Christie Blatchford: Fishing for the missing salmon

VANCOUVER — If the famously missing sockeye salmon of the Fraser River weren’t already so often M.I.A., the temptation would be to imagine they had sat in on the proceedings of the Cohen Commission of Inquiry, and then simply done the decent thing and hanged themselves en masse.
The Commission is but the latest iteration – the first full-blown federal inquiry, though there have been half a dozen earlier investigations – studying what is politely called the decline of the salmon in the Fraser.
The fish mysteriously returned last year in record numbers, but the commercial fishery was completely shuttered for six of the previous 10 years, including three consecutive years starting in 2007.
The first closure was in 1999, smack in the middle of a period during which about 15 million fish vanished between the monitoring station at Mission, B.C. and their spawning grounds, which range from between 200 and 1,000 miles away
(Among the interesting facts about Pacific salmon is that they are what’s called anadromous, which means they migrate from the ocean to freshwater to spawn.)
In any case, the questions once must have seemed blessedly straightforward: Where did the damn fish go?
Did they all die and sink to the bottom? Did the counting station screw up? Or, at least a reasonable possibility since the only people who can fish with nets between the spawning grounds and Mission are aboriginal, was aboriginal over-fishing one of the culprits?
It is pretty serious stuff, not only to the aboriginal fishers who have long depended on salmon, but also to non-native fishers; when Phil Eidsvik of the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition did a little research a few years ago, for instance, he found at least 30 B.C. municipalities which have salmon incorporated in their official coats of arms.
Clearly, in this part of the country, a salmon is not just a salmon.
Mr. Eidsvik and his group were among those pressing for years for a proper, full-blown inquiry into the missing fish. This Commission, headed by B.C. Supreme Court Judge Bruce Cohen, is the result.
And while it is early days yet to pronounce any sort of judgment – the Commission recently received a 13-month extension, and another $11-million in public funds for a total of about $25-million, and won’t produce its final report for another year— it’s hard to say if it will in the end do what it’s supposed to, that is, determine and actually name the causes of the decline of the fishery.
The first hint that the inquiry may lack the will to tackle the subject head on came last month, when it refused to accept as evidence a 1989 secret tape-recording federal fisheries investigators made of a meeting with a native man who was then the self-appointed “king of the Fraser River native fishery” and who bragged of the vast amounts of sockeye he could get – all taken during the so-called FSC fishery, the native food, social and ceremonial fishery.

This week the inquiry is in an evidentiary phase on the topic of “Aboriginal Fishing;” the first witness, held up as one of the inquiry experts, University of British Columbia law professor and author Doug Harris.
He was commissioned to write a paper on the legal historical context for aboriginal fishing up to 1982. He equates the native “food fishery” with the native reserve – an attempt, as he testified Monday, to “contain the aboriginal fishery to a small fragment” of what it had been, just as reserves set aside small pieces of formerly large swaths of territory for aboriginal use, thus allowing government to open up a resource to immigrants, or settlers.
In fact, the goal of the federal fisheries department, Mr. Harris said, was “to eliminate the food fishery.” He believes that the so-called Douglas Treaties, deals signed by the Hudson’s Bay Company on behalf of the British Crown with aboriginal peoples on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, provide early recognition of special aboriginal rights and that successive governments ever since have attempted to re-write that first recognition.
That is a live issue, with documents which appear to equally support conflicting views, but Mr. Harris was slow to acknowledge even that much.
The commission already has marked more than 1,150 documents as exhibits; it seems to be well on its way to drowning in paper and lawyers. Its quarters in an air-conditioned eighth-floor office in downtown Vancouver is a long way from the rough and tumble of the fishery.
In a controversial 2007 paper on aboriginal rights and Canadian environmental policy delivered at Trent University, a professor named Frances Widdowson offered the radical view that contrary to public wisdom, aboriginal peoples don’t have an ingrained conservation ethic.
“A great deal of evidence indicates this was not a feature of aboriginal societies in the past,” she wrote, and said relying on native “oral histories” is a risky practice, as the problem with oral histories is they are, well, oral, difficult to pin down and thus easy to rewrite.
She quoted Robert McGhee, a curator with the Canadian Museum of Civilization, who in discussing the modern habit of imbuing “people who are simpler or more primitive than ourselves” with lives more spiritually grounded noted that such romantic primitivism is called nostalgie de la boue in French. It means “homesickness for mud”.
This week may tell the tale if nostalgie has also infected the Commission, and if it too is stuck in the mud.

Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com