Addressing cumulative effects: Insights from Indigenous efforts in the Salish Sea

This Indigenous program could provide surety to industry, confidence to First Nations in one of Canada’s critical waterways.

The leadership of SSIGA at IPSS 2022. This article is an excerpt of the Rights & Respect Magazine, Issue 2.

The idea for Salish Sea Indigenous Guardians Association (SSIGA) was born during IPSS 2020, when Chief Harley Chappell of the Semiahmoo First Nation participated in a panel about cumulative effects on the Salish Sea, a region of the Pacific Ocean that includes Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, and the waters off Vancouver BC.

In a panel discussion with other SSIGA representatives at IPSS 2022, Chappell explained the background: “[When we] look at the impacts that have happened over generations in our territory, and I say specifically to my territory in Semiahmoo . . . our bay has been closed for harvesting shellfish since 1976 with no mechanism to open it back up. So that’s an issue. That’s a problem for me.”

But, he adds, “There’s never been a catastrophic event. There’s never been one thing that led to that devastation. It’s been the death by a thousand cuts for generations.”

At the same time, he notes, First Nations are often overwhelmed by referrals for individual projects in their territories. “Each individual project, one at a time, and thousands of them.

“I come from a very small nation. We’re just over 100 members. And we’re a working council of three. . . . What we started to think was how we look at this from a lens as Indigenous communities, a holistic look at our territory and impacts. And we started talking about cumulative effects assessments and what could that look like?”

Tumia Knott, council member with the Kwantlen First Nation, agrees the piecemeal approach has long been problematic. “We, as many First Nation communities, are immersed in the referral process and the kind of onslaught of development that’s happening within our territory. And we’ve been very frustrated with that process. It’s a process that’s very narrow in scope all the time. And of course, as Indigenous peoples, we come to those conversations always with a broader perspective and a broader lens that we want to share and communicate. And it’s challenging because we always feel like we’re coming up against walls and we are told we can’t talk about this issue.

“I know from my own community, we are really seeing, particularly in this current generation, impacts to our precious salmon resources, and it continues to be a significant crisis in our community. So, we’re looking in discussions with government and with major projects that are happening in our territory . . . how can we look regionally at impacts? How can we have that kind of information and inform decisions going forward?”

Following the discussion at the inaugural IPSS in 2020, Global Container Terminals (GCT), the event’s platinum sponsor, put out a call for proposals for an independent, Indigenous-led effort to address the issues being raised. “There was a rally behind . . . why cumulative effects needed to be addressed . . . and that it should be Indigenous led,” says SSIGA Executive Director Marian Ngo. In February 2021, SSIGA officially became an entity, and has since also received funding from Transport Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).

Steven Stark, council member with the Tsawwassen First Nation, and a fisher for many years, says he wanted to participate in SSIGA because he’d been part of many environmental studies over the past decade, and he knew there was little in the way of a database that Indigenous communities could use to make better decisions.

“When referrals come in there’s a lot of questions and surveys amongst community members and the surveys are redundant,” says Stark. “They’re very invasive because every time that a new project or proposal comes up, we, as members, have to do another survey and talk about our traditional food sources, talk about our traditional areas. So here we’re trying to help expedite some of those conversations by creating this software and this database so it can help better inform our communities.”

The SSIGA database collects data on three traditional food sources within the Salish Sea: salmon, crab, and shellfish. Knott says the longterm goal is to be able to provide information to assist Nations with shared territories in doing regional assessments and making decisions. “We’re not a decision-making body,” says Chappell.

“We’re an information gathering and sharing body, but again, from our lens, our worldview.

“We see so often the disconnect between government, industry, and First Nations. And so, for us to be able to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to collect this. We’re going to do this. We’re going to give some surety to industry. . . . and what our threshold may be. . . . To me, that’s an aspect of reconciliation—it’s an aspect of it.”

Nearly 140 data layers have been gathered, organized, and stored to date, and work is ongoing to incorporate the Indigenous lens and perspectives into the raw data in a way that accommodates the needs of the communities.

“Our intention is actually to complement what we know is ongoing work throughout the Salish Sea,” says Ngo. “It’s really to support each other, it’s not to be in competition with anything else. We’re here to prop each other up, to pull all of the resources together to get a better picture and go towards informed decision-making and meaningful participation.”

“It’s very empowering for our communities to be directly involved in this work, leading this work,” says Knott. “I think one of the very exciting initiatives that’s happening in many Nations across the country is the establishment of guardianship kind of programs that . . . balance and blend the traditional values and cultural teachings, and knowledge that comes from our elders and knowledge-keepers in our community, with science.”

Chappell would like to see the information used to protect future resources. “This is our responsibility, and we need to grab a hold of that . . . and value that. Because from our teachings . . . the decisions and choices that we make now will have impacts for generations to come.”

This article was originally published in Rights & Respect, Issue 2.