In discussion about the harvesting rights and use of BC's salmon there are sometimes comments related to salmon, and some aboriginal groups, being here "forever". I'd like to add another perspective to that.
Up until agrueably 9,000 to 12,000 years ago all of BC, including Vancouver Island, and parts of Washington State as far south as Seattle-Tacoma, were covered by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. Therefore there was logically no Fraser River during that time, and obviously no salmon in it. And unless they lived on the harsh environment of the surface of a glacier, there were no aboriginal peoples here either.
After the melting of the glaciers "our" world famous salmon all came here from somewhere else. So did the aboriginal peoples. Neither has always been here!
The so-called 'First Nations' peoples were in fact here first and based on historical, universally accepted practices, relating to colonization they do have some special rights tied to their traditions.
First off - most of the First Nations and Aboriginal peoples of the America's have creation myths that have them created right where they are now ...or where in the case of those that were relocated. Certainly Europeans were not here "forever" or in Europe " forever". Fact is humans or more correctly Homo Sapiens has only been on earth for a very short period (about 1/4 million years) relative to the age of the planet and the time life has been on the planet.
Second the glaciers by their very nature destroyed whatever evidence of life, human and otherwise, that was on the parts of the earth immediately before they covered them.
During glacial periods ocean levels were hundreds of feet lower than currently since so much of the water in the water cycle was locked up in ice. People may lived along the margins of the glacial sheets where there was land just as there is in Greenland today. Evidence of such habitation that could be much older than current evidence would be covered under hundreds of feet of water.
The dates we have from evidence recovered is the oldest we have to date. It's not the final word though most archaeologists and geologists believe that is about the limit since the earliest human habitation evidence for Eastern Siberia isn't much older than the dates for North America.
No there wasn't a Fraser River but there was a Columbia River and salmon bearing rivers in Oregon. Most of Eastern BC's watersheds flowed south through the Columbia including the upper Thompson watershed. Likewise rivers of now inundated coastal margins also had salmon. (Greenland has rivers with huge populations of Arctic Char). Haida Gwaii was never glaciated and neither was much of Alaska That's likely why the Fraser and other coastal rivers formed after the ice retreated were so quickly colonized by salmon. It also shoots your little 'theory' in the foot. (Not dead just wounded).
FWIW most scientists now consider that we are still in an 'ice age' since there is permanent still present in many parts of the world including BC. Just go north of the Fraser valley and it is possible to enter an ice age zone. The cause of the ice age isn't well understood but seems to depend on 2 things; Milankovitch cycles; the wobble of the earth's axis every 23,000 years or so and the carbon cycle. Carbon that gets created by life gets bound up either in rock strata (ie oil and coal) or in the depths of the ocean. Glaciation also reduces carbon essentially making a larger portion of the earths surface more or less lifeless. The carbon that causes glacial retreat is thought to come from the carbon sinks in the depth sof the ocean. The glaciers move south to some limit and then melt releasing liquid water formerly bound as ice. This corresponds to a warming part of the Milankovitch cycle.The melt water that enters the oceans, changes ocean currents and concentrates heat in the equatorial zones and southern latitudes pushing sequestered carbon out of the deep ocean carbon sink. At least that's a current theory. One thing that is fairly certain is that increases in atmospheric CO2 always lead (come before) dramatic rise of average global temperatures.
Author
Topic: BC Salmon - an historical perspective (Read 8865 times)