Archaeology demonstrates sustainable Ancestral Coast Salish salmon stewardship over thousands of years pre-contact

Salmon are an essential component of the ecosystem in Tsleil-Waututh
Nation’s traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory, centred on
present-day Burrard Inlet, BC, Canada, where Tsleil-Waututh people have
been harvesting salmon, along with a wide variety of other fishes, for
millennia. Tsleil-Waututh Nation is an ancestral Coast Salish community
that has called the Inlet home since time immemorial. This research
assesses the continuity and sustainability of the salmon fishery at
təmtəmíxʷtən, an ancestral Tsleil-Waututh settlement in the Inlet, over
thousands of years before European contact (1792 CE). We apply
Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) analysis to 245 archaeological
salmon vertebrae to identify the species that were harvested by the
Tsleil-Waututh community that lived at təmtəmíxʷtən. The results
demonstrate that Tsleil-Waututh communities consistently and
preferentially fished for chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) over the period
of almost 3,000 years. The consistent abundance indicates a sustainable
chum salmon fishery over that time and a strong salmon-to-people
relationship through generations. This research supports Tsleil-Waututh
Nation’s stewardship obligations under their ancestral legal principles to
maintain conditions that uphold the Nation’s way of life.