I can, absolutely.
When we look at both knowledge systems, they're equally important, but we tend to put indigenous knowledge aside and recognize most of the science.
When you actually look at what's happening on the Yukon River, the people who live along the river are the people who actually know what's happening. They've maintained the salmon populations and had a relationship with salmon for thousands of years, and they've not depleted it. Then we look at how we've been managing this by science, and we're in trouble. It's been by the numbers only and it's been quantitative, and it hasn't been looking at what is happening in the river.
We look at what the Pilot Station site says, and it says that this is the science. It looks at the numbers coming through, and it says we're going to manage to the upper level in terms of how many salmon we can take out of that system, when the indigenous people are saying, no, we actually have to slow down.
Our people have been saying for 20 years that we need to slow down in fishing. We need to recognize that we need to not take all the first run, because those are the first ones that are going to get through it. They're the fast ones. They're the males. Then people say, “Okay—it's the middle of the run, so we're going to take the next ones.” As people on the river, we know those are the bigger salmon. Those are the slower females that are coming through. We know we need to get those females through, and that's why we don't take that big pulse in the second run. We take the first ones because we know there are still more males coming.
This is just traditional knowledge, and that is the actual knowledge from seeing what's happening on the river. That's why it's so important to take that into consideration when we're looking at developing and rebuilding a plan, or even when we're managing within the “in season”, as they call it.