ASP Podcast #12: Salmon & transboundary mining issues with Allison Barrett
Listen to Dan and Allison with your favorite podcast player, or via Apple Podcasts
Filming in the Petersburg harbor
Growing up with salmon, fishing for salmon, and transboundary mining issues
Early memories & running north through the Inside Passage in the family seine boat
Fishing for sockeye salmon off of Noyes Island in SE Alaska
Alarmed by the Mt. Polley mine disaster, and implications for the major transboundary, Alaska—B.C. rivers with vital salmon runs
Embarking on a documentary film project: "Sisters and Rivers" concerning transboundary mining issues
First nation peoples of B.C.— their perspectives on mining issues
Stories of their long resistance and struggle with multi-national corporate development in the Sacred Waters area of northern B.C.
Implications of running a power line up the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, 37, into NW B.C.
The Red Chris mine in the headwaters of the Stikine River; the KSM mine development in the headwaters of the Unuk River
The complexities of transboundary mining issues: perspectives
Aliveness, storytelling, and the documentary
ASP Episode #12
Highly recommended advocacy group: Salmon Beyond Borders. Current information, pictures, maps, ways to contribute.
Another excellent web resource. Great imagery of the both mine sites and why the Sacred Headwaters are so important and special: The Narwhal, transboundary mining
As mentioned in the podcast, First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining (FNWARM)
On the genesis of the Sisters & Rivers documentary project. Excerpt:
Allison: “I want to share this memory I have of sitting on the boat with my family. We were just floating around it was probably the day before an opener and I just remember it was a glorious, just beautiful sunny day. And that year the Pink Salmon return was really, really strong in that area. and really really strong in Tenakee Inlet. And so I'm sitting on the back deck and we're floating around and I'm sitting with my Dad and we're on folding chairs—I’m sitting with my sisters and we're talking about all these things. We're talking about old boats, we're talking about people who had fished there before. We're storytelling, kind of knowledge sharing that I was talking about before, and we're sitting there chatting about life and then on the horizon there’s, just everywhere you look, like popcorn, you know, there are so many Pink Salmon jumping that you couldn't look at a slice of water for more than five seconds without seeing forty fish.
And I don't even really remember, if we did fish the next day I don't remember if we had a good fishing day like that doesn't matter like that part of the memory didn't stick. What stuck with me was that feeling of being in the middle of all of that abundance, and being in the middle of that tremendous energy of all those salmon returning. I don't know if that was the first time that I had this thought, but at the time that I remember where I just was looking out at all of that and looking at my family and thinking about how precious this is and imagining what that would be like if it was gone, you know, if the faucet just got turned off.
That got me to thinking there's so many ways that the future of salmon or has been threatened. Some of those ways seems so big and nebulous and the borders are hard to find. The perimeter of the problem is hard to detect. Things like climate collapse or climate change. And then there are these issues that are, in my opinion, easier to define. They're not simple issues, but things like logging and mining and the things that take place on land that we can see that we can ask questions to try to establish the boundaries of the problem.
There are these problems too and I think that is what drew me into questioning the whole process of mining and proximity to salmon waterways was born out of a real sense of trying to wrap my head around what it would be like to lose salmon.”
On the Mount Polley mine disaster of 2014:
“I mean there was a drinking water shutdown in that area for a while, while people determined, if it was actually safe to drink that water. So of course people weren't going to go catch fish out of it. And you're interrupting people's thousands-year-old subsistence fishing tradition on that system. In an effort to repair those damages, [she] told us that the mining company gave everybody in her band six cans of salmon, as sort of a gesture, a gesture of ‘we understand that you can't catch your fish but here's some canned salmon’. And she.
I mean it's crazy, and she showed us that can I think she's kept them just as sort of like a visual reference for ‘this is what they think it means to recover our subsistence tradition—here this is literally what they think it means like the six cans of salmon’. So besides that obvious loss of being able to harvest fish, I think there's an important reason to focus on the psychological stain that it leaves, because even if, let's just say, even if for some crazy reason, all the tailings were cleaned out or, completely washed out of the system or even if it was determined that they were 100% safe which they obviously aren’t, and then obviously won't be proven that that's the case, but it's the psychological stain that it's left on people who used to feel so safe in that environment and so connected to the natural abundance in the area of the area who have had that taken away from them.
So an elder we spoke with, Jean William, told us that no matter what happens, she's never going to eat another fish out of the Fraser River. It's been too contaminated and she's someone that grew up learning how to fish with her grandparents and it's still a speaker of the language and she was just so adamant about that—that no matter what happens, she will never touch a fish out of that river because it's been it's been too disrespected.”
Tip of the hat to Christian Arthur for his musical contributions. Thanks, Chris!