[Witness spoke in Halkomelem]
[English]
Thank you for the opportunity to share here. I ask the interpreters to excuse me, as I don't have prepared notes to share with them.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee. In preparing to do that, I couldn't help but think of being about seven or eight years old with my late mother. This would have been about 1968 or 1969, something like that. My mom was having a conversation with two other ladies about her age. They were talking about how many fish they had put away for the summer.
The one lady responded 108, and the other one said 52, and my mom's response was 96. They chuckled at my mom because with a big family she had put away only 96 jars of salmon. Those would have been quart jars back in the day. My mom's response was that it was not 96 jars; it was 96 dozen quarts of salmon put away in one season.
Hearing this narrative about where we are with salmon in today's state, I can't help but think of growing up on salmon, as we did throughout our early years, right up until a point in time when the stocks started declining, and we had less and less access to fish.
Also, on the other end of it, we had some studies that showed us as Stó:lo people. What you know as the Fraser River, we know as the Stó:lo. It's the mother of all rivers. It's the food provider for us, the Stó:lo people.
When the first Europeans arrived on the shores, they calculated that we Stó:lo people consumed about 1,000 pounds of salmon per capita per year. They looked at other tribes around us, but we had by far the greatest consumption.
I'm thinking of those two baselines in a narrative of reconciliation. My community now consists of 1,000 people. Had we still been consuming salmon at 1,000 pounds per capita, that would be a million pounds per year. We are certainly not anywhere near that, due only to how DFO regulates us and manages the fishery as a whole.
I would really encourage folks to think about that impact of going from such sustenance to where we are now, where we would only have a chance to fish every weekend like we did growing up. If we have a wedding, we barbeque fish. If we have a funeral, we barbeque fish. If we have a birthday, we barbeque fish. Sometimes we barbeque or cook fish just for the fun of it, because it's in our blood. It's in our DNA.
Thinking of that from a reconciliation manner, Mr. Chair, I would think that in this day and era of reconciliation and of the declaration, folks like you and the department would be doing everything they possibly could to ensure that at a minimum our sustenance is met. In doing that, you have tools in front of you around the wild salmon policy, the Cohen commission recommendations and the precautionary principle.
The 10 principles are supposed to be driving the federal bureaucracy, particularly around the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Articles 18, 19, 24 and 38 really stand out for me, Mr. Chair.
It's about utilizing existing tools that the federal government has at hand through the department, and what can be done to prevent any harm, particularly man-made harm. We know that there are climate change factors that we can do only some things about, but we're in control of the man-made influences, particularly around the open-net pen fish farms and the migratory route around the Discovery Passage in particular.
You can't imagine the harm that those fish farms do on a migratory path. When our salmon are out migrating right by these farms and there are lice outbreaks on them, DFO allows a 42-day window for those farms to respond to the lice. In doing that, they are not monitoring the amount of lice that are on the wild salmon, period.
I think there's a missed opportunity in terms of not using tools that the people have available right here and now to better protect and to do everything you possibly can to minimize the man-made negative impacts on something that's so vital to us. It's more than a food source. It's a way of being. It's who we are as Stó:lo people and who other first nations are as well.
Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chair.