Fish weirs are still banned under the Fisheries Act. This First Nation wants to build a new one

On an overcast afternoon in early August, Siyamexwelalexw (Troy Ganzeveld) paces up and down the bank of the Vedder River in Stó:lō territories. 

He was hoping to have had the fish weir in place by now. Water levels are higher than average, because of a late snowmelt, and a part of him wonders whether the weir will succumb to the river’s relentless flux.

As the crew cranes the metal weir into the river, no one is confident whether it will stay. 

“It’s a mixture of nervousness, tension and excitement,” says one biologist. 

Heavy concrete slabs are lowered into the weir’s trap box, along with sandbags filled with pea gravel — more friendly to spawning salmon than sandy sediment — in the hopes they will provide enough weight and stability to withstand heavy surges of passing water. 

Fish weirs, a traditional freshwater fishing technology designed for shallow, slow-moving streams, were used by Indigenous communities as a sustainable fishing method for thousands of years prior to colonization. 

From carefully placed rocks in a U-shape, to a wooden fence driven into the riverbed, weirs varied from community to community depending on specific environments, fish species, and cultural practices. 

Traditionally, the Semá:th (Sumas First Nation) would have secured wooden fences to the riverbed, often with a walkway overtop, extending across the entire width of the river. 

But the Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) — which is funding a large chunk of the project through investments made under the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative — has forbidden any permanent structure that would anchor the weir to the river bank or bottom, or extend the full width of the canal.

This is likely to limit the impact on the environment and save money, says Ganzeveld, an elected councillor for Sumas First Nation), but he believes there are also politics at play.

“I think there would be some pushback from the recreational sector if a First Nation established a permanent location for their fishing site,” he says.

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Ganzeveld has been overseeing a scientific study on behalf of Sumas First Nation. In partnership with the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the First Nation is attempting to reintroduce a weir on its traditional territory for the purpose of studying its impacts.

But in late August, just weeks after the scientific team’s hopeful construction efforts, the region experienced record breaking rainfall and Ganzeveld’s fears were realized. The fish weir was swept away. 

“How do you achieve structural stability in a weir if you can only cover two thirds of the channel?” Jared Connoy, a PhD candidate involved in the project, asks. 

Ganzeveld adds that the heavy flows of water lifted the weir and trap box from below, making it inoperable. 

These environmental challenges are, in many regards, a legacy of law and policy decisions. The draining of Xhotsa (Sumas Lake) a century ago, and the construction of a narrow, channelized canal — stripped of natural friction from vegetation, irregular surfaces, and meandering curves — has left the system vulnerable to the effects of heavy rainfall, which courses through it with intensified force.

“The environmental and the bureaucratic challenges aren’t necessarily separable from each other,” says Connoy, “and so we’re having to deal with both.”

‘What if we drained the lake?’

The last time the Semá:th fished with their own weir, the territory looked vastly different. Cradled between the Kwekwei:qw (Sumas) and Qoqó:lem (Vedder) Mountains, the First Nation, along with their eastern neighbours, the Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribe, shared a weir that stretched 200 feet across the width of Xhotsa. 

During the postglacial period, this vast body of water covered 85,000 acres of land, nearly twice the size of the City of Vancouver, with continuous nourishment from the Semá:th and Chilliwack River systems — Mother Nature’s gift from the last Ice Age. 

Although salmon spawned in the millions around Xhotsa, it was better known for its sturgeon. This was the preferred catch from the weir, which grew villages at either end, as well as many other villages around the lake.

According to Chad Reimer’s 2018 history Before We Lost the Lake, the Semá:th weir was constructed from about five pairs of large wooden poles driven into the clay bottom at an angle, forming a groove for more poles to rest on. 

A wooden gate was then plunged down into the clay and a walkway three poles thick would allow for travel and harvesting. A generation later, Stó:lō Elder Bob Joe recounted:

“In the mornings, when the water was fairly clear, one could see sturgeon resting against the weir, held by the current. Carefully a noose was slipped over the head of the fish, then it was harpooned, quickly dragged away from the others, and landed in shallow water. When enough sturgeon had been caught, the weir was opened.”

Once the most widespread salmon fishing technique practiced by Indigenous fishers from California to Alaska, weirs, typically used on rivers, would block upriver migrations of returning adult salmon. Fishers would use dip nets or spears to harvest salmon, often leaving the females to spawn. Once a fisher harvested what they needed, the weir would open, leaving the rest of the salmon free to continue their travels.

But in 1894, weirs, along with spears and other traditional traps, were outlawed in British Columbia following pressure from canners — the most influential voice in fisheries policy at the time — who wanted better access to salmon. This ban, coupled with the broader 1888 Fisheries Act, were part of a deliberate colonial strategy to dismantle Indigenous fishing rights and practices, while eroding Indigenous economies and knowledge systems in favor of commercial and settler fisheries. 

Meanwhile, as more settlers arrived in the Semá:th Valley in their quest for gold, they found it necessary to adapt, begrudgingly, to the marshy landscape, and its recurring floods and mosquitos. Dreams of intensive agriculture planted in them an idea: “What if we drained the lake?”

A history of criminalizing Indigenous fisheries

One hundred years ago this past November, settlers successfully purged more than 1,200 square kilometres of watershed, transforming the landscape into farmland, while displacing Indigenous communities that were already decimated by smallpox and other diseases of the day. The loss of the lake severed their deep reliance on its abundant natural resources, further eroding their way of life.

Before long, in place of muskrats, ducks and sturgeon, grew tobacco, hops and livestock feed. 

Of the millions of people who drive through Sumas Prairie each year, few are aware of its lush, swampy history. Only major floods like the atmospheric river event of 2021, remind locals and news followers of the region’s wetland origins.

In place of Xhotsa, where the massive Semá:th weir once operated, flows the diked Vedder River (renamed in 2018 from Vedder Canal). 

Roughly five kilometres in length, the pin-straight man-made channel was constructed to permanently redirect the Chilliwack River, draining Xhotsa into the Semá:th River just short of its confluence with the Fraser River mainstem. 

For the Semá:th to restore its traditional lake fishing practices, they needed to think creatively about where and how to do so. 

The nation partnered with the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at UBC, and together, they applied for a scientific licence to study salmon using a fish weir. 

Connoy has dedicated the last two years to helping obtain the licenses from DFO and carry out scientific research during summer and fall salmon returns. He’s tasked with tracking the survival of fish released from the weir, which he can compare to popular licensed methods such as gillnetting and angling.

“And so our goal was to compare those gears and to understand which gears would be best for fish in these systems,” Connoy says from the seat of his UBC truck.

He records some basic observations like sex, length, maturity, wounds. Then, depending on the species of fish, he inserts either a tiny pit tag the size of a piece of long-grain rice, which will detect whether the fish made it back to the Chilliwack River Hatchery, or a larger radio tag, the size of a thumb, which will track the fish to five points along the 40-kilometre route upstream back to the same hatchery. 

But it’s not the science that was the most challenging part for Connoy. When the team first proposed their project to DFO, he ran into significant challenges securing science permits “because of [DFOs] perception that a weir could impede Pacific salmon migrations to their spawning grounds,” he says. According to Connoy, DFO was particularly concerned about fish weirs because of their ability to block all fish from passing. 

“But that’s not how weirs ever worked,” Connoy says. “It all comes back to the history of criminalizing these [traditional technologies].”

In an email, DFO says that the goal of the project is to assess “the feasibility of safe and effective fish capture, handling, release and by-pass through behavioral assessments.” DFO did not provide a response to a question from IndigiNews and The Narwhal about their reported concerns that the fish weir could block all fish from passing. 

‘We’re going to find a way forward, with or without you’

Connoy says he spent a long time trying to communicate to DFO that his project had no intention of harming all the migrating salmon. They were simply asking to monitor and tag some that were swimming by. 

Kwilosintun (Murray Ned) retired as an elected councillor in 2022 and was one of the visionaries for Semá:th’s conservation, guardianship and harvest program, of which the fish weir project is part. He believes the scientific license is important for Semá:th’s ability to manage salmon as a resource. 

“It’s about conservation,” he said. “It’s about being more involved with the management side of things, the science side of things, and then ‘ground truthing’ everything with our own Indigenous Knowledge.”

Ned, who is also the executive director of the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance and serves as a commissioner with the Pacific Salmon Commission, says that despite asking the DFO and the provincial government to partner and invest in the fish weir project, they wouldn’t invest until the nation began “pushing the envelope” without them. 

“We’re going to find a way forward, with or without you, that’s meaningful for the fish and our people,” he says, explaining why the nation chose to forge ahead with their own plans for the weir without the support of the federal and provincial governments.

Eventually, DFO granted the licence under terms that the weir be partial and mobile, spanning two-thirds of the canal only, allowing one-third as a salmon escape route. Ganzeveld said this rule also prioritizes summer float-tubers to enjoy bobbing down the canal, a rule reportedly set by the Canadian Navigable Waters Act under Transport Canada.

‘A lot of people were getting kicked out of their fishing spots’

Ned’s great grandfather, who carried the ancestral names Selesmelton and Kwa:losintun, was chief when the lake was drained and was the first to oppose it, Ned says. 

Although the draining didn’t affect his immediate family’s fishing sites, it destroyed the entire nation’s food security, livelihood and cultural practices. In the 1980s and again in 2014, dike stabilization efforts destroyed many of his Semá:th relatives’ sites, including Thiyō:qweltel/The:táx (Chris Silver)’s father’s fishing site. 

Silver, a current Sumas First Nation councillor, goes fishing “here and there” but doesn’t have a strong connection to the practice, largely because of the destruction of his family’s fishing sites. As a child, he strongly opposed fishing. He saw how it destroyed his family — or so he thought.

“A lot of people were getting kicked out of their fishing spots,” he says. “It was more illegal than drug dealing.”

Silver’s parents, who were on social assistance when he and his four siblings were young, relied on selling salmon illegally to get by. Silver remembers DFO raiding his house. 

“And I mean like — raided,” he says. Silver says DFO confiscated all salmon-related memorabilia from the family home.

“I remember there was like a huge collage of salmon on the wall. My mom loved it. And then as soon as we came home, I was like, where did all the pictures go?” 

Silver says growing up under the Indian Act felt like always being on the run, either from child and family services, or the DFO. 

“Both of those things went hand-in-hand, and it’s because we were poor,” he says. 

Silver believes it’s part of “poverty culture.” He says he could clearly see the stigma of fishing from a young age, that “only poor people do this, only broke people do this, only the welfare people do this. And that becomes a part of your culture.” He thinks that’s why there are fewer and fewer Indigenous fishers each year.

Access also plays a role in the number of Indigenous fishers participating in food, social and ceremonial — or FSC — fisheries. According to Ned, harvesting opportunities for First Nations fisheries has declined by about 90 per cent in the last three decades: from three days per week in the early 1990s, to about 15 days total in 2021.

This decline persists in spite of the landmark 1990 R. v. Sparrow Supreme Court of Canada decision, which affirmed that Indigenous people have “an Aboriginal right to fish for food, social and ceremonial (FSC) purposes and that after conservation, this right takes priority,” as stated on DFO’s website. 

However, Ned argues that First Nations are still treated as stakeholders alongside the commercial and recreational sectors. This stems from the fact that the Integrated Fisheries Management Plans and the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which guide annual fisheries allocations, were developed at a time when Indigenous Rights and Title were not formally recognized.

“The socio-economics of [the commercial and recreational] fisheries has been a key driver for the Fisheries minister in the past, and still is to this day,” says Ned.

It’s why the food, social and ceremonial fisheries are often seen using gill nets, says Ned, which are one of the least selective gears, with higher rates of mortality. 

“We don’t have time nowadays, especially if you only have three weekends to get your food fish.” 

If the food, social and ceremonial fishers were allowed to pick and choose the days they could go out and fish, things would look different. 

“But that’s my mentality now, which is unfortunate. You got to get in, and get out,” he says.

Given the limited number of days allotted for fishing, it’s easy to see why sports fishers are quick to assert that Indigenous fishers, and their gill nets, don’t belong.

Ganzeveld says he knows how it feels to be a sports fisher. He gained Indian status in 1985, the year Bill C-31 passed into law, which allowed those forcibly enfranchised under the Indian Act, like his mother, to regain their Indian status. 

But before 1985, Ganzeveld and his dad enjoyed countless days on the water together year-round.

“I definitely understand the connection that a lot of recreational fishers have — the relaxation, the satisfaction you get going out and harvesting your own — but it’s still not the same experience,” he reflects. According to Sq’éwlets, a Sto:lo community, finned food (salmon, sturgeon, eulachon, trout) was once as much as 90 per cent of the Sto:lo diet. 

“That’s absolutely amazing,” Ganzeveld says.

“It is challenging now to think of the limited access that we have to the resource.” 

Until five years ago, DFO didn’t permit any gill net fishing on the Semá:th and Chilliwack rivers, but after closing all recreational salmon fisheries on the Fraser River in an attempt to recover species of concern, the Semá:th and Chilliwack opened up for sports fishers, heightening tensions between sport and food, social and ceremonial fishers who found themselves crammed together in the name of scarcity. 

With the weir destroyed in late August, Connoy and Ganzeveld debated whether pitching to receive more money from DFO would be a good idea, but it seemed too unrealistic that late into the season. They shifted to a new plan: beach seining, which uses a huge, weighted net. It takes significant people power to haul the net through shallow water, trapping fish within its enclosure, where they can be selectively removed with a dip net.

Since the fall, the team has been working after sundown to avoid the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of sports fishers, and because night-time fishing is more successful anyways — the fish don’t see you coming. 

Clashes with non-Indigenous fishers continue

During a particularly dark evening of beach seining in October, Ganzeveld noticed a huddle of bodies in the shallow water near the crew’s net. No one paid much attention at first, they’d seen sport fishers out this late before, despite the DFO rule against salmon fishing after sunset. But eventually they approached to see what was going on.

“Their fishery had basically closed an hour prior to [us speaking to them],” Ganzeveld recalls. When he approached the sport fishers, he explained that they were undergoing a scientific study with a DFO licence, and asked them what they were doing.

“Are you Indigenous?” asked one of the settlers, to which Ganzeveld replies he was and that he was also an elected councillor for Sumas First Nation. 

The settlers laughed. “That’s not even a nation around here,” one said, standing on Semá:th lands. 

Ganzeveld called the DFO, who called the RCMP, who arrived after the sport fishers had left. According to Ganzeveld, the RCMP officers who responded didn’t know the intricacies of the Fisheries Act anyways. They stood for a long time on their phones looking it up. 

“We’re probably not calling as often as we should,” Ganzeveld says. “I mean, every night that we’ve been out, there’s been guys that have stayed longer than they should have.” 

But this time felt different, he adds. “The ignorance of whose territory they’re actually on, and the arrogance of him being out, openly fishing, and not caring about the regulations or anything else.”

The fish weir project was not what Connoy anticipated. He thought it would be about community-driven science — about how fish interact with traditional technologies, about bringing back those technologies. Now, he realizes that the bureaucratic, environmental and social challenges are a big part of what the team needs to address — and overcome, if they hope to restore their traditional practices.

“It’s just going to take a really long time before some of the more selective fishing methods can be returned,” Connoy says.

To prepare for the coming year, Ganzeveld is developing a plan for a new weir he thinks will be more structurally secure against the elements. He said Sumas First Nation is also looking at what it would take to rewild the Semá:th River, currently void of any complex habitat. 

Ned says discussions are happening between the nation, the city and the province about the return of — some — of the lake. Since the catastrophic flooding of the Fraser Valley that followed record-breaking rains in November 2021, the communities have grappled with the best path forward in an era marked by the volatile impacts of climate change.

“Could we have the whole lake back? Probably not. Can we have a portion of the lake back? It’s probably a good idea,” he says. 

Ned believes it’s in the interests of farmers and politicians, too.

“I think if the farmers and politicians were thinking longer term about these appearances of more droughts, more floods, more fires, then they should make some room for those drought years, where you can have storage for the water, and then the farmers can still have access to that.”

According to Ned, another flood is inevitable, “whether you want it or not.” 

The problem, he says, is how dirty and potentially toxic the water will be in the case of an unintentional flood. “If we bring water back, for me, it has to be productive. It has to be meaningful for fish, waterfowl and other beings that rely on water.” 

‘Trial and error’

In 2023, Sumas First Nation along with academics at UBC and a handful of non-profits released a paper that found that restoring Xhotsa in a controlled, meaningful way, what the authors call a “managed retreat,” would cost half as much as maintaining the current flood defence systems while improving resilience to future climate events. 

“It helps tell our side of the story a little bit,” says Ned, who adds that whenever the nation starts talking about bringing back the lake, local farmers begin pushing back that they’ll become displaced and lose their livelihoods. It’s just another one of the social challenges that Sumas First Nation has to address.

“If you see the stark contrast between what occurred in 1924 where our people were removed, to now where we’re talking about bringing some of the lake back and maybe displacing a few people,” he says.

In some ways, reviving the lake seems to mirror the struggle to reintroduce a fish weir. Both are bound by a legacy of colonial laws and policies that prioritizes settler economies over Indigenous Rights and ecological balance. 

“But that’s the thing about bringing back former practices in modern day with new kinds of materials,” says Ned. “It’ll be trial and error for a bit to figure out a way forward.”

Reporting for this story was made possible in part through a grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Updated Jan. 9, 2024, at 2 p.m. PT: A previous version of this article stated in the headline that weirs were banned under the Indian Act. In fact they are banned under the Fisheries Act.