[Witness spoke in Secwepemctsin and provided the following text:]
Weyt-kp xwexéytep. Greg Witzky ren Skweskwst. Quelmuc te Secwepepmcul’ecw.
[Witness provided the following translation:]
Hello, everyone. My name is Greg Witzky. I'm indigenous from the Shuswap Nation.
[English]
I wish to express my gratitude to the standing committee for blessing me today with this opportunity to openly discuss the state of the salmon and the impacts of the Big Bar landslide.
My role over the past year with the government-to-government-to-government landslide remediation efforts has been to offer traditional knowledge, cultural protocols and perspectives and to make sure that indigenous roles and voices are not lost in the efforts to help salmon get past the landslide.
Mr. Chair, I trust that the information you are about to hear today will convince the standing committee that now is the right time to utilize the committee's political influence to persuade government decision-makers to take significant measures to protect salmon for generations to come.
Pacific salmon have been impacted by natural disasters and man-made dangers since time immemorial, yet they have shown their resilience to endure. However, at no other time in history have salmon suffered a more imminent threat to their existence than that of today. There are no simple answers, of course, to address all the different complex impacts and cumulative effects surrounding the current poor state of the Pacific salmon. My witness appearance here today is intended to provide, from my ancestral wisdom, a viable solution to our growing problem.
I was asked to appear today to give my opinion on the state of the salmon and the impacts of the Big Bar landslide. My opinion will come from ancestral traditional knowledge, which has taught me that when our Mother Earth is hurting, then we are hurting, and if we are hurting, we hurt others. If we don't do something to stop that hurt when we have the opportunity to do so, then we're not living up to our natural laws to protect and preserve our Mother Earth for seven generations to come.
Mr. Chair and distinguished committee members, I ask that you sincerely consider what I'm going to now address.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has stated that even without any fishery impacts at all, some of the already endangered salmon stocks will not be able to rebuild without us undertaking significant actions to protect them throughout their entire life cycle. The Big Bar landslide occurred at quite possibly the worst time in history, as while the 2019 forecast was moderate, the salmon return turned out to be the lowest in recorded history. Unfortunately, this year's salmon returns are expected to be even poorer than last year. Back-to-back historically low returns are certainly not a good thing.
These unnatural low returns, compounded with the 2020 higher than average snow packs, increased rainfall and runoff, have exacerbated migration issues for the already dire straits of the Pacific salmon. Add in the Big Bar landslide migration obstruction issue and once again we have a complete recipe for disaster. We know something big and bad is happening, and you're likely thinking, what can we collectively do about it?
I was shown at a very young age that indigenous people were put here to ensure that all food and natural materials from our Mother Earth are for the continued survival of our way of life. Nowadays, we have rights entrenched in the Canadian Constitution that provide us with the priority access to fish, but more importantly, we have the responsibility to uphold those rights for all of humankind. We can't maintain those responsibilities if we can't participate in the process to safeguard these rights.
Many indigenous peoples in these contemporary times now have the skills and capacity to effectively co-manage salmon fisheries alongside our DFO counterparts. What we don't have with those rights and capacities are the same levels of funding, jurisdiction and decision-making authorities that our partners in the different government departments possess. Meanwhile, indigenous people are anticipated to play an instrumental role in the protection, management and preservation of Pacific salmon, so steps must be taken to embed this responsibility into the policies, regulations and laws that impact Pacific salmon throughout their life cycle.
Therefore, I am asking the committee to please provide direction to DFO in the form of the following recommendation: Utilize your strong political influence to persuade the powers that be to deliver equitable A-based permanent funding support to indigenous fisheries organizations, like the Fraser River Aboriginal Fisheries Secretariat, which has just recently blended with the Fraser Salmon Management Council, so that we can effectively collaborate with DFO to ignite a culture change as stated in DFO's 2019 reconciliation strategy.
DFO was created to police Indian fisheries over 100 years ago in order to provide the non-Indian commercial fishery with increased, unobstructed opportunities. As a result, systematic paternalistic values have been ingrained in DFO that need to be reconciled directly if we are to work together to protect Pacific salmon. If DFO desires to build renewed nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown and government-to-government relations with indigenous peoples, based on the recognition of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership, then they must prove it by putting concrete actions to these words.
That said, I wish to applaud DFO for recently attempting to acknowledge this divide by signing the historic Fraser Salmon Collaborative Management Agreement on July 5, 2019. To date we have a signed agreement, but we have yet to obtain permanent government funding support to co-design, co-develop and co-implement the decision-making, co-management and administrative processes.