The Hungry People
Non-indigenous people like to go on about the technologies colonizers brought to the Americas. But what of the innovations they took away?
Non-indigenous people like to go on about the technologies colonizers brought to the Americas. But what of the innovations they took away? by Robert Jago
There are maggots inside my gloves — this I discover after a few minutes of wear, when I get a prickly feeling in my fingertips. I quickly take the gloves off, flip them inside out, and rinse them in the river. I’m making my best effort at being tough and unflappable because I’m out with the Stó:lō fishing fleet and fishers, as a rule, are tough.
The gloves go back on. I reach into the net and pull out another writhing, surprisingly strong salmon. It’s the summer of 2018 and I’m on a flat-bottomed boat with just enough space for a very large ice-filled fishing tote, a couple of helpers, and the captain, all of us members of various Stó:lō First Nations — the group of First Nations stretching along the length of the lower Fraser River and into Metro Vancouver.
The salmon goes from the river to the net to the tote, all the while heaving its body back and forth. Blood, ice, and water spray when the lid on the tote comes up — enough gets in your mouth that you can taste the salt of it. This is fresh water, so that salt taste is blood. The nausea from the maggots is a distant memory now.
As our boats come in, trucks swarm us, non-natives looking to buy our fish. Our tote might hold $2,000 worth of salmon, but every bit of it is already earmarked for various family members, and the government’s put off signing the contract that would allow us to sell any extra, anyway. That night, as we’re washing down the fishing gear, we overhear a TV reporter talking about us. We get to the TV in time to see the news crews bothering people who are unloading their boats. A spokesperson from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (dfo) accuses us and other Stó:lō people of illegally selling our fish, which we’re meant to keep only for our consumption. Later, in a written statement, a federal official refuses to use our First Nations name but refers to us by the name of the adjacent non-native town: “Lower Mainland fishery officers, particularly in Langley area, have been receiving a significant volume of public complaints around rampant and open illegal sales of fresh salmon.”
Adding insult to injury, the statement tacks on a warning to the unsuspecting public, telling them that we don’t know how to handle the fish properly; they advise that any salmon bought from us poses a “significant risk to human health.”
Our catch is fine for us to eat, apparently — it’s just a problem for “human” health.
Stó:lō means “river people,” and this river is full of salmon — or, at least, it used to be. It’s our staple food, eaten smoked, baked, boiled, and candied. My grandma prized the eyes, plucked out and sucked on till they popped and released their fishy goo. My nephew goes for the eggs; he quite literally licks his lips at the sight of them. My uncle takes the best cuts to smoke outdoors with a closely guarded, centuries-old family recipe.
It takes a lot of nerve to say we don’t know how to handle salmon — but I suspect the reality behind that claim is that a great many Canadians can’t imagine us knowing anything independently, as Native people. It’s a way of thinking that is common enough among non-natives, going all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who, describing his first encounter with “Indians,” gave us the backhanded compliment: “These are very simple-minded and handsomely formed people.”
Pretty and dumb.
Canadians, Americans — all of them treat us as the poor cousin of the human race. We’re seen as inferior Stone Age people, incapable of inventing or creating or even running our own lives. Look at how Indian Affairs or Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada or Indigenous Services puts training wheels on our nations: thanks to the Indian Act that variously named department administers, we have less freedom to act than a local housing co-op board. Look at how the dfo talks about us as if we were dangerous incompetents. Non-natives act like we entered the world the day after
they landed on Plymouth Rock, like they brought us into creation and are teaching us to be almost but not quite as good as them.
It’s a sentiment expressed openly in a 2012 editorial from a small-town Alberta newspaper, which declared, “It is our obligation, as trained and educated citizens, to become more involved with First Nations peoples and guide them towards becoming more responsible citizens.” The writer went on to ask, “Are First Nations people capable of understanding and assuming these responsibilities?”
Another way of saying that we’re pretty and dumb is to praise us for the “light touch” we have had on our environment. “The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere.” That assessment doesn’t trace back to Columbus, though, or even to those first colonizers. That was Smithsonian botanist Stanwyn G. Shetler, writing in 1991, for the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. In effect, he and many others think that we had the same impact on our continent as squirrels — which is to say that, even though we were here, we didn’t occupy our land in any meaningful sense. It belonged to nobody.
Sadly, that view of Canada and the Americas as terra nullius — no one’s land — dominates among non-natives.
But what do the facts say? The facts say that, far from them bringing us into the world, and far from us being the pretty and dumb cousin to proper humans, it was only with our knowledge and creations and work that their world was able to come into existence in the first place. They didn’t hand us the keys to the modern world — they took from us the tools that built its foundations.
The spokesperson for the dfo didn’t emerge out of the earth fully formed: they and their way of thinking came from somewhere. Look to the person who trained them, and the one who trained them. If you keep going back, one boss after another after another, you will eventually end up, at noon on Monday, July 30, 1827, on the Cadboro, a schooner owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company that has anchored in the Fraser River — for us Stó:lō, this is where Canada begins. The boat carries a mix of Quebecois, Hawaiian, British, Métis, Abenaki, and Iroquois labourers. These men have come to build Fort Langley, where British Columbia will one day be founded as its own colony. But — though their descendants might tell you the land was untouched — they are in S’olh Temexw and they work opposite Kwantlen, which is my home First Nation. The construction they start that day is the first act of foreign rule in our country.
George Barnston was a surveyor for the Hudson’s Bay Company and an important (if undervalued) member of the Cadboro’s crew. One of Barnston’s duties was to keep Fort Langley’s logbook, a diary of sorts. Back in July 1827, Barnston briefly mentioned the settlement but spent the majority of his entry discussing the fishing practices of my ancestors and the ancestors of those I was catching salmon with: