areas and their marine life. These plans outlined how marine resources could be used sustainably, conserving both ecologically and culturally significant areas. The Songhees Nation decided to create a marine plan of their own, and to outline similar goals for Tl’ches.

While sketching out how to create this plan, Cheryl Bryce — Kathy Bryce’s sister and predecessor as lands manager — met Buscher, then a master’s student in environmental studies at the University of Victoria. Using interviews with Nation members and archived writing and tapes, Buscher helped Cheryl and Kathy Bryce create a list of 25 marine animals involved in traditional social, ceremonial, or harvest practices. One, for example, was salmon (five species in the genus Onchorhynchus), both a major food source and key to the Lekwungen, or “salmon people,” origin story.

Their aim was to establish an ecological baseline, a measure of what the islands’ marine life looks like today that the Songhees could use to monitor its health or to establish new protections.

The team then sent in the drone to scope these animals out at 45 sites around the islands. Through its camera, team members found 14 of the 25 target organisms; another, harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), they spotted with their own eyes. The Songhees are planning further research to learn whether the 10 other animals are no longer present or simply were not visible on video. The team also identified several stressed areas that could be restored.

Importantly, the ROV found culturally important organisms across all habitat types and at all depths studied, down to 20 meters (about 66 feet) and lower. This confirmed Nation members’ intuition that marine protections for Tl’ches would have to encompass the entire archipelago, not just certain habitats.

Kathy Bryce said this data could help revitalize traditional practices like shellfish harvesting and fishing that many people, now living in urban centers, have been cut off from. It will also help the Songhees determine the most sustainable way to harvest culturally important species, she said.

“This allows us to show our people who haven’t seen what [Tl’ches] looks like today, explaining how our people had access to organic foods and knew how to manage, maintain and harvest them,” Bryce said.

Buscher said simply showing that a low-cost drone can complete such a survey is valuable. The drone offers a cheaper alternative to other survey methods, like scuba. Scuba surveys are not only expensive and time-consuming, but can also be dangerous in strong currents like the ones common in the Pacific Northwest.

Two-eyed seeing

The Tl’ches survey is also emblematic of an overdue but growing trend: scientists and conservationists using Indigenous knowledge alongside Western thinking.

“While this paper focuses on the Trident ROV, the data that this ROV accessed is only made possible via the directions and input of Indigenous knowledge holders,” said Lauren Eckert, a Ph.D. student focusing on Indigenous and Western sciences in conservation at the University of Victoria. She was not involved in the Songhees survey, but said it is exactly the kind of collaboration that researchers need to undertake.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Eckert said, interest in Indigenous knowledge surged among scientists. But for many decades the relationship was extractive: scientists would “parachute” into Indigenous communities to gain information, but rarely ensured that their results benefited the communities.

In contrast, Indigenous knowledge not only drove the Tl’ches survey plan but also produced information that will benefit Indigenous people.

“I think we’re seeing a movement now toward real Indigenous leadership in research, and toward there being space for that to be carried out and recognized as an essential role,” said Andrea Reid, a member of the Nisga’a Nation and assistant professor of Indigenous fisheries at the University of British Columbia.

In collaborations like the Tl’ches survey, Reid said she sees the embodiment of a concept called “two-eyed seeing.” Albert Marshall, a Mi’kmaq elder and an adviser at the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources in Eskasoni, Nova Scotia, developed the concept based on generations of Indigenous knowledge. The concept recognizes the strengths of both Indigenous and Western knowledge; rather than attempting to bridge a perceived gap between the two, two-eyed seeing uses them in harmony.

“Fundamentally they’re both science, because we’re talking about systematic ways of understanding the world around us,” Reid said. “But when we think about [conservation] through the Indigenous lens, it is inherently reciprocal. We need the fish, but they need us too. We are here to guard the land, to steward this system.”

Around Tl’ches, the Songhees Nation plan to continue this fusion of knowledge through a grant that will support further research. The money will pay for scuba certifications and boating licenses for members of the research team, and to train Songhees scientists in GPS mapping, underwater archaeology, and piloting underwater and airborne drones.

Ultimately, Buscher told Mongabay, Nation members hope one day to restrict the harvest of food species on the islands and waters of Tl’ches to Indigenous people only. Yet the pathway for doing so remains unclear. Legally, the provincial administration governs the shoreline and seafloor, and Canada governs the water column and its fisheries. There is no recognized measure that could exclude non-Indigenous users.

Bryce emphasized the importance of finding some way to ensure the future health of the islands. “Tl’ches is a home away from home,” she said. “There’s a natural way to life there. Without that, we won’t have anything left.”

Banner image: Red sea urchin (Mesocentrotus franciscanus), one of the culturally important marine animals the ROV documented at Tl’ches, photographed in British Columbia, Canada. Image by Extemporalist via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

Correction 1/29/21: We updated this story to correct the spelling of  Sellemah’s traditional and English names and the kind of intertidal garden still present on Tl’ches islands. We also corrected the story to better describe how Songhees Nation members aim to restrict harvesting in the archipelago and why many people living in urban centers do not engage in traditional harvesting practices. We regret the errors.

 Citation:

Buscher, E., Mathews, D. L., Bryce, C., Bryce, K., Joseph, D., & Ban, N. C. (2020). Applying a low cost, mini remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to assess an ecological baseline of an Indigenous seascape in Canada. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7. doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00669

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