THE FRASER RIVER is 1,375 kilometres long. With a network of thirty-four rivers pouring into it, the Fraser drains one-quarter of the land mass of the province of British Columbia—more than 21 million hectares. This massive watershed contains lakes, swamps and countless streams that were once the spawning grounds and nursery of the largest run of salmon in the world. And the river passes through the city of Vancouver before it fans out across a broad estuary, into the Salish Sea.
Before the Paddle for Wild Salmon started, Don, Anissa and I took a road trip up the river to its headwaters to speak with the salmon people of the Fraser’s watershed. I wanted to meet the people watching over the places where tens of millions of salmon used to come to bury their eggs, both newcomers and the nations who had been here for thousands of years. I wanted to hear why they thought the salmon were vanishing and to tell them of the risks their salmon faced as they swam through the millions of sea lice and billions of infectious virus particles flowing from each Atlantic salmon farm.
Don Staniford is one of those people who somehow finds the right persons to connect with so that important conversations happen. For instance, when we pulled up to what looked like a random gas station, four hundred kilometres up the Fraser River, Don told me there was someone there who wanted to do a radio interview with me. This was Secwépemc territory, near Chase, BC. The person waiting to talk to me was Neskie Manuel, who pulled out a small audio recorder and asked me how I thought salmon farms were affecting Fraser River salmon. Members of the Manuel family—including Neskie’s father, the late Arthur Manuel, one of Canada’s strongest and most outspoken Indigenous authors and leaders, and his sister, activist Kanahus Freedom Manuel—are on the front lines in defence of the rights for all Indigenous Peoples.
From there we drove north to Prince George, where we picked up Paul Kennedy, host of the CBC Radio show Ideas. Paul wanted to join us for part of our journey and interview me on the side of the river. The only hotel that was open when we got to Vanderhoof wouldn’t take dogs, so I slept in the car with Ahta and Anissa’s dog, Jade. (I can sleep anywhere.)
We were 1,500 kilometres from the ocean by now, and yet there were salmon here. We met with Sharolise Baker, the Stellat’en fisheries manager. She said that the fishermen of her community were telling her that the salmon were becoming too soft for traditional methods of preserving them. They also wanted to know why they were finding so many sockeye salmon dead on the riverbanks, still full of the precious eggs they had travelled upriver to lay in a pebble nest. Why were their fish changing? People were worried.
This was Stellat’en and Saik’uz territory. These nations were fiercely protective of their salmon and were fighting the aluminum corporation Alcan after the BC government had gifted Alcan with the flow of the Nechako River, one of the big Fraser sockeye spawning grounds, to provide electricity for their smelter. In 1995, these nations stopped the expansion of this project, which would have taken most of the water out of the river. The people I met told me that DFO’s opinion was that the sockeye would be fine despite the water diversion. Apparently, the Department was not just a handmaiden to the salmon farmers; it smoothed the way for other industries as well. Perhaps that was DFO’s unspoken role and why it never made sense to me. It was running interference for industries—whether mining, logging, smelters or salmon farming—making it appear that precautions were being taken when in fact I knew from growing experience that they were not.
The nations guarded the spawning grounds, as taught by their ancestors, a duty passed down for generations. Now they used a counting fence and cameras that allow twenty-four-hour surveillance to accurately count how many salmon entered the spawning grounds. They compared that total against the number of juvenile salmon they observed leaving the grounds in spring to calculate how many should return. While Fraser River sockeye returns used to be predictable, they had grown increasingly less so over the past eighteen years.
What the nations didn’t know was that the young salmon leaving their river would swim through the pathogen-rich excrement from millions of Atlantic salmon and that the new softness of the flesh of their fish could be due to exposure to pathogens from that farmed species. Learning from these nations, I began to think about what could be done to provide answers to their questions about the changes in their fish. At one meeting a young man standing in the back of the room, wearing an expression of deep-seated rage, said, “You are telling me that fish farms might be killing our fish.”
Yes, that was exactly what I was saying.
On the evening of our stay they held a blanket dance. A large blanket was laid out on the floor. People danced around it, throwing money into it. Clueless, Anissa, Don and I got up, circled the blanket and also threw money into it. It was embarrassing to learn minutes later that the money was for us to help with expenses.
I felt the weight of their hopes, and hoped I wouldn’t let them down, but I was also grateful for the strength of their support. More than once people drew parallels between the threat of European viruses spreading from the Atlantic salmon farms and the smallpox virus brought to the province by Europeans that had killed well over half of their ancestors. I heard repeatedly, They killed us and now they are killing our food like they did to the people of the plains when they killed the buffalo.
When we arrived at Fort St. James, we met Betsy Leon, who was eighty-seven and still fishing the river. She noticed an angry red bug bite on my leg and treated it with a poultice of vinegar and nettles that worked immediately. In Tachi, we met Kirby Johnnie, the local fisheries manager. As requested by his Elders, he took us out to the river. His care, love and knowledge for this river, full of miniature sockeye called kokanee, was revealed in every graceful gesture. These fish had adapted to remain in freshwater and never go to sea. To do this they had to shrink themselves to fit a life in the river.
We were too late for the early Stuart run—these were the sockeye that swam the entire length of the river—but I saw the dried head of one lying on the riverbank. Its face was small and delicate, curved like an Arabian horse, not at all like the stout, deep-bodied look of the sockeye that spawned in the Adams River much farther downriver. It was remarkable that all these fish were called sockeye, because the sockeye from every tributary of the river looked different. The fish had adapted themselves to the river. Their unique DNA was their key to survival; as the river changed, so would they.
When salmon enter a river to spawn, they stop feeding. They swim uphill, sometimes powering right up waterfalls or through frothing cauldrons caused by millions of gallons of water boiling through narrow canyon walls. The fish rely on the energy they had collected over their life at sea to fuel them day after day, as they powered their way a thousand kilometres and more upriver. There was no food for them in the river.
In addition to the energy demands of the migration, the males undergo dramatic changes as they travel. Their bodies blush with red and green. Some species glow in shades of purple and stripes appear on their bodies where there were no stripes before. Some species of salmon grow enormous humps and hooked noses, while others sprout long curved fangs. Their investment in this stunning regalia ensures the best possible future for their offspring, because these changes in appearance speak to the females. They say something like, Hey baby, I went out to the ocean, took a spin around the Pacific gyre, swam up this river and I brought all this wealth home to you!
When you watch spawning salmon, it is hard to see how the female decides which male she will mate with, but she is looking the guys over, head to tail. She is making a critical decision for the future of her species by picking the male she feels will make her babies the strongest. Salmon have exceptional diversity stored in their genetic code; as their rivers change, becoming faster, slower, colder, warmer or more silted, the female’s choice hones the next generation to evolve rapidly in synch with the river.
Run of the River, a book by a senior correspondent with the Vancouver Sun, Mark Hume, tells the story of trying to put salmon back into a river that had lost its fish. It’s an impossible task for humans because the salmon and their river are one organism. A salmon is only half a creature; it can’t survive without its river. This explains why a hundred years of work by salmon hatcheries has not been able to restore wild self-sustaining runs of salmon. If you take away the mysterious signals between the males and the females, you have stolen their most important tool for survival. You might as well cut off their tails.
Our next stop was Takla Landing, nearing the headwaters of the Fraser River. We were warned that the “dirt” road in was hard on tires, so we parked Anissa’s van behind and piled into my car. Indeed, the road was a bed of jagged rock fragments, but two hours later we were just in time for dinner at the village’s little hotel. As I walked Ahta after the long drive, a black fox came boldly at us until the local dogs put the run to it. Ahta was unsettled; nothing about this place was familiar, not the smells or the animals. So she stuck close. Good dog.
At a meeting with Elders the next day we learned that here, so close to the Fraser’s headwaters, the people were still very much on the land. They still maintained their family fishing spots on the river, handed down generation to generation over the centuries.
Margo French, the Takla fisheries manager, took us in her extra-durable truck, bouncing and lurching 210 kilometres further upriver. We followed the shore of Takla Lake into the headwaters of Driftwood Creek, the highest reach where so-called Fraser River sockeye spawn. The water tasted like snow.
Margo set out food to share on the tailgate of the truck: canned groundhog (woodchuck), wind-dried salmon, bear grease and applesauce. She described how the chiefs traditionally watched the river and did not allow fishing until they felt enough fish had made it into the river to spawn. I had assumed that before modern industrial fishing, people simply didn’t have the tools to harm salmon runs. But I learned this was not true. Looking at the tiny streams that poured into Takla Lake, I realized that it would have been easy to kill all the fish in each stream. The people who lived here for thousands of years had learned to make sure the needs of the fish came first, so that future generations would always be fed.
Although the Takla Nation continued to guard the spawning grounds of these salmon, fewer fish were showing up year after year. Margo was deeply troubled when I showed her pictures of the young Fraser River sockeye salmon I had caught near salmon farms. Unlike the pink and chum salmon of the Broughton, the young sockeye do not linger around the farms but rocket past to get out into the open ocean. Still, they were infected with sea lice. If the sockeye were picking up the lice from the farms, they were also exposed to the bacteria and viruses. Indeed, one year the young sockeye in the Discovery Islands had open sores so deep I could see their bones.
Margo was a woman as rough as the land she was part of. But through her, Kirby Johnnie and Sharolise Baker, First Nation fisheries managers along the Fraser River, I was exposed to Indigenous sockeye knowledge. I knew from talking to Billy Proctor that nothing compared to conversing with the people who lived with the fish. Billy’s knowledge was at least a hundred years deep, based on his own experience and that of the old-timers he’d talked to while growing up. Indigenous knowledge was thousands of years old, and while it had been fragmented by the heavy suppression of their culture, a lot of the knowledge had been protected. I began to think that if I was to become DFO’s director of wild salmon, I would travel to every community living with salmon and absorb not only the essential baseline knowledge required to understand what the system was capable of, but also the ancient instructions on how to live with salmon. The fish had proven that they are able to adapt to us, but only if we follow their laws. The knowledge I was exposed to on this voyage was the key to living by salmon laws.
From Takla Landing we turned around and headed downriver to Williams Lake. Chris Blake told us about the twelve-thousand-square-kilometre Quesnel Lake watershed, where an average of 500 millimetres of rain a year kept fifteen-hundred-year-old cedar trees alive. It took the sockeye twenty days to get here from Vancouver. Twenty days of no food, swimming against the river, as the eggs were ripening in the females and the males were manufacturing their regalia!
One year later, I would come back here to witness the aftermath of the collapse of an earthen dam built by Vancouver-based Imperial Metals that held a toxic cocktail of mining waste. The company also was paid to truck human sewage up from Vancouver to dump into the tailings pond. When the dam broke, people on the far side of Quesnel Lake were hit with a toxic wind from the spill. After it blew past, trees were missing leaves on the branches that faced the lake, while the leaves facing away from the industrial spill were still green.
Hazeltine Creek had become a broad smear of brown sludge that made my throat burn. I ached with anger and sadness to see the tracks of elk, bears and cranes who must have been wondering where their creek was. Bits of splintered wood from the shattered trees were black-edged where they made contact with the sludge. I realized they were burned. The feet of the animals that had left tracks through this wasteland must have burned too. Did they try to lick them clean? Did that kill them?
I took samples of the sludge that had reached the lake, where it formed an enormous underwater mountain, as soft as talcum powder. Any small current caused the toxic material to lift into the water column and begin its journey of death down the river.
A first responder told me that when he put his arm into the water to set a rope around one of the hundreds of trees that had been swept into the lake, in order to tow it to shore, his skin began to burn and turned bright red. He was afraid to talk to anyone about it.
As a child I did not believe in “evil.” I thought it was something religions thought up to scare us into compliance. But at Quesnel Lake I saw that evil is real. To threaten life on such a catastrophic level, forever, is evil. Kanahus Manuel, Neskie’s sister, would spend years battling Imperial Metals to get them to clean this mess up and stop mining in salmon watersheds. The succession of Liberal and NDP governments of British Columbia have not even fined Imperial Metals for this spill, which still affects the river. The lack of political reaction to the damage caused by salmon farming is not an isolated blunder; it’s part of a fatal continuum.
Next we drove down to Adams Lake. I was excited to visit the spawning grounds of the magnificent Adams River sockeye, which I had fished off the west coast of Vancouver Island when I worked for Billy Proctor. They were everyone’s iconic image of a Fraser River sockeye, brilliant red, with a green head and tail—the largest sockeye in British Columbia.
A park had been built at the grounds complete with parking attendants, a gift shop and trails along the river. The fish, used to humans, went about the business of spawning without fear as we watched. The words of German, Japanese and French tourists mingled with the rushing noise of salmon splashing as they fought for mates and dug their nests.
Male salmon guarded nesting sites, slashing at other males that tried to move in. As they fought their backs exploded out of the shallow water like scarlet flames. The females were on their sides beating at the pebbles to form a shallow depression. They constantly assessed the excavation, hovering over it to measure it with their anal fin. Then they went back to work until it was perfect. The male guarded the female digging on his turf and, at the right moment, sidled up alongside her to release his sperm. Salmon eggs can only be fertilized for the few moments after they leave the mother’s body, because shortly after an egg contacts freshwater, its outer edge forms a watertight barrier. The male has to release his sperm at the same second as the female releases her eggs in a river alive with the distraction of thousands of other fish involved in the many stages of the same process.
Among the big males, I spotted an occasional much smaller male, called a jack. These jacks, a year younger, used a different strategy. Sneaking in at the last second, they released their sperm into the cloud from the older male. In doing so they provided the wealth of genetic material from two otherwise separate generations. This meant that two different males could fertilize the hundreds of eggs from one female.
I loved watching the children around me absorb the wildness of the fish and the river. Some of the adults did not appear to know how to express the emotion they were feeling. Most stood still and simply watched. Many kept telling neighbours to look, even though we were all looking at same scene. Others, however, seemed to want the fish to pay attention to them. They threw rocks or tried to jab the fish with sticks. No one from BC Parks was there to tell them not to do this, though the gift shop was well staffed. BC Parks personnel, did however tell us to cover up the stickers all over Anissa’s Volkswagen van that read Calling the Wild Salmon People, Salmon Are Sacred and Stop Fish Farms, or we would be asked to leave the park. We didn’t have a blanket big enough so they made Anissa move the van behind the RVs, where the tourists could not see it.
In Lumby, Priscilla Judd, a musician and a local streamkeeper, took us to Shuswap Falls. The Wilsey Dam was built on the Shuswap River seventy years ago, blocking salmon from reaching the upper river. The promised fish ladder has never been built. As we stood there, a single sockeye threw itself against the wall of the dam, brilliant red against the slick black of the wet wall. He knew he was supposed to return to the spawning grounds of his ancestors. How he knew is a mystery. If we just let salmon guide us, we could live successfully together, I thought.
Priscilla held a potluck dinner for us that night and, once again, I scribbled notes as I listened to people who knew the fish and generally knew what the fish in that region needed. When DFO had refused to post signs prohibiting jet skiers from running over top of the huge chinook salmon trying to spawn in the Shuswap River, locals made signs reading NO JET BOATING and put them up. The jet skiers complied, which protected the untold millions of chinook salmon eggs laid safely into the gravel, benefitting people along the entire coast of British Columbia and the orca that depend on chinook to survive. It baffled me why DFO would refuse to do this, but I was learning that people all along the Fraser River were kick-ass, edgy, independent doers. I liked them a lot.
The Calgary Herald called. They were dedicating a section of the paper to Dr. Jane Goodall and were looking for the “Janes of Canada.” They wanted to talk to me, and that meant a lot.
We were approaching the town of Hope—the end of our road trip—and the launch of the week-long paddle loomed. Don was in charge of media coverage, and he and Anissa tried to persuade me that before the paddle started, I should raft through the Hell’s Gate rapids, holding a Salmon Are Sacred sign aloft. They said it would make a great picture to kick off the trip.
Tourists do this all the time, but my years on the water had taught me fear. As one of my friends, Nicole Mackay, says, “I don’t play in rough water.” My attitude exactly. Don and Anissa insisted I needed to do this, throwing in the fact that an unfortunate cow once rode the rapids and survived. I was glad for the cow, but I really, really did not want to do this.
In the end I gave in and climbed into the second of two rafts. At first the trip was lovely, as we floated downriver on a huge, comfortable inflatable. Then the river began to narrow between high banks and the water moved faster in a series of large rollers. I got this, I told myself. This boat is well designed for the rough water.
Then we came around a bend and I could see where the river fell away into a huge hole at the bottom of a steep drop. Boiling white waves towered over us, knocking us around. Just before we dropped into the most frightening watery violence I have ever seen, the outboard that was keeping our raft from taking the waves broadside quit. The guide stood and began pulling on the cord to restart it. “Shit, shit, shit,” he repeated, pulling hard and fast.
I was gripping the side of the boat with one hand, holding onto the damn sign in the other, looking at how I could unlash the oar beside me to provide some sort of steering. The front of the boat reared up, folded in two and then hurled the stern into the air. The engine sputtered to life. I squeezed my eyes shut and, as we fell into hell, I held up the sign. Would it even be visible in the chaos of water?
Don and Anissa missed the shot.
We set out on our paddle from Hope, BC, on the frosty morning of October 20, 2010. National Chief Shawn Atleo drummed ninety of us into the large voyageur canoes and several smaller ones, and we slipped out onto the peaceful rushing river. It was 160 kilometres to Vancouver. Chief Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwet’in Nation was among us. She’d won a tough fight to save Teztan Biny (Fish Lake) from Taseko Mines’ proposal to locate one of the biggest copper and gold mines in the province there. An hour after we started paddling, the BC Salmon Farmers Association put out a press release under the headline: “BC’s salmon farms: well-managed and sustainable.”
As the sun rose, a warm wind picked up. Sockeye were leaping around us. Our first stop was Cheam, where the formidable First Nation Matriarch June Quipp took me aside and said, “I have been watching you.” I froze. Then she hugged me and provided food for the whole flotilla.
We arrived in Skwah territory as the sun was setting, turning the river red-golden. The moon rose behind the silhouetted drummers on the riverbank welcoming us. Skwah Elder Eddie Gardner was there. He was one of the thousands of people who’d showed up at the Get Out Migration, making the trip from his home in Chilliwack. He went on to lead sixty farm salmon boycott events at Walmart, Costco, Save-on-Foods, Real Canadian Superstore and Safeway.
Eddie, relentless but deeply kind, spoke to us around a fire that night, making it clearer than I ever could how important this work was. We had to get the farm salmon disease records, he told people, so that we could learn why the salmon in the Fraser River were changing, and why they were vanishing. Thank you, Eddie.
The next day the canoe I was in hit a gravel bar. In an instant, the boat swung sideways and tipped dangerously. Our skipper, Will, who had been raised on the river, rapid-fire instructed us not to set foot outside the boat; the current was so strong we would have been swept away. Though the chase boat spotted us immediately, Will had us sorted and gliding downstream again within moments. River water is so different from ocean water.
As we approached Matsqui, ninety kilometres from the ocean, young Aaron Williams of the Squamish Nation called all the boats together. Ninety people, holding on to each other’s canoes, rafted together in the middle of the river. He explained to us in his deep raspy voice that we couldn’t behave the way we’d done the night before: we needed to learn some manners.
“I am embarrassed to be seen with you!” he said in a booming Big House voice. “Treat your paddles like your wife, husband or child. Don’t just walk away from your canoe at the end of the day like a child. Take your paddle with you and treat it with respect. Make sure your canoe is perfectly clean before you leave it for the night.
“Second,” he went on, “when we approach a village, you are going to raise your paddle and remain still until you are invited to land. If that invitation comes, you are going to turn the canoe around and back into the beach, signalling that we do not intend to raid the village!”
It had been a long time since ninety people in canoes had travelled nation-to-nation on a quest along the river.
Before getting into our canoes at Matsqui the next morning, we were smudged with sage smoke. When we arrived at Katzie, thirty-five kilometres downriver, Chief Willie Pierre received us. Standing alone on the riverbank, he drummed and sang a hauntingly beautiful song. We remained silent and motionless, our ninety paddles raised. When he realized that we were waiting for his invitation, his eyes brimmed with emotion. The clearing where we camped that night was strewn with old rusting equipment, but the food was nourishing and the fire warmed us. There was singing, laughter and discussions about how to stop those who saw killing off the wild salmon as simply the price of doing business.
Don, Elena, Anissa and I intentionally faded into the background as this paddle became an Indigenous-led voyage; chiefs and elders set our schedule and they told us where we were going every evening after the paddling to various gatherings. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip and his wife, Joan Phillip, paddled with us. Fin Donnelly, the MP who had introduced Bill C518 to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa to move salmon farms into tanks on land, joined us. The provincial MLA, Michael Sather, got into one of the canoes, and the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robinson, paddled with us on the last day. As we entered Musqueam territory, the last stop before we reached the ocean, their First Nation fisheries powerboat came out and escorted us.
Twenty more people arrived in canoes that night in Musqueam, including Chief Darren Blaney of the Homalco First Nation, located on the mainland across from Campbell River, in his dugout canoe. In the band hall at Musqueam, we stood in a circle and listened to band members talk about losing wild salmon. I was learning from the people whom salmon had nourished for ten thousand years. Someone that night asked me if I was tired. As I thought for a second, I realized I had no idea. I had been swept into something ancient, human, spiritual, wet and cold—a river. In that moment I could not feel myself as separate from it.
The next morning we would leave the river and enter the ocean to round the point from the Fraser River into Vancouver. There was a stiff breeze. We asked the littlest children with us to go by land for this leg of the voyage, since we would have to turn broadside to the waves to navigate around Point Grey. Some of the river people were nervous but now I felt confident. Ocean water was familiar. We assembled like a pod of whales, and 110 people in canoes headed for the Cohen Commission into the decline of the Fraser River sockeye.
The ocean was gentler than anticipated and carried us easily around the headland. When we landed at Jericho Beach, Chief Bobby Joseph hugged me so warmly that for a second I felt like I belonged. This man has travelled the world, met with the pope in Rome and done everything he could to bring reconciliation and respect to the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. Bobby Joe, as he is called, is beloved. As a full media contingent watched, he and the other chiefs said it was critical that the Cohen Commission produce the farm salmon disease records. Their fish were being exposed to viruses and sea lice, and they wanted to know what was going on in the farms.
The next morning it was raining so hard we could barely tell when the sun rose. For the last time we picked up our paddles, which had been lying beside us every night, and took our positions in the canoes. There were dark grey thunderheads over the city of Vancouver and the water was silver. One hundred and ten paddles pulled the canoes towards the city.
We arrived at Vanier Beach to a sea of umbrellas. Margo French had come all the way from Takla Landing to greet us. Protocol was observed. Hereditary Chief Ian Campbell stood in front of the crowd, the feathers of his regalia rippling in the wind. Chief Robert Chamberlin stood alongside him in the sea of people; it felt good to see his familiar face.
I thanked my canoe, took my paddle with me and asked a young man standing in the parking lot if he knew the way to the Burrard Street Bridge. He said, “Yes, for sure.”
I asked, “Could you lead us there?”
He said yes, and he did.
The rain poured down on us as we took over one lane of the Burrard Street Bridge, the crowd stretching the entire length of the bridge. When we got to the downtown office building on West Georgia Street where the hearings were to be held, a small group of us, including Chief Chamberlin, Fin Donnelly, and the chief of the Musqueam Nation, whose territory we were standing on, entered the hearings. As we filed in, Justice Bruce Cohen kept his attention on the witness who was testifying. A map of the Fraser River was up on the screen. That image meant so much more to me now. Together our group held open an elk hide that supporters had signed as we travelled the river, in support of protecting wild salmon. The hide was so wet from the rain that it was slippery and elastic. Water pooled on the carpet at our feet, as though we had brought the river with us.
Finally, when the speaker concluded, Commissioner Cohen turned to look at us. We dipped our heads in unison to acknowledge his attention and then turned and left without saying a word, carrying our soggy hide with us.
In the coverage of the opening of the inquiry, we appeared on the front page of every newspaper, along with our message: the people of the river and the coast want the BC government salmon farm disease records to be made public. The inquiry did order the province to hand over the records. Mission accomplished.
And it changed my life. Unexpectedly I was about to become a virus hunter.