One of the examples of the application of traditional knowledge took place within our traditional territories in the Okanagan Basin. The Okanagan is a sub-basin of the Columbia Basin. In the past, there were arguments with DFO, and also the province, about having sockeye or other anadromous species in the Okanagan system. A lot of this, to get over the hurdle of recovery, was to say that these salmon were in the Okanagan system, and the evidence was primarily based on aboriginal traditional knowledge of place, sites, and usage.
What this knowledge did was raise the profile of this species. One year we had something like 600 sockeye return to the Okanagan system, and last year, I think we had over Wells Dam in the United States close to 340,000 salmon. Aboriginal traditional knowledge played a large role in refocusing energies—by the province, the federal government, and the Okanagan nation—to preserve and enhance the number of salmon that were in there.
The beauty of this whole relationship was that a majority of the money for that recovery came from Washington state and not from Canada. Canada had a very small portion. The majority came from PUDs, or public utility departments, and other funding sources in the United States. They had done this to meet their mitigation obligations under U.S. law.
This is an example of the use of aboriginal traditional knowledge. We increased what was probably a zero-sustenance take on these salmon to a take of somewhere around 20,000 last year, or higher. When you look at our diet, especially in the Columbia Basin, it's been proven, through studies in the U.S., that each indigenous person in the Columbia Basin consumes roughly 1.2 pounds of aquatic species per day, which could be salmon or other resident species. So in that context, aboriginal traditional knowledge played a very important role.