Ideas - Pt 1 | What the river wants to be

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Estuaries are a meeting of two worlds: the river and the sea. They’re incredibly fertile ecosystems that sustain 80 per cent of coastal fish and wildlife in British Columbia. For thousands of years, estuaries were central to Indigenous agriculture on parts of the West Coast. Then a new kind of agriculture arrived, profoundly altering the landscape. IDEAS visits the Cowichan Valley, where an ambitious project aims to restore an estuary — and to revitalize language, culture and traditional agriculture.Guests in this podcast:Tom Reid is the West Coast Conservation Manager for the Nature Trust of BC.Jared Qwustenuxun Williams is a passionate traditional foods chef who works with elders and knowledge holders to keep traditional food practices alive.Dr. Jennifer Grenz is a Nlaka’pamux scholar and a member of the Lytton First Nation. She is the principal investigator at the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC.Siil'na'mut Ken Elliott is a Cowichan elder and plant knowledge keeper who has worked in habitat restoration for decades. With his wife, he runs Ken Elliott's Native Plant Nursery.Alyssa Zandvliet is a graduate student at Simon Fraser University conducting research with the Historical Ecological Research Lab at SFU and the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC.Kim Lagimodiere is the acting marine projects manager at the Lulumexun Lands and Natural Resources department of Cowichan Tribes. She is also the coordinator of the S-hwuhwa'us Thi'lut Kw'atl'kwa (Thunderbird Protecting the Ocean) program.

What's the last book you read that you absolutely loved? If you're anything like me, you could probably talk about it for hours. You might be wondering what went into the story or why the author made the choices they did. And on my podcast bookends, I can help you find those answers. Every week, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind your favorite books, like how Louise Penny got through five years of writer's block, or how R.F. Kwong feels about Taylor Swift. Check out bookends with Mateo Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayen. I'm glad I wore my boots. Am I the only one? I think you are. It's a cold rainy day in the Kalachia Valley, the tail end of an atmospheric river that dumped 12 inches of rainwater on southern Vancouver Island.

We will become acquainted with the water that wants to be. producer Pauline Holtzworth is standing on a partially flooded grassy field, a field that's starting to look a little bit like the estuary it used to be. You can see the land wants to return. Like it's almost like saying, okay, here I am. And it's been saying here I am for over a hundred years since the dikes been built. Water is pooling in depressions in the ground, following the estuary's old channels. Estuaries have hundreds of weaving limbs, and it's almost like somebody lied on the earth with long hair and let their hair kind of run out, and it kind of just heads wherever it wants to.

Estuaries are small but mighty places. Where the river meets the sea, it creates a unique and fertile ecosystem that's crucial for fish and wildlife. Estuaries are 2.3% of BC's coast, and they support 80. percent of fish and wildlife. So that's a very, very, very, very small component of the landscape that supports so much. Human communities, too. This estuary was once central to Cowich and Tribes food system. The phrase,

Hanit Seim, eat, ni, hushai atalatem. When the tide is out, the table is ready, really jumps into my... mind, this entire area was an indigenous farm. Over a century ago, the estuary was diked to create Western agricultural fields, but the water keeps finding its way back in. Now there's an ambitious project underway to restore the estuary, both as an ecosystem and a food system. One of the long-term goals of Couchin is to be able to harvest from our estuary one day, right? This is a goal I will never give up. So some people might say like, oh,

you know, that that estuary has been close to food harvest since before you were born. Like, give it up. There's like, you know, like that's an industrial space now. And I refuse. And so does Cowchin. On ideas, the connection between a living estuary, a living culture and the living language. we're calling this episode what the river wants to be. We're standing on land that was traditionally known as let me see if I remember

Les Sheem's exact translation. It was Quoklacham. But it hasn't had that as its traditional name for about 120 years. This land was one of the original areas that was colonized here in our traditional territory because it was

a large, vast grassland. And so long story short when the colonists originally arrived in 1858 they were looking for somewhere to put their cows and we live in a place of trees and cows and trees don't normally mix and so areas like this were utilized for cows and agriculture but little did they know they were actually utilizing traditional agricultural lands ah siamna's shalakwa see amnes likea i enta whataumousneakus nekwiskeiqeckiqe and the kwistin mousneekh to chitzole al-a-le-meachen at Dachwlemouth. Allens to do you like to-Mow-Lacken. Hello, I am a Jared Kwisdean-Williams, Indigenous Foods Harvester,

and I like to work wherever we can access, utilize, harvest, and eat our indigenous foods. That's a huge aspect out here is that everybody doesn't seem to realize that our indigenous tribes, indigenous nations had traditional agriculture. We weren't just hunter-gatherers. We were actually dedicated agriculturalists, and this is one of those areas where we used to do that. Before the dyking, you know, this system, this is where the table was set. You know, this is not only where your protein sources were, like different fish coming up the river, all the weirs that were in place to do that, but the plant food system. And, you know, there weren't grocery stores back.

then. You had thousands of people to feed. And the estuary was one of those places where that happened. This is Jennifer Grenz, an Inglokachmuk scholar and member of the Lytton First Nation. She's the principal investigator for the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC, one of the partners on this project. So for the plant food systems, which are often sort of forgotten about when we think about, you know, what did indigenous peoples eat? Everyone tends to. to think on the coast about fish, right? But we know from the work of people like Nancy J. Turner that the plants made up 60% of the diet, right? You also didn't have food storage in the same sense that we have today.

So you would be relying on seasonality. And so, you know, you might harvest further upstream in the higher elevation areas that are warmer, right, first. and then moving your way down to this beautiful, inundated estuarine system. The very first accounts actually by settlers was when they were on their way up the river, they saw all these islands covered in vegetables, once they even recognized, because at that time, we'd already adapted to using the cucumber and the potato. And so they were quite amazed that we were already using that,

but also referenced that there were several other islands with other. vegetation they weren't aware of. So what was that other vegetation? Well, we traditionally grew Camus out here, which our traditional word is a span. Span produces a root, which is akin to a cauliflower flavored lehaha-a-a-a-a-a- potato and is high in something called inyelin. And so it was our main starch. And we've actually learned recently that the variety of span that we grew out here was saltwater resistant, which is very unique. Sophisticated plant breeding was done by the people of those lands over time to create varieties that could withstand the intrusion of salt water. Right. And this has been something that's actually been a surprise even to us. I actually,

first got called to the estuary because a lands manager was like, Jen, there's camis blooming in the estuary because we've always thought of camis as something that existed within Garrioke ecosystems, which is an ecosystem that is uphill, like higher elevation. It shouldn't be growing where the tide comes in, you know, where it's inundated for hours at a time with salt water. And sure enough, when we came down there, there it was. But this just showed us the level of sophistication of the agricultural system where there's a recognition that you need that seasonal food, right? So you're going to have varieties that can withstand heat up in the higher elevation, and then you're going to have a variety that can withstand the intrusion of salt water,

because then that's going to provide you with that food when it's hotter and drier. So that's an example. You know, so we think like plant breeding belongs to conventional agriculture today. No, plant breeding has been going on for thousands of years. The estuary was part of traditional cowards and food systems that span from the ocean to the mountains. Years ago, Kent Elliott started noticing the same four plants clustered across Cowich and Territory. You would see Camus, chocolate lily, nodding onion, and yarrow, all four of those species. in a garden area. You go another maybe 25 meters, 30 meters,

another circle with the same plants. We're wondering, what's going on here? And so we were up Mount Suhalam, staring at all these circles, wondering why did they do this? And so we're standing there, admiring the forest, just looking at everything, and it was as if a shadow walked by,

going to the garden. And that's when I realized, oh, okay, each one of these circles was a family's garden. So they would go over Mount Suhalam, go to Maple Bay, maybe going fishing out in Maple Bay, maybe hunting on Maple Mountain. Get their meats, coming back, they'd stop at their garden, and they'd say, we're going to have Camus tonight, so that was our potato. My name is Ken Elliott. I am a Cowchin Tribes member. I live on the Kwamechin Reserve and Cowichin here. My Halcaminum name is Sish Namit.

It was handed down to me from my mom's mom. If we were having Camas tonight for dinner, we would have had to have started to cook the Camus dinner time yesterday. So it needs a long, slow, low cooking temperature. And about 24 hours cooks it just right. If you have your temperature too high, your bulb gets mushy. Once the bulb gets mushy inside, then it lost all of its nutritional value. So you have to be patient with it.

You can't modern cook it. You have to cook it the old way. Can you tell me about some of those other food plants, like the nodding onion? Okay. Say if we're having nodding onion and you go, oh man, that camus was good today. I think I'll have another one. And then you go, oh, yeah, that camus is so good. I'm going to have even another one.

So they told me, I haven't tried it myself, that if you overindulge in eating your camus, you get flatulence. You get gassed up. And so you could take your nodding onion corn, eat it, swallow it, pushes the gas out. So that was our roll aids besides being the flavoring for your cooking. medicine for your heartburn and flatulence. And say if they didn't want camus, they'd go, gee, I feel like rice tonight. So they would dig up the chocolate lily.

And when you dig up the chocolate lily, so you've got the plant above ground, then you get down to the ground level. And just under the ground, you come to a corm, very similar to a bulb. And so the corm has two halves. and then all around the base, I call the big corms, the mother corms. All around the base, baby corms, about that big.

And then the root system left intact. And so the family would go out, dig these plants up, harvest the baby corms, putting them into a container. Once they harvested all the baby corms they wanted off of the mother corm, they put the roots back in, put the mother corms back in, and cover it back up. Survives, continues to grow. Next year there would be baby corms again. So you take these baby corms home, steam them.

Once they're steamed, you mash it. Steamed and mashed, same texture as the steamed rice we're used of eating today. And so there's chocolate lily, black lily, white fawn lily, pink fawn lily, tiger lily. So all these corms share that dinner property. Alongside cultivating food plants like Camus, Cowichan tribes harvested ducks, urchins, clams, crabs, and salmon, all of which relied on the estuary to thrive.

But in the middle of the 19th century, the first seeds of a new kind of agriculture were planted. The context of this area is that, A large wave of settlers, European settlers, didn't arrive here until 1862. There was a scattering of people, and there was certainly connections before then and relationships. But in 1862, on the HMS Hecket, 100 settler farmers came and settled here through the preemption system. Essentially, it's an illegal system that allowed settlers to take up land without it being surveyed in advance. So my name is Alyssa Zandleet. I'm a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, just finishing up the second year of my master's degree in the historical ecological research lab with Chelsea Armstrong as my supervisor.

And then I'm being co-supervised by Jennifer Grunz at UBC's Indigenous Ecology Lab. Before settlers arrived here, there was certainly an interest with growing population pressures of the colony of Vancouver Island to find places. to grow foods that could feed the colony and also to expand settlement into other areas. At first, the settlers engaged in a process of treaty making. Which is when the Douglas treaties came out in the early 1850s. But as the population grew, those efforts were abandoned. So they forced settlement into this area with no treaty and through the preemption system, which they adopted in the early 1860s.

Here's how the history section on the Cowich and Tribes, website describes this moment. In 1862, 100 settlers accompanied by a gunboat arrived in the Cowichin Valley to take some of our lands. Governor Douglas accompanied them and promised our Cowichan ancestors that they would be paid for the land the settler occupied. The gunboat kept watch in Cowichin Bay. However, Governor Douglas' promise to us remains dishonored to this day. In the 1880s, the Esquimo-Nanamo Railroad was completed, a project driven by Robert Dunsmir, the Coal King of Vancouver Island. And that was also marks a time where there was huge changes to, like, private land because the Canadian government gave the E&N Railway Company a huge land grant. That's like almost two-thirds of Halcuminum traditional territories, I believe.

That land was then leased to lumber companies and farmers, further interrupting Cowich and Farmers. food systems. So one example would be late 1890s into the early 1900s. There was a period of log driving down the couch and river and it was largely unregulated and they would send logs down the river. They would blast the river. There are numerous accounts that hundreds of acres of Quotson Reserve land, including like fields where they're growing food, were flooded because of these activities. and it eroded the riverbanks, and so really actually reduced the acreage of their reserve. When did the dikes go in on the estuary?

There's a lot of information we don't have because things were poorly recorded and are inaccessible. And so the early dikes in the estuary were unregulated, unrecorded, put up by people, for example, who were maybe preempting parcels. They were not under anyone's thumb, and they were doing whatever they wanted. So, yeah, we don't really know. I have seen one recording that said 1883 could be like around the time that a dike was put where the Dinsdale dike is now.

The Cowich and Estuary has now been diked for over a hundred years, creating about 200 acres of grassy farmland. As we set off towards the dike, I asked Jared. what he sees when he walks through these fields. What do I see? I see grass. I see 200 acres of grass surrounded by life. I see on the edges of the grassland. I see trees.

I see traditional food plants trying to return. And then I see the watershed. I see our mountains. Jared pointed at the mountain in front of us. The mountain here is now called Zuhaylam. Now, when I look at it, when I'm hanging out in the estuary like this, it reminds me of our history, which we call a seeth, and our like seeth about the thunderbird and the whale.

Where we are now in our traditional histories is where there was a great war between this, massive killer whale that was literally eating all of our salmon in the river here. And the community, they had to work hard to try to remove the whale, but they weren't having any luck, and it was eating everything. And as you've probably heard through us through here, that we relied on those salmon runs. And so they called upon the power of our Suhuaas, or our Lahai Thunderbird. In that legend, they talk about how, our like river only ever had one way into the ocean,

but that during that combat, the like thrashing of the whale and the Thunderbird created all of these like little channels that were all in here. And then at the end of that, legend us who was lifted up the whale to the very top of what is now known as the Hahai Zuhalam. And so just looking on the land, It just like reminds me of who we are and where we are.

Now, many of those channels are gone, replaced by the field of grasses we're standing on now. The land we're on is definitely not like the land around it, right? Like I said, all I see is grass for 200 acres, and that that grass is probably not from here. It's probably introduced. And it becomes obvious what happened here and that this land was, was changed from what it originally was to what it is now and then turned into Western agriculture. But why do we spend so much resource and so much energy and so much effort trying to grow food that does not naturally live here? Imagine if we could reinvest those resources that we spend on trying

to raise crops that are not supposed to exist here, on raising crops that were here for thousands of years. Imagine how much like more we could have. if we looked after what was here instead of constantly trying to change what's here to Lake's suit what I guess we had when we were in Europe. From Cowichin Bay on Vancouver Island, that was Jared Williams. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayat. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard.

And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC. vast archives. Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Immanuel Jochi. And Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives.

Listen to Big Lives, wherever you get your podcasts. I see Tom walking up towards us. Hey, who's that guy? Hey, what's going on? Hey, Tom. Good. Oh, hi. I see him.

Yeah, I'm Tom. I'm the West Coast Conservation Land Manager for the Nature Trust of British Columbia, and I represent some other partners as well involved in this estuary, couch and project and then other estuaries up and down the coast of BC. Estuaries are a crucial habitat for more than 80% of BC's coastal fish and wildlife. But as the sea levels rise and storms worsen, these ecosystems are getting caught between surging waters and human-built infrastructure like dikes and sea walls.

Researchers call it coastal squeeze. Over the coming decades, it could squeeze many of these ecosystems out of existence. On Vancouver Island, scientists, conservationists, and First Nations are racing to save them. The largest project is in Cowichin Bay. We originally had the opportunity to acquire this land looking at a time when there was a real decline in Trump or Swan populations due to lead poisoning. And a lot of the targets were we should buy seasonally flooded agricultural fields. work with farmers to plant cover crops. And so that's why that's how nature trust and ducks limited came to acquire the property.

But then over time, you start to see, okay, those birds have recovered. But now we're seeing issues in the estuary in terms of resilience and the dynamic nature of how estuaries should be. And then working with the nation for the last 10, 15 years, it's kind of got us to this point of going, okay, it's time, it's time. We have to do something or we're going to basically lose the capital. And that's where I feel a little bit like I may have sort of threw a bomb into their plans a little bit and said, whoa, wait a minute. This isn't just a restoration of like what an estuary should look like. This was actually an intertidal food system for cowichin tribes. Now, this has become much more than an ecological restoration project. It's an attempt to revitalize indigenous

this agriculture, and with it, culture, language, and a way of life. From Southern Vancouver Island, here's producer Pauline Holtsworth. We'll pop up on here. This is the edge of the dike. Over the next few years, pending approvals, the Nature Trust of BC and their partners plan to remove a section of this dike that runs through their land and let the river spread out. on the other side, we'll be able to see the coaxile of marsh area. That's a part of the estuary that used to be blocked by another dike. But decades ago, that dike eroded.

So we removed the remnant berm there and all that material was actually, you could see it had been dug up from the estuary itself to create these dikes. And so we just flattened it and spread it around. And, yeah, so we've been monitoring it for the last couple of years and it's actually pretty phenomenal. nominal how it's and it just naturally starts coming back. Yeah, so yeah, we can either follow Jared in his rubber boots. We climbed up the dike and entered another world. I'm still, I'm kind of still struck just from, you know, when we walked up the dike here about, you know, a meter in elevation.

And it felt like we arrived in this other place. Like this is so different from where we were walking in the grass. And so I'm just going to again ask you to just describe what it is that we're looking at and what it is that this place is. The phrase, Hanit Seim, I, ni, hsi atalatem. When the tide is out, the table is ready, really jumps into my mind. You know, like I said, we were standing in a grassland that was created through artificial, colonial, like, changes to the land and now we're standing on something that was created directly during

colonization so we can be up you know one or two meters higher and looking out onto an area that that was not as harshly managed as this area and is slowly returning to what it once was you can see the small islands happening just off you know in the estuary here and you can like see the land slowly allowing itself to be reclaimed and it doesn't look out of place. When we were standing where we were standing, you feel like you're in like the prairies or something, but then when you're up here, you're quite obviously on the West Coast. To return to the question of intertidal food systems,

we need to not lose sight of the fact that that is the main area where we would harvest our shellfish. Most of the elders that I do ask about this area specifically referenced that this is where they would go to harvest their shellfish. The cultivation and harvest of shellfish was a significant part of cowich and food systems. The clam garden, so you've got, again, this is an intertidal food system. So you've got like higher ground plants and this transition zone for kind of salt tolerant plants and then move into where shellfish production occurred. And I think this is also a mistake. People think aquaculture, you know, was something that was introduced by settlers, right?

And is even in a contentious, you know, industry in many respects. That's been happening all along. You know, clam gardens are developed over generations of time. So many of the sandy beaches on the coast of British Columbia that people admire, those are shellfish gardens. We had three kinds of clams that we would eat here in large amounts. One would be our sawha or our butter clams. which once again if you look into the archaeological records the way that we looked after them they have almost quadrupled in like size over probably like two or three thousand years the way that that we would transplant the larger ones but then there's the squelais which we call little necks and then on on here there would probably also be what we call horse clams or schweem or schweem and so dried clams where we're one of our economic advantages here, we have this massive area of estuary silt that could be highly

productive for shellfish. And so we were wealthy with that resource, right? Like in this new world, we trade currency for things. In that old world, we traded dried food for whatever we required and having access to this massive intertidal food system is one of the reasons why we were one of the largest tribes in one of the most populated areas on the west coast of Canada. My grandmother was harvesting cedar bark. We'd steam clams.

She would make a string, put the steam clams on it, hang it in the smokehouse, and dry it. Scythnamet grew up eating clams from the estuart. I called it my candy, all my growing up life. Even today, if I can find steamer clams, I'll steam them, dry them in the oven, and you just put them in a brown paper bag, and when you want, munch out on them. So that was my candy. But today, the estuary is so contaminated that the clams are no longer safe to eat. The estuary has been closed to food harvest for Kim Leggimodier's lifetime,

but she still hangs on to the store. she's been told. Babies being handed dried clams to like chew on like as a little thing and it's like we want that to be we want those things back right we want to be able to like have access to the clams in our area and have those to be safe for all of the all the couch and citizens from babies to elders. So my name is Kim La Jermodeer. I am a Cowtson citizen. My mother her families are from Cowtzen and Seneimo and Lajmere comes from my dad's side from Manitoba, from A.T. Irish Ukrainian family. I am right now the acting marine projects manager at the Lala Mahmachian Department of Cowichin Tribes

and also the program coordinator of these Hwa-Hua Estitlitkwatqua or Thunderbird Protecting the Ocean Program. The water quality in our bay is disturbed by, we have the industrial, right? We have West Can Terminal, which, you know, we've had breaches and we've have, like, industry who's trying to work with us, right, like, to make these alterations. But that's artificial, and it's an artificial divide of our estuary. So we have another way in which water is, has been confined. So we have the dyke up here, which we all know what the issue with that is. We have West Ken terminal there. And then, of course, all the upland dikes, right?

So, like, we've had so many alterations of the way our water flows that we have so many, like we just, for lack of a better term at this moment, like a sick water system that is very disconnected. Her team recently completed two years of water sampling. All the way from the top of the watershed, down the river, in side channels which are impacted by road runoff and storm runoff, tap water, and the marine system to test for over 580 different analysts. Things from the usual, like the fecal contaminants and the heavy metals, to personal care products, pesticides. One big one right now is the six PPDQ that is a tire preservative, which is highly lethal to coho. Ultimately, the goal would be to identify those contaminants, which are the biggest problem at this point, the biggest fire, because that's where we're at with water quality, is putting out some fires, right? and work towards working with all the land users and the province to set higher standards and guidelines.

So, of course, right now the bay is 100% closed. We can't harvest anything there. But let's say the ultimate vision came through. We can do that, but we still have those inputs. If we said, okay, now suddenly those water quality targets for fecal contaminants from agriculture, you know, road runoff, sewage, all those things were meeting their targets. It wouldn't necessarily meet, like, cultural use targets. Unfortunately, when the province sets those kinds of guidelines,

they're putting it for, like, the average Canadian consumption, whereas, and use or exposure, whereas what we would want is, like, you know, for a community that relies on, you know, a high level of clam harvest and eating from like a small child, right? Like through your whole life, a high level of consumption. Like what are the values that we would find that are safe and acceptable for our babies, right? One of the long-term goals of couching is to be able to harvest from our estuary one day, right? This is a goal I will never give up. So some people might say like, oh, you know, that estuary.

has been close to food harvest since before you were born. Like, give it up. There's like, you know, like that's an industrial space now. And I refuse. And so does Cowichin. Every time Cowichin elder, Seith Namit speaks about plants, his face lights up. And it was speaking with him that really brought the idea at the heart of this project to life for me. As a young man, Scythnamet got into a serious accident he barely survived.

Even when he recovered, he felt unmoored. He couldn't figure out why he was still here. One day, he told me, he walked down to the river to watch the salmon and prayed to the creator for answers. And I got to hear the salmon speak to me. The salmon said, my home is no longer safe for me. My home is no longer safe for my children. If you, meaning all of us as modern man, are not careful,

there will be no grandchildren. And I went, oh man, how smart was I, I totally missed it. And so I realized that Mother Nature needed our human help to look after the salmon's home. So growing native plants for habitat restoration. Today, after decades of working in habitat restoration, he and his wife run a native plant nursery. Like I said, I was 21. I'm 68 and 1112th now. And so time snuck behind me very quickly because I found work I love to do. I found a place I love to be. I found people I love to be with. And so the creator answered my prayers and gave me answers to questions I didn't even realize I had. Years ago, he developed a morning ritual for greeting the plants in his nursery. As soon as the sun peaked over the mountain, that's when I would go open the door wide open and say it's time to get up, everyone.

And I'd come into the, go into the greenhouse, and I would enter and go around to the right, and I would greet the first group. I'd be crouching down in front of them. Oh, look at you guys. You grew an inch over night, and they're just trembling away, just, oh, man. What I realized was every breath I was sharing with them was the breath they needed to breathe in. In return, they were giving me a little blast of oxygen. So we were doing an exchange just every morning. When I realized, just like the salmon were speaking, the plants were speaking to me,

through their actions. And they were just going, oh, we love you, man. We love you because we're watering them, feeding them, nurturing them. And they were just sharing their love with us, growing, happy, and healthy. As time went on, Sithnamet started to fall behind on weeding.

And notice the plants were starting to fade. What I seen ahead of me, when the plants are not happy, they put their heads down showing they're not comfortable, they're not happy, they're actually sad. And so I was going, oh no, I never meant for it to be like this for you. I never meant to hurt you. I didn't mean for your life to be like this, waiting and waiting and waiting trying to catch up. But each year I was doing a little bit less than the year before.

got to the point when I was crawling around out there, looking ahead, all of those drooping heads, I just broke down and would cry in amongst all of my plants. And so summer would end, fall would come, fall would end, winter would come, winter would end, spring comes again, every pot I thought died, sprouting back out, the plant I thought I killed, sprouting back out, and it was that moment that they spoke to me again.

We never forgot you. Don't you ever forget us. Many of the plants that used to be grown in the couch and estuary haven't been grown here for decades. But the nation hasn't forgotten them, and they're hoping the plants haven't forgotten them either. The first time I visited the native plant nursery created to repopulate the couch in estuary. It was partially flooded.

Looks like we need to put some of our wetland species over here. Yeah, so this is, a lot of this is underwater here. Yeah, yeah, and it's kind of a lot of the plants that are being propagated. We're trying to target plants that we know can survive in these wet conditions and brackish conditions that an estuary normally is. Yeah, we can, I think there's some labels on the rose and, Jared's better at I'm not pronouncing the names than I am. Oh, no way. No problem.

I was just having a look because, you know, as you were like referencing everything over here, it's wet. Well, all of this here is all clonily known as silverweed, which would be happy to be wet. I don't think it would have any issue with that. And it usually lives in the estuary and it grows very long, fibrous roots that you can eat that I've had them. They're kind of like root-flavored spaghetti. And so they're happy to be wet. You know, the water will be running through here and has run through here for like thousands of years.

And so those species that like the elders have requested, they should be hardy enough to handle these conditions. Some of these plants, we don't see around here as much, right? And so it's really exciting to see them being reestablished in this space. In the nursery, rows after rows of plants are labeled. in the Holkaminum language. So you can see the English name, the bear-stem desert parsley. The Holkameenum name is Khakhmein. I think there's another common name, Indian consumption plant.

It's actually called that because tuberculosis was traditionally called consumption. And so it was what we utilized to combat tuberculosis, as I think Nancy Turner once called it the natural antibiotic of the West Coast. Let's see. Oh, they're right here. Sorry. So here is, so we have a couple of kinds of organ grape. This is tall organ grape or Lalit's alp. The food system creates the language. And so as an example of something like that, Lalit's alp. Now, to anybody who doesn't understand our language, that probably is just an awkward word to try to say, but that's about where it ends. But to me, me, Lalits alp, is rooted in two things. The word yellow is actually lullets alas, so they're both rooted in the word yellow.

Lalets alp, lullets alas. Now what is alp? Alp on the end of a word normally denotes a plant. So lullets alp is a yellow plant. Instead of naming things for ourselves, we often named things for their use. Lalit's alp was used for yellow. wool dye and its roots were used for that it also produces yellow flower so it was easily

recognizable many of our traditional words are that way um kualat la alp alh alr most individuals when they look at alder wouldn't assume that you could eat alder kualat la alp is uh translates to orange tree plant but you look at it it's not orange uh in the early times of the year you can remove the outer tree bark and eat the tree bark on the inside of the tree. But once that inside tree bark gets like he oxidized, it turns neon orange. And so when you eat it with your hands or whatever else, everything will become orange. And so the elders are quite often referenced that the children used to be just covered in this bright orange because it's very sweet or at least sweet in the world where you don't have

access to who sugar. it would be sweet. And so it was what the young ones would eat. And also just having that in her head that, like, they would run out to eat that in, like, February and March because he'd lived in a long house for winter with only dried food, no fresh vegetables for who knows how long. One of Cowichin Tribe's goals is to introduce young people in the community to these plants and to these words. So one day we had the daycare kids come to visit. from Laotlamath and they, so they're like, you know, four years old, but they learn the language every day and they're very good students of language. So we walked around and as I said,

I'm a learner of Hulk Kamenem, but, you know, anything that I knew how to pronounce and could share, we went and we walked through and said it and they were so sweet. They all just dutifully repeated back and like they were just all eyes. and it was just really special. And I did not anticipate that with, like, four-year-olds. So that was, I think, my favorite day in this. I imagine for young people who are growing up going to school, it's a lot easier to learn a word, to have a relationship with a word,

if you have a relationship with that plant. That plant is back in this land. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And the reality that we're teaching a lot, language to children whose parents weren't allowed to learn the language. Like, we really need to remember that. Like, the first residential school in the area opened 1880 and closed 1973. Sithnomit vividly remembers how he learned these words and how they started to disappear.

Growing up, I had the opportunity where my mom's mom and my mom's grandma taught me all of the foods, medicines, and things that we could use for tools in the forest. So that was all cool, fine and dandy. They even taught us the Hulcaminum names. They taught us how to introduce ourselves to the plant that we were going to ask for help and harvest in a respectful way where that plant will give you the medicine or food that you need. but its wound was very, very minimal. It would heal over and it would get to continue to survive and carry on as a healthy member of the forest community.

And so this kind of went on until I was about in grade three, maybe about eight or nine years old. Same grandma, same great-grandma that taught us crying, crying. What's the matter, Graham? Why are you so sad? Oh, Graham, how come you're crying so much? And they just put their head down, cry some more. Oh, what's the matter, Graham? What's hurting you?

Why are you crying so much? Again, put their head down. But you could see they were trying to toughen up in their heart. And so finally they settled down, dried their tears. And then they looked at us and said, We have to ask you to let it go now. Graham, what are you talking about? We're not holding anything.

No, we have to ask you to let our language go now. Don't use it anymore. We have to ask you to let it go. Everything we taught you about the forest, let it go now. Don't use it. Don't speak of it. And so it took a while to understand, but both grandma and great-grandma went through the residential school experience.

My grandma would defend all the other kids in her age group when the priests and nuns would be beating them. My grandma wasn't any older or any bigger, but she'd go and try and fight with the priest, try and fight with the nuns, and she would get very beat up for trying to look after the other kids her age. And so that's what they didn't want us to go through. And so now we're reintroducing the language to this new generation.

And so it's, waking them up and returning them to the land. And when they head home, they're actually La Heik teaching the language to their family at home. How many generations did we eat older versus how many generations did we eat Cheerios, right? So when this is the generation where we can at least understand what we ate and then La Heig potentially learned to live with a combination of the two.

Continuing where we were with language, What's the relationship between a living estuary and a living language? The realization that not only humans are alive, realizing that the earth is alive and the estuary is a fundamental aspect of that and that it used to move. I think that's really something that we've lost when we create these La Heikey dikeways and we straighten out our rivers. and we build our homes on the edge of them,

we lose the reality that the river walks. The river can change where it wants to exist and it has a life of its own. They're already starting to move some plants from the nursery out into the estuary itself. So that eventually they won't all be in rows, they'll be in their happy zones all the way over this land and then they'll be able to move freely.

Soon, they hope to release the river too. And once we do that, there will be several islands again. And what I would like to have returned is that those islands each individually grow one food crop. And that then either individuals or families could have their food crops on their island. Is it used to be here for thousands of years? The Nature Trust of BC is involved in a total of 18 estuary restoration projects with other coastal first nations. Raven's eye view of the change is a reintroduction of traditional trade networks. When I think about all these estuaries, each estuary provides its own resource.

We had the span here and other estuaries have the silverweed, right? We all have our strengths. And in yesteryear, those were all versions of wealth that we would happily trade with each other. So we're starting off reinvigorating indigenous agriculture. But what we are actually doing is reinvigorating indigenous economics as well. In 2024, Jared Williams made and served a traditional feast here. And afterwards, we're sitting by the fire. And I think it was Lushim said that that's the first time.

It's been 150, 160 years since. couch and food had been prepared here. On this land. Yeah, pretty powerful. And I had the opportunity to, you know, to help with that. And just that that's where that, like, trauma kind of returns, right? It's like, like the gulags, they took people and locked them in the gulags, but they didn't lock us in anywhere.

They locked us away from our home. Like, imagine generations using this land and then imagine having to live through the generation that wasn't allowed to use this land anymore, right? Then having, you know, that happened, where we're having, like, traditionally prepared feast, you know, like on these lands would be, would be very emotional, yeah. What did you make? Oh, the list. I made... There were some things that I couldn't get enough. Yeah. Clams. I just love it. So I did a fire-roasted salmon, which we call pequin salmon. And then I did... I did steamed clams and dried clams and a clam seaweed soup and something we call

Swesem, which I believe the English translation is Indian ice cream, but it doesn't really taste like ice cream. It's always a lot more interesting than that. Well, it is absolute delicious, and I would love to eat it, but it doesn't look like it would normally taste. I used the example with it that we listen to the radio all the time, and we assume we know what the radio announcer looks like until we see them and we are almost always very wrong. Now, Indian ice cream looks like strawberry ice cream, but it tastes like coffee. Not exactly, but it has that kind of flavor. And when you're expecting something sweet and you get something not sweet, it can be kind of

jarring. So I just, I use, you know, that example of like we have this idea of indigenous foods that, you know, they, you know, they exist one way, they act one way. until we have them, we don't know anything. As these foods return to this land, Jared hopes people will think about more than just how they taste. I hosted a gathering years ago where an elder was there, and we served our span, our camis,

and I was watching everybody, and that elder, she just started crying. And I walked over, Auntie, oh, my God, you okay. She goes, yeah, I'm okay. I said, what is it? She goes, look, and I look, and I see everybody eating. And I said, yeah, she goes, there's young ones there. And I said, oh, that's good. She goes, they're having our food.

And I said, yeah, yeah, okay. It does not really realizing it. And then she goes, I bet they've never had it before. And I said, yeah. And she goes, but they'll remember now. Now they'll remember what we ate and who we are. That was Jared Williams, standing in the Cowichin Estuary. This is the first of a two-part series.

In part two, what happens when an estuary restoration project collides with the polarized politics of our era? In my whole career, I would never have expected to have protests against restoring the natural environment. This is literally, we have been planting native plants in the estuary and people are screaming at us, running at us. Like, we, to the point now where we, We need security much of the time when we are actually working on the project on the site.

That's coming up on Ideas. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production by Emily Kiervezio. Our senior producer is Nicola Lozsche. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts. It's.