OVER THE YEARS, I’d often said that dealing with fish farms was like trying to catch a greased pig. Terrible analogy, really, but that’s what it felt like. No matter where I published my science, how many lawsuits I won, whether I was on 60 Minutes or the front page of the New York Times science section, or how many people marched or paddled with me, there had been no getting hold of this industry in order to stop the harm. They successfully slipped away from every measure that could have made the industry acceptable to First Nations and Canadians in general.
Imagine my surprise when after fifty days of occupation, British Columbia’s premier, John Horgan, agreed to meet with the nations of the Broughton Archipelago in the Big House in Alert Bay, ‘Namgis territory, at 10 a.m. on October 10, 2017.
Hope ran high as representative chiefs of eight nations in and surrounding the Broughton gathered together in their most sacred regalia. Present were four tribes of the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw, along with the Mamalilikulla, Ma’amtagila, ‘Namgis and Tlowitsis. A cedar fire roared on the earthen floor in the middle of the Big House. Its smoke defined shafts of sunlight streaking down from the opening in the roof where the smoke escaped, igniting the colours of the regalia. The Big House was full. Packed rows of benches rose in tiers around the walls. Volunteers had gone out to the farms to hold down the occupations so that Molina, Ernest, Karissa and others from the front lines could attend. The heads of these families gathered here to impress upon the provincial government that it must not renew the salmon farm tenures.
Elected Chief Robert Chamberlin, who had been battling this industry for the longest of all the chiefs, stood wearing an ermine headpiece. Elsewhere, conflict was escalating between elected and hereditary leaders over fish farming. Rumours circled about huge signing bonuses coming annually to councillors who had aided in the signing of contracts with the industry, some of whom might not even still be on band councils. The Broughton was lucky in that her people, elected or hereditary, spoke with one voice against the farms.
Premier Horgan arrived with four cabinet members in tow, including his minister of agriculture, Lana Popham, and the local MLA, Claire Trevena. I wondered who had advised Horgan to dress in casual clothes. When he and the others took their seats in the only chairs in the house, they faced a line of twenty chiefs in full regalia. Then Horgan announced that he was here to hear their “stories.”
Stories! This felt condescending. From the stern expressions of the men standing in front of the premier, it didn’t look to me like they had gathered to tell him stories. They were there to meet government-to-government in order to find a path forward on how salmon farms were going to be removed.
They handed the premier a stack of my published scientific papers, saying the province didn’t need any more science to prove that salmon farms were destroying wild salmon. (I still savour that moment; it meant that I had not wasted the past thirty years.)
Just before this meeting, Lana Popham had sent a firm letter to Mowi—the first and only letter I had seen from a non-indigenous government that stood up to the industry. Popham put the company on notice about the upcoming deadline to renew the Broughton tenures, pointing out that the government was “entering into sensitive discussions with some of the First Nations in the Broughton Archipelago” and that the company’s tenure renewals were not guaranteed. She warned Mowi that if the company chose to restock farms on expiring tenures, they needed to be aware they might have to “return possession of tenured sites.” Did the company’s shareholders even know that a significant number of its tenures in western Canada were not “guaranteed”? After decades of dedicated bootlicking from previous provincial parties, I don’t think Mowi was used to being talked to that way. Popham was a brave and straightforward woman.
After delivering my papers to Horgan, the leaders of each nation voiced their concerns one after the other. Chief Moon demanded that Horgan prohibit any restocking of farms whose tenures were about to expire, given that farm fish require two years to grow before harvest and all the tenures were due to expire in eight months. Since the occupation began, the companies had been leaving farms empty to the south of the archipelago, but they were restocking the farms in Broughton. This made it seem that the industry was doing everything it could to make it hard for the government not to renew the tenures. The industry certainly did nothing to defuse the situation.
After hearing out the chiefs, Horgan stood among them to deliver his response. What we all heard from him was that nothing was going to change at the provincial level. As the knot of chiefs around Horgan tightened, the diminutive Lana Popham rose to stand beside him. Chief Bill Wilson, Hemis Kla-Lee-Lee-Kla, a lawyer influential in amending the Constitution of Canada to enshrine Aboriginal Rights (and former federal minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s father), took the microphone and advanced on Horgan. He posed a simple question: Was the premier going to allow Mowi and Cermaq to restock farms on tenures that would expire in a few months?
Hundreds of people on the surrounding benches fell silent, listening hard for the answer. Dzawada’enuxw filmmaker Lindsey Mae Willie had her camera focused on the premier. Horgan could not walk away from Wilson and the chiefs who now ringed him and so, in that moment, he took the side of the Indigenous leaders and said, “If those leases are up in less than two years, they should not be able to restock them.”
There was a collective sigh. Everyone knew there was a good chance Horgan would retreat from those words—politicians break promises all the time. But what is said in the Big House becomes law. The nations’ leaders had represented them properly and had achieved what they could that day.
Claire Trevena had become skilled at ducking all things fish farm over the years she’d been the local MLA. While the uprising was in her riding, so were the head offices of the three Norwegian-run companies that dominated the BC industry. She’d faced crowds eleven years earlier who carried signs with her name and a skull and crossbones on them threatening her for trying to get salmon farms out of the ocean and into land-based facilities. When she’d awarded me the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal in 2002, she hadn’t mentioned the words fish farm when describing why I was receiving the honour. She could not be seen rewarding me for fighting this industry. Here in the Big House, after Horgan had made his promise, she moved through the crowd telling people that if the government did not renew the tenures, the companies could sue them. This made me wonder how, exactly, this industry was threatening government.
I went home after the meeting to provision my boat. That night I heard an unfamiliar noise. I looked out the back door and saw a plane flying very low and slow right up the road to my house, then over me and on, over the Swanson camp. Then it banked and flew over Midsummer Island, before it continued up Knight Inlet. It had a triangular pattern of lights on its belly and a big orange light in front of that.
When I arrived at Swanson the next day, I heard that RCMP officers were amassing in Port McNeill, where two large black Zodiacs were sitting at the dock. The parking lot of one of the town’s hotels was full of police vehicles. I also heard that the Viktoria Viking had gone north to get another load of farm salmon. Everyone was on edge. What farm was the Viking preparing to stock? And what would we do about it?