Ending B.C. bear hunt a collaborative victory

Grizzly bears in British Columbia are now safe from trophy hunters.

This week, new provincial legislation takes effect, banning the hunt for sport. It’s a win for environmental activists and Indigenous groups — but more importantly, it’s informed by Western science and generations of Indigenous knowledge, an early step toward a new type of collaborative conservation.

When the grizzly bear hunt was reinstated in 2001, many First Nations wanted to end the practice for conservation and cultural reasons, and brought these concerns to the provincial government.

“The government came to the table with 10-year(-old) statistical modelling data from flyovers and tree covering,” says Hadley Archer, executive director of TNC Canada, an affiliate of the world’s largest conservation organization, the

Nature Conservancy. Government scientists then extrapolated from one part of the province to estimate for others, essentially “guessing” the number of bears in a regions, he says.

“Meanwhile (First Nations) communities knew where the bears were because they see them all the time. They literally have relationships with individual animals.”

Data and models faced off against cultural knowledge and experience. The data won. The hunt continued. But while the B.C. government was picking numbers over Indigenous experience, traditional ecological knowledge is gaining a foothold in academia and conservation circles.

Thousands of years of lived experience and a deep connection to the land go into Indigenous knowledge, says Kelsey Dokis-Jansen, Indigenous initiatives manager at the University of Alberta.

“The rigour is equal to or greater than that of Western science,” she says. “Just because it doesn’t look like the data that those trained in science can interpret does not mean it is not real.”

While grizzly bears remained in the scopes of hunters, concerned First Nations spent the next 10 years enhancing traditional knowledge with “data the government would respect,” says Archer. To influence policy, they had to speak bureaucrat — and put knowledge into numbers.

A group of First Nations from across central B.C. worked with conservation organizations to track bear populations.

And their economic assessments proved the value of eco-tourism dwarfed the money brought in from hunting licenses and guides. And public polls showed nearly 90 per cent of British Columbians supported a ban on the trophy hunt.

The data corroborated what First Nations had found and convinced the government to end the hunt.

“(Taking) what First Nations already know, packaging it in a way that governments accept is a temporary state,” says Aaron Heidt, program director at Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance. The goal is building understanding between both parties “to work together to solve the same problems.”

Gathering data and generating models has been the go-to method to inform environmental policy, but Archer, Heidt and Dokis-Jansen agree there is room for other tools in the toolbox. Indigenous groups are often the ones living closest to the land. Their daily experiences and real-time observations can also drive policy.

“There are many ways of knowing the world, statistics and data are just one,” says Dokis-Jansen. “That’s pretty hard to grasp if you haven’t lived it, but I am hopeful we will get there.”

Craig and Marc Kielburger are the co-founders of the WE movement, which includes WE Charity, ME to WE Social Enterprise and WE Day. For more dispatches from WE, check out WE Stories.