A lot of the places that we've cleaned up, where we've gotten rid of derelict vessels from the beach, are still not healthy, and this was years ago. There are loads of heavy metals. People love to use the paint that has lead in it and stuff like that, and it all leaches into the beaches and poisons the clam-beds. Then everything that eats clams going forward has all those toxins in them as well.
I was talking about hishuk ish tsawalk, and then it's the same with fibreglass. It's releasing microplastics. Everything this small eats it, and then something bigger eats it and so on up the chain. Then we eventually eat it.
We're living with microplastics and toxins because of what we're putting into our food chain. Coastal first nations and coastal people rely heavily on food sovereignty, especially when something happens. There was a fire a couple of years ago in Port Alberni that cut us off from the rest of the island. There was no way around it. During those times, like a lot of people, we needed to rely on the foods that we had in our freezers that we had harvested from our own territories and everything like that. We want more abundance.
I always hear from all the old-timers, “Oh, my God, it was a heyday; we had so much. There were way more fish; there was way more forest.” I want those heydays to come back, and that's why the work that I'm doing is restoring it or remediating it to those levels. It's so that my kids and my kids' kids can have that same abundance, which I don't have in this generation because it skipped mine because of the generation before that had their heyday. I want to bring the levels back up so that future generations have that heyday again.