Indigenous sex-selective salmon harvesting demonstrates pre-contact marine resource management in Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, Canada

To gain insight into pre-contact Coast Salish fishing practices, we used new palaeogenetic analytical techniques to assign sex identifications to salmonid bones from four archaeological sites in Burrard Inlet (Tsleil-Waut), British Columbia, Canada, dating between about 2300–1000 BP (ca. 400 BCE–CE 1200). Our results indicate that male chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) were preferentially targeted at two of the four sampled archaeological sites. Because a single male salmon can mate with several females, selectively harvesting male salmon can increase a fishery’s maximum sustainable harvest. We suggest such selective harvesting of visually distinctive male spawning chum salmon was a common practice, most effectively undertaken at wooden weirs spanning small salmon rivers and streams. We argue that this selective harvesting of males is indicative of an ancient and probably geographically widespread practice for ensuring sustainable salmon populations. The archaeological data presented here confirms earlier ethnographic accounts describing the selective harvest of male salmon.

Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures

Anthropocene debate centers on the start-date and the cause of the geologic Epoch. One argument for the Epoch’s start-date is the “Early Anthropocene,” contending humanity “took control” of Earth systems during the Neolithic Revolution. Adherents contend agriculture contributed to rising carbon emissions and laid the groundwork for societal ills such as colonialism and extractive capitalism. Such a deterministic theory erases centuries of relational agriculture practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This article upsets the narrative of the “Early Anthropocene” that would mark all agriculture and agricultural societies as destructive and extractive, and instead offers embodied Indigenous narratives that view agriculture as a relational system of partnerships between humans and other-than-human beings over centuries. First, I trace the “Early Anthropocene” narrative from its origins with paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman to its contemporary adherents and show how such a theory lines-up with the narrative of the Christianized Biblical Fall. I show that “Early Anthropocene” theorists portray agriculture as society’s “ultimate sin,” wherein humans fall from a hunter–gatherer Eden and must toil to cultivate crops, eventually giving way to colonialism and extractive capitalism, ultimately causing environmental degradation and destruction and leading to a second coming of the hunter-gathering Eden. I then argue against such stories, tracing examples of relational agriculture practiced prior to settler colonization into our contemporary moment by Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Western Apache, Karuk, Coast Salish, and Ponca peoples. Such stories show a pattern of missteps, understanding, and knowledge production between human groups and the more-than-human, rather than the environmental and societal destruction that Early Anthropocene theorists portray as the inevitable end of agricultural societies. This study disproves the agricultural “Early Anthropocene” as a starting point for Earth’s Epoch. It also presents relational environmental understanding through decolonized agriculture on repatriated land as a future method for interacting with the other-than-human environment.

Vicky Boldo/kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew (Gentle Wind Woman): From Individual to Intergenerational Healing

In this article, the authors highlight Indigenous helper Vicky Boldo/kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s (Gentle Wind Woman) approach to healing knowledges. kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s background of Cree, Coast Salish and Métis ancestry, in addition to living a scarring experience as a trans-racial adoptee, created a ground of insight and self-care that sparked her awareness and reliance on Mother Earth as part of her survival. This chapter documents kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s insights into the sacred and inseparable relationship to Earth and all beings as crucial to overall wellbeing. The authors discuss kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s teachings about connection, embodiment and utilizing inner resources to move through the pain and trauma of separation from the self and sacred. Ultimately, kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew exemplifies the need to centre the ways in which people respond to hurt assisted by positive social environments that challenge and stop structures of abuse. This understanding gained as a “wounded healer” in turn creates spaces for individual learnings extending into intergenerational teachings on healing and dignity.

Social Networks and Stratagems of Nineteenth-Century Coast Salish Leaders

During the socially transformative mid-nineteenth century in the Salish Sea region of the Northwest Coast, a number of influential leaders emerged within Indigenous tribal groups. They played a significant role in reshaping the social geography of the region, blending emergent religious, commercial, and military bases for authority with more conventional Coast Salish strategies of patronage and generosity. The authors examine the lives and social connections of three Coast Salish leaders to illustrate how they were able to establish and maintain social networks across the region for their advantage and for the advantage of followers who had gravitated to them from surrounding shattered communities.

Referee statement on Technology as Human Social Tradition: 15 Trait-Based Datasets of Hunter-Gatherer Material Culture (Northwest Siberia, Pacific Northwest Coast, Northern California). Data Paper

The data provide significant opportunities for new investigations. The data are structured in such a way that each of Jordan's studies can be replicated spanning Khanty, Coast Salish, and various Indigenous Californian technological traditions.