From Canada to the Amazon, scientists are trying to build on Native knowledge before it’s too late.
From his home in remote coastal British Columbia, Ernest Mason, a 77-year-old elder and hereditary chief of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation, remembers. He remembers a childhood fishing trip with his father, when they packed sleeping bags but caught so many halibut they were home before dark. He remembers setting traps for pink Dungeness crab and floating hemlock branches to collect edible herring eggs.
He also remembers watching the first two times the herring stocks collapsed, and then, fearing a third collapse, telling the Canadian government that he and the other chiefs were banning commercial fishermen from their traditional territorial waters. “I said, ‘We’ll do what it takes to protect what we have,’” Mason told Vox. “This is one of the ways our grandfathers taught us, how to look after things. That’s one of the chores now.”
For coastal Indigenous communities like Mason’s, these ancestral lessons can be the difference between plenty and poverty. Mason is one of the province’s few elders who was not forced into Canada’s residential schools, which stripped Indigenous children of their languages, oral histories, and cultures. This is one reason Mason, who often wears a baseball cap over his silver hair, remembers so much.
Around the world, the memories of elders like Mason are playing a powerful role in understanding and helping to preserve marine species. A growing group of researchers, some of them from within Indigenous communities, is translating the qualitative stories of fishermen into quantitative data, in a process that often requires sensitive negotiations and uncomfortable conversations between Indigenous leaders and Western institutions. Their recollections can help fill historical and geographical gaps that have eluded scientists until now.
Five years ago, University of Victoria PhD candidate Lauren Eckert interviewed Mason for hours about his earliest fishing memories. Since then, a series of Indigenous-led research projects — based on those memories and others — have rewritten best practices on the management of two species, Dungeness crab and yelloweye rockfish. “Science is exceptionally good at taking accurate snapshots that approach truth,” Eckert says. “But Indigenous knowledge includes long-term datasets that provide this massive canvas of information that spans decades to thousands of years.”
Both yelloweye rockfish and Dungeness crab are essential to coastal Pacific ecosystems. Dungeness crab, according to one government description, is “the most important crab species harvested” in the country’s western province. Yelloweye is threatened because adults must live 15 years before they start to spawn, making them vulnerable to overfishing.
But government managers only have reliable information on yelloweye abundance starting in 2001 — the same year a population crash forced them to start a targeted conservation plan. Yelloweye are considered a “data-poor” species, according to the plan, because data was only collected “sporadically” from the 1980s onward. This made it difficult for government scientists to tell how steeply the population had fallen since the advent of big-boat commercial fishing in the 1970s, says Eckert.
One place they hadn’t looked, however, was in the memories of those who were there all along.
To reconstruct the historical abundance, or baselines, of rockfish and crab, Eckert drew on an interview methodology developed after the 1990s Atlantic cod collapse. In this “vessel-based approach,” fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador were asked to recall memories of specific boats on which they had fished; this prompted specific memories of fish size and abundance, as well as when and where fish had been caught. Researchers translated the accounts of Central Coast fishers into box graphs estimating size, which corroborated the official modern catch records to an astounding — but not surprising — degree, Eckert says.
As biodiversity loss and climate change loom large over our planet’s fate, these types of projects are beginning to model healthier, less extractive relationships between biologists and the communities in which they work. In the process, they could also bring key species back from the brink of extinction.
For more than 10,000 years, the Central Coast nations have developed and practiced intricate harvesting techniques based on respect and reciprocity — like harvesting herring eggs on hemlock boughs — that long allowed the species they relied on to thrive alongside their annual harvests, says Frid.
That Indigenous stewardship was swept aside with the arrival of European settlers, who were, says University of British Columbia marine biologist Daniel Pauly, “a bunch of racists.” Science, when properly done, Pauly says, draws on all available evidence. Canadian authorities “thought that the First Nations didn’t know what they were doing,” he says. “And in 20 years, they destroyed the salmon run.”
While the scientific approach to gathering memories may differ, there are patterns across research projects. Many papers published in this emerging field draw heavily on the methods of anthropology — a field that has its own history of racism and colonialism. Often, data takes the form of anecdotes and recollections, which are gathered during confidential, hours-long, in-person interviews.
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