There was a large palisaded Indian village at the mouth of the river when Captain George Vancouver sailed into the inlet in 1793, as there were on all major rivers along the coast. Back then the natives used large rock and wooden weirs to trap and harvest their salmon from the river. What you're seeing in the video is no different from a historical re-creation.
If you live in the GVRD area, don't forget to thank the Squamish Nation every time you turn on your water tap, water your lawn or wash your truck, because the Cleveland Dam that supplies all or some of that water wiped out 95% of the spawning areas in the river and destroying the native fishery on the river. The hatchery was built to replace a portion of that lost fish but you should be thankful the band hasn't called for all recreational fishing be banned from the river until they get all of their harvest...the courts would back them up.
Not "sporting"? The very idea of sport fishing, particularly catch and release, is abhorrent to most indigenous people. They aren't recreational fishermen. They catch fish and game for food, not for sport or to play with. See what your wife thinks when you borrow the Thanksgiving turkey for a quick game of turkey basketball in the driveway. You're projecting your cultural values on a different culture...you might as well try to open a sports bar in Saudi Arabia.
Thanks SA, you beat me to the punch on this one. While I understand concerns over the wild fish, particularly any steelhead, that may have gotten mixed into the coho, really the issue over the FN harvesting the coho on the Cap is a long standing one that is often misunderstood. Your BC government built the dam that wiped out the truly "wild" fish in this river, and that hatchery that "our tax dollars" pay for was set up to mitigate the ecological and economic impact that dam had, not only for our commercial and sport fishery, but the FN one as well. These are not sports anglers, it is comparable to a commercial harvest, and this scene is not much different that the scene on a seiner when the net dumps the fish on the deck. The difference is that it is happen right on a river bank, right under a public bridge, and right in sight of the general public (now broadcast on You tube).
Where was the uproar when THIS happened?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5liEGlZq5kAnd over 13k sockeye were killed in this single set. How many were endangered Cultus Lake Sockeye? How many wild coho? Thompson steelhead?
No shock, no racist slurs. THIS is acceptable. But if a group FN youth engages in the same activity on the a river their ancestors harvested fish on for centuries (before we exterminated the run with a dam), oh for THAT people cry foul. Hypocrites.
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Topic: Mascaucre Hoes (Read 28485 times)