Equitable seafood futures

Co-designing ancestral and contemporary food systems

Bringing together the efforts of the Huuuʔay̓aḥt and ɬaʔamɩn Nations, SFU’s Ocean Relations Collaborative, SFU’s Earth to Ocean Research Group, and University of Victoria’s Visual Story Lab, this collaborative is engaging in reciprocal community exchanges and visual story telling that will support Huuuʔay̓aḥt and ɬaʔamɩn Nations in exercising their inherent right to self-determination and food sovereignty, supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer, community health and each Nations’ socio-cultural priorities.

Guided by both western scientific data and ancestral Indigenous mariculture practices, the land-based learnings will inform actions to improve community access to safe, reliable shellfish harvesting, and ensuring that community harvests balance the needs of human- and non-human beings who rely on clams and clam beaches supports all aspects of thriving ocean communities, including economic, ecological, and socio-cultural objectives. This reflects the nuučaanuɫ law of tsawalk, which means all is one.

Potential outcomes

This project aims to inform coastal stewardship action that can support resilient human-clam relationships and equitable seafood futures.

Socio-Cultural Benefits: Restoring clam beaches and revitalizing ancestral caretaking practices that confer climate resilience is an empowering way for communities to reconnect to their lands, seas, and skies, relationships that have been severed due to a long history of settler colonialism on Canada’s Pacific coast. Indigenous clam harvesting in southern British Columbia has experienced declines due to historic legacies of settler-driven overharvesting, industrial pollution, legal exclusion, predator recovery, nonnative species, and climate warming such as marine heatwaves. By leading stewardship and revitalization efforts informed by ancestral mariculture innovations and western science this collaboration will support Huuuʔay̓aḥt and ɬaʔamɩn Nations in exercising their inherent right to self-determination and food sovereignty, supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer, community health and each Nations’ socio-cultural priorities.

Ecological Benefits: Supporting clam growth and survival by implementing thermally-buffering stewardship actions for vulnerable species at vulnerable beaches will improve the resilience of these systems to climate warming and marine heatwaves.

Economic Empowerment: Improving growing conditions for clams can support expanded harvests that align with community goals, including food, social, and ceremonial harvest and trade among communities, or commercial digging which many community members take part in.

One Ocean Benefit: Improving community access to safe, reliable shellfish harvesting, and ensuring that community harvests balance the needs of human- and non-human beings who rely on clams and clam beaches supports all aspects of thriving ocean communities, including economic, ecological, and socio-cultural objectives. This reflects the nuučaanuɫ law of tsawalk, which means all is one. This law reminds us to consider the nature of existence as an integrated whole, and it should be researched and cared for as such.