Within just a few decades after Europeans began to develop what is now Vancouver, British Columbia, in the 1870s, 99 percent of Pacific herring, surf smelt, and eulachon had been wiped out in nearby waters.
According to new research, the three species of forage fishes, which feed whales, salmon, seabirds and many other animals, were quickly decimated by destructive fishing practices, industrial activity and pollution.
For millennia before colonization, Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish) nations relied on these species, using sophisticated technologies including nets and weirs to catch them.
But by the 1930s the fisheries’ near-total collapse had deprived First Nations of crucial foods and destabilized the entire ecosystem.
The research results are no surprise to Gabriel George, a cultural leader and the director of treaty, lands and resources for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which commissioned the study. The nation’s name translates to “the people of the inlet,” and they have lived in səlilwət—or Burrard Inlet, the narrow fjord that bisects Vancouver—since time out of mind.
For generations, elders have passed down detailed knowledge about the state of səlilwət before and after settlers arrived.
To understand forage fish populations during that period, archaeologist Jesse Morin, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and a team of researchers combined information from archaeological digs with archival records, mostly from the turn of the 20th century.
They combed through field notes, journals, reports and maps from ethnographers, early scientists and fisheries regulators, and through recordings from Tsleil-Waututh knowledge keepers, including George’s late grandfather, Dan George, a notable leader and chief.
The accounts describe settlers’ rapacious fishing methods, including the common practice of tossing dynamite in the ocean to kill schools of herring. After the fish floated to the surface, oil collected from their carcasses was used to grease wooden skids to slide huge logs out of the forests.
In 1888, a fisheries regulator noted that herring, which had previously seemed “inexhaustible,” were becoming very difficult to catch around Vancouver.
“We’ve got people fishing in the most destructive way humanly possible way before scientists even glanced at those waters and thought about [measuring the herring population],” says Morin.
Indeed, the magnitude of these forage fish collapses more than a century ago was almost entirely overlooked by federal fisheries scientists, who didn’t begin studying the populations systematically until the 1970s.
To Iain McKechnie, a coastal archaeologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the recent research, the results align with a paper he published in 2014. That study found that, unlike today, herring were consistently abundant in waters between Washington and Alaska prior to colonization.
Studies like these led by Morin and McKechnie combat the tendency to assume that the ecological conditions we observe within our lifetimes are normal.
It may be impossible to revive the ecology of the pre-colonization era, George says, but restoring the inlet as a source of food would benefit all Vancouverites, who rely on the health of the ecosystem whether they realize it or not.