Fish Weirs to Sonar Screen: the Demise of the Native Fishery
30 May
Elaine Brière, Simon Fraser University
download this essay: Briere_Fish weirs
“The management of fisheries is intended for the benefit of man, not fish.”
Canadian Economist H. Scott Gordon, 1950
photo by Elaine Brière
Introduction
Amongst my earliest memories are the sights, sounds and smells of fishing activity on the docks of Prince Rupert and Nanaimo. My father was a commercial fisherman of French-Canadian descent. His first boat was a double-ended troller; one of the hundreds seized from Japanese fishers during the war. Salmon was the main fishery, but there were also halibut. In Prince Rupert I remember seeing a mature halibut filling the hold of my father’s thirty-two foot boat. A fish of this size was rare as the once great north coast halibut fishing banks had been greatly depleted even by 1915. After my family moved to Nanaimo in 1958, my father fished salmon for some years in the Georgia Strait before the development of the purse-seine fleet depleted the gulf fishery. Commercial salmon fishers in the Gulf were then forced to travel to the west coast of Vancouver Island to earn a livelihood.
Herring came into Nanaimo harbour in great shoals in the 1950′s. As a 10 year-old I recall the excitement going out to rake herring at night in a dugout canoe with my Indian neighbours, who lived in stilt houses in Newcastle Channel. This was before herring, a vital food for the marine ecosystem, itself became a major commercial fishery. Between 1960 and 1967 when sharply declining stocks forced the closure of the reduction herring fishery, hundreds of tons were taken for fertilizer and feed. Herring stocks are again in serious decline since a market has been developed in Japan for the female roe. Federal fishery biologists estimate that about 170 locations where herring used to spawn in the Johnson and Georgia Straits are barren or near barren. The Indians and their stilt houses disappeared from Newcastle Channel along with the herring. They were removed to the reservation at the other end of town, near the mouth of Nanaimo River, whose marine life was destroyed when it became a booming ground for the logging industry.
Since the European West Coast fisheries began in the latter part of the 19th century, West Coast marine life has gone from awesome abundance to precipitous decline, to extirpation or near extirpation of many species that most British Columbians have never even heard of. (more…)
