[Witness speaks in Kwakiutl language]
I'd like to thank the hereditary chiefs and their people of the N'Quatqua First Nations, as well as the Homalco First Nation.
My name is Tom Sewid. I am past chair of Aboriginal Tourism British Columbia, and I am the past executive director of Aboriginal Tourism Team Canada. Back in 1991, when I was the vice-president of the Kwakiutl Territorial Fisheries Commission, not one kilometre down the road I spoke at a hotel in a chamber like this to someone who came from Ottawa with some people on a panel. I believe it was either Mifflin or Fraser, I can't remember at this time. But it was concerning the salmon in the Fraser River system. And when I spoke there I stated that we have to really look at AFS, the aboriginal fisheries strategy.
Right now it's an understatement to say, as the head of Aboriginal Adventures Canada, that if we don't have a salmon resource, we don't have a tourism industry, because it directly impacts the regional draws of grizzly bears, orcas, dolphins, eagles, and everything else. And the scientists will say it makes the forests grow. I believe them.
So in order to keep this resource sustainable and keep them coming to our river systems, we have to look at all the factors that are making them disappear from time to time. I had faith in 1991 when I was relieved of my duty as a captain for Canadian Fishing Company, Jimmy Pattison, on a seine boat. I said that a day would come when those sockeye will return, gangbusters. In 2010 it happened. Thankfully I was on the deck of a seine boat and I reaped the rewards of that salmon season.
Last year I never had one jar canned of salmon in my cupboards, as well as the year before. What happened? Well, I let everyone talk about their reasons. It's all there. But maybe we should look at other things as well, such as why are there drift net floats washing up on the shores of Haida Gwaii right now, as my friends tell me? When I lived there two years ago I saw it. Why is it that the bargain stores now have canned salmon sold cheaply, canned in places like Thailand and from across the Pacific Ocean, where they don't have salmon in their rivers?
Why is it that we're starting to see salmon on the decks of these fish boats this year that have scars in them that are not derived from daggertooth, which was a deepwater fish that was really hammering our salmon populations back in the 1990s? Now they have marks on them that are seal, sea lion, and that's normal. But they also have three slashes: Humboldt squid. I have pictures of Humboldt squid washing up on the shores of Haida Gwaii. It's now a sports fishery on the west coast of Vancouver Island and off the coast of Washington State. So we need to look at all the compounding factors of why the sockeye and other salmon don't show up from time to time.
But when listening to everyone you guys are going to hear, one of the things you need to understand is that as first nations, having a status card makes us more Canadian than Canadians. And with the Supreme Court of Canada and its decisions, we get the rights even more than average Canadians. We now have the right to go in and work with companies to put run-of-the-river projects in our river systems in our traditional territories.
We're able to work with the wind farm operations. We hear from everyone that it's not viable, feasible to go on land with closed containment for fish farming. Well, if aboriginal people have cheap electricity that is produced in their traditional territories, then it makes it feasible to put containment on land.
But it's up to you, as the leaders at the federal government level, to change policies so that we, as aboriginals, have more revenue and equity-sharing with the fish-farming industry. And that is crucial, because once we do, then we can look at working with the federal government to change an obsolete fisheries policy of not allowing ocean ranching that's making those rivers very productive.
Aboriginals were doing that since the dawn of creation. Go to the museum and you'll see a box that was designed to move fertilized eggs from one river system to one that wasn't productive. Yet with DFO policy we can't do that. We have spawning channels, serpentine channels in Phillips Arm in their river system and up in my river, Kakweiken River in the Broughton Archipelago, in the middle of it. Yet due to DFO policy and cutbacks in funding, there is no money to go in there and take the sediment out and the logjams. Well, if we all work together, we're going to put the hand of man on the catch in rivers, however we do it. And you'd better have the budgets to keep those rivers going.
One of the biggest holdbacks right now is this obsolete policy of this genetic uniqueness of salmon in a certain river system. Come on now, the Everglades have 20-plus percent introduced species growing in that rainforest and those swamps because of ships coming from Europe and other places. Everything in life is a constant change. We have to work with it. And one of the best ways we can see salmon being strong on this coast is to work with the first nations, and that's to give us more rights to our traditional territories.
Halla Kas La.
Go in peace.