Ideas - Pt 2 | What the River Wants to Be

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

For thousands of years, estuaries were central to Indigenous agriculture on the West Coast. Then, when colonists arrived, they diked many of these ecosystems to create western farmland. Now, Cowichan Tribes is working with a group of scientists and conservationists to restore an estuary as an ecosystem and a food system — and the project has sparked an unexpected controversy. At the heart of the debate are two questions. What does agriculture really mean? And when the waters start to rise, do we work with them, or against them?This is the second and final part of this series, What the River Wants to Be. Listen to Part One.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 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.Nava Sachs is a graduate student at UBC conducting research with the Indigenous Ecology Lab.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.Dr. Bethany Coulthard is the acting director at the Lulumexun Lands and Natural Resources department of Cowichan Tribes.Dr. Lenore Newman is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge and an independent journalist who covers water, climate change, critters, and more from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. 

Hi, Donovan Woods here. Hey, hey, it's me, Tom Power. We're here to tell you about our brand new podcast. It's called The Big Five. So Donovan, what is the Big Five? Yeah, exactly. What is the Big Five? That's what the Big Five is all about.

Every week, Tom and I will sit down with a special guest and dive into new topics, debating things like, what are the Big Five farm animals? The Big Five types of hat. The Big Five guys named Paul. Martin, Revere, Mezcal, McCartney, John Paul. The debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country. It's like a game show. It is a game show.

The Big Five, available now, wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. This was paradise. As modern man, we took this incredibly large eraser and started erasing paradise, modernizing the land, channeling the rivers, channeling the streams, doing unnatural things to them, making them change.

Welcome to ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The Cowichin Estuary on Southern Vancouver Island is nestled in a landscape that has seen radical change. Down in the estuary, it was no different. We put up dikes to keep the ocean out. We didn't want it flooding our farmlands. Historically, that land would have been allowed to flood.

It was a part of the... nature of the land. Cowich and tribes elder Sithnamet. As a people, our first nation people, have to depend on the new way. We can't go dig clams. Most of our harvest areas are contaminated now. We can't go hunting in the mountain.

Private property. Other places we used to go, private property, trespassing. Our new harvest area is called Savon, Superstore, Thrifty's. That's where we go get the food. But someday soon, the estuary might once again become a harvest area. Cowichin Tribes, a First Nation based in the Cowichin Valley, is working with a group of scientists and conservationists to restore the estuary, both as an ecosystem and a food system. They just didn't expect it to be this controversial. In my whole career, I would never have expected to have protests against restoring the natural environment. At the heart of the debate are two questions. First, what does agriculture really mean?

Like this land we're on is in the agricultural land reserve. And so how do you explain to a... governing body that we are actually doing agriculture here when we're not using anything they would normally use and we're not using any of their Lahai technologies to do it. And second, what to do when the waters start to rise? Work with the water or against it. A decision has to be made. Do we need to armor and protect or do we need to look at a managed retreat to allow this

area to flourish. And it's a significant question, not just hearing Cowagin, but up and down the coast and up and down every coast. This is the second part of a two-part series called What the River Wants to Be. From Cowichin Valley, here's producer Pauline Holsworth. Standing by the Cowichin Estuary, Kim Leje Modiere tells me about a version of abundance she dreams of, but is never seen. Before this estuary was diked in the late 1800s to create Western farmland. It was the heart of cowtach and agriculture. So I've heard numbers like 60 as an example of the number of species that Cowtsin used to harvest from this estuary alone. That's abundance, right?

So my name is Kim La Jermodeer. I am a Cowitzin citizen. I am right now the acting marine projects manager at the Lalamachan Department of Cowichin tribes. I've heard stories of elders having to slowly make their way through a flotilla of sea birds, like having a hard time getting through there with the canoe because there's thousands of birds. When the original colonists arrived, they were overwhelmed by how many salmon there were. They assumed that that massive surplus of salmon was just the way things were the environment had created it,

and so they could utilize it and they were so happy without realizing that that was generations of indigenous engineering and genetic selection. Indigenous chef, Jared Kustanekin Williams. That's our Le He Heir system, or our schreit, and the schacht in anthropology is well over 3,000 years old.

And so we were altering them for long enough that we reached this huge volume, like one of the elders. Les Chim uses, you know, this really wonderful example that you can always tell a shunuch salmon from our river because we use those weir so that the shunuchs that were thinner could weasel their way in between the weir steaks and so over generations all of our shunuch actually became much thinner and much taller and so other relatives from nearby rivers can recognize when one of our

Chinook accidentally run up there, river just like it's a unique shape. People harvested crabs here and sea urchins and clams. And then foods like duck, like hardly anyone eats that. This space was an important duck hunting area in the estuary, right? And we would create these duck nets, which are two 60-foot-high cedar poles. and we weave a net we can hang in between them and we chase the animals into the net and harvest them that way. Would you like to hear about the plants to different species?

There's Pacific crab apple that sort of makes the structure of an orchard-like area as well. PhD student, Navasax. There's native hawthorn. Oh, who was that? Is that an otter? Yes, we're talking about you. Oh, I shot Tzikwak is red elderberry. Over there, I saw some of what we call a shtkan.

And the satskan are our reeds or cat tails, which were used for weaving and Lahag for housing. But also the root of the satskan could be used for food. And the pollen off of it was used as. a flower. So it was used to eat here as well. One of the most amazing parts of where we are right now is the Camus bloom that happens. A large part of this estuary turns purple in the spring, which really points to the history of intensive cultivation here in indigenous agriculture. Camus was our potatoes. All of the lilycorns were our rice plant. And so there's

chocolate lily, black lily, white fawn lily, pink fawn lily, tiger lily. This, actually this plant, this gumweed, one of the fun things I learned from Lescham's plants was that I knew this was very gummy, right? You can pick it, it has these yellow flowers when it's in bloom, and they're very sticky, and the plant's sticky. And it would make a great, like, hand cleaner. With the example given, say, you're harvesting clams and your hands smell very clammy. You can find this on the beach and take the flower and the leaves and rub it on your hand, and it takes away the scent.

And I thought, that's amazing. Thank you, Gumbly. But the estuary, or what's left of it, is at risk. By the end of this century, the sea levels here are projected to rise between 75 centimeters and a meter. That means the estuary will get. pushed up against the dike and drowned. One of the problems with hardening shores like this is that you allow no opportunity for the migration of habitat

through sea level rise, right? So you just have a net loss as the water starts to rise. You don't have an opportunity for like the sea asparagus and other marsh plants to move up into the higher end of tidal and then the eel grass to move up. If we think about the estuary as a heart, what is sort of the state of health for the heart here? I'm trying to think of a good cardiac, like a coronary bypass or whatever.

Tom Reed, the West Coast Conservation Manager for the Nature Trust of British Columbia. And our data is showing that in the current configuration is that we may end up losing in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, most of the marsh habits. that remains. And once you lose all that marsh habitat, you start to lose all that ability for juvenile salmonids, shellfish, crabs, migratory birds. And you get to this point of realizing that we have an opportunity right now to do, for lack of a better term, almost like heart surgery here, to be like, you know what, let's free up this plugged artery, basically, and give this heart the ability to function.

To do that heart surgery and pave the way for restoring cowage and agriculture, the Nature Trust hopes to remove a section of this dike. But that's where things have gotten complicated. We have been planting native plants in the estuary and people are screaming at us, running at us, to the point now where we need security much of the time when we are actually working on the project on the site, which is private property. A little context. The Nature Trust of BC and Ducks Unlimited purchased this land from a farmer in 1990. 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 and work with farmers to plant cover crops. For close to three decades, they leased the land to a local farmer who grew hay and corn for local dairy and cattle. But then over time, you start to see,

Kay, 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 cowich in estuary.

In the summer of 2023, when plans to restore the estuary by removing the dike, were publicly announced. It sparked an outcry from some local farmers who view the project as destroying valuable farmland. There was even a tractor convoy protest opposing the project, followed by passionate speeches and rebuttals in the BC legislature. I'm a farmer myself. You know, I'm very protective of that. You know, that's really sacred to me.

Right now we're facing a group of individuals, you know, farmers that believe. that what we're trying to do is going to erase what is so sacred to them. But really, we're just trying to do the same thing. We're just trying to do it in a way that's working with the current conditions. This is Jennifer Grins, an Inglokachmak scholar and a member of the Lytton First Nation. She's the principal investigator at the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC, one of the partners on the Estuary Restoration Project. They've tried to invite opponents to talk about their common goals, but for the most part, it hasn't worked. And I'm so sad. I wish I could understand how we get to this point where we can no longer create bridges of understanding and have conversation.

Because I think for me, it's also heartbreaking because I am a farmer. Like I'm, you know, like, I'm one of you guys. It's like, you know, but again, I think it's just so hard for people to accept that we have to make change. We have to innovate. We have to feed people. And this is a way to do it. And it's not a joke. It's not some radical idea.

It was the prevailing way thousands people were fed up until 125 years ago in this very spot. And we can do it again. Most of the Dikin question runs through private property owned by. the Nature Trust of BC and Ducks Unlimited. But about 450 meters of the dike runs through land in BC's agricultural land reserve, which means to take down that section of the dike, they had to submit an application to the Agricultural Land Commission. And so how do you explain to a governing body

that we are actually doing agriculture here when we're not using anything they would normally use and we're not using any of their La Hague technologies to do it. Trying to also use this opportunity to raise awareness, right? Because when you are talking about indigenous agriculture, people normally look rather confused because we've almost all been raised that we didn't have indigenous agriculture. That wasn't really a thing, but that it's happening here and now.

So now we can highlight that to the rest of the world, the rest of Canada. That's a message. members of the project say they struggled to get across to the Agricultural Land Commission. I mean, I got asked, you know, how did Couch and tribes know they were growing food here? I mean, you know, this is the level of ignorance that we're up against, right? Where there's not even a recognition that, of course, they conducted agriculture to grow their food, right? I have an agroecology degree from UBC. My undergrad was an agroecology.

And when I was there, I basically learned that agriculture is growing food. That's it, right? That is it, plain and simple. But now it's like this definition is becoming more narrow, motivated, I think, by political ideologies, racism, misunderstanding, where it's, Like the definition has become settler agriculture is agriculture. So growing annual crops like corn, plants that were not part of the ecosystem here or developed here, but brought from somewhere else. We have a very strange view of agriculture as Canadians, even within the Western context. So if I say agriculture, people think of their grandparents or great grandparents,

on a farm and it has a red barn, it has a Ford 1945 tractor, it has a pitchfork, it has two or three chickens, which number one is nothing like what the agricultural system actually looks like now. And I often like to joke that if old McDonald had a farm, he probably lost it in the 1980s and or he's a he's a venture capitalist now. He's not living in his red barn with his pitchfork. My name is Dr. Lenore Newman, and I am the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. What we're really seeing in this case is a clash of worldviews, the question of what is a food system. And I find it fascinating that the land in question, although it is good farmland.

land, no question, is being used to grow grass to graze cows for the most part. And that is definitely, as, you know, that goes with that red barn image of land-based agriculture. And I think one of the critical elements here is that's not how the indigenous peoples of BC thought of their food system. And they did farm. Let's make no mistake. I think there is also, it would be remiss not to say, there's a bit of story of willful blindness to how advanced food production was in this region. It's been overlooked in part because it draws into question that whole doctrine of Ternullis

that was used to justify the taking of indigenous lands. And I think there was definitely examples of people looking at. that was clearly a farm or a fish production technology and saying, oh, how weird there's a pile of rocks. You know, those rocks are very orderly. And I think we do see that whole project of settlement was helped along by applying a very rigid definition of what farming is and was. Like the estuary itself,

Indigenous agriculture here has historically blurred the lines between land and sea. It is a very beautiful region where the boundary between shore and ocean is blurred. You had to think of it holistically as a shifting zone of water and land. And Western agriculture has not really, it struggles a bit with that boundary. If we look federally, we have a Department of Agriculture that covers land-based agriculture and a department of fisheries and oceans that covers oceanic food systems, and they don't really talk to each other. Now, at the provincial level and full credit where credit is due to the provincial government,

they've actually combined those ministries, but traditionally they've been very separate. And the thing is, you can't separate these two things. intricately linked. In August 2025, the Agricultural Land Commission ruled against the Nature Trust's request to remove the section of the dike that runs through the Agricultural Land Reserve, saying it would reduce the number of crops that could be grown on this land. It's really disappointing, to be honest. It was kind of like we felt the decision was made in like a really colonial framework

of what that definition of farming looks like, whereas we're saying actually we need. need to remove this dike to actually revitalize the agriculture. And so on one hand, we have, you know, the Agricultural Land Commission takes perhaps the most doctrine vision of farmland. And so they're quite opposed to this because to them, what matters is acres of cultivated land, turning back into a marsh. To them, that's a negative on the ledger. The Minister of Agriculture has been much more supportive because it does fit her broader mandate of connecting together ocean production and land production. And then you have, say, the shadow, the shadow minister

has been quite opposed, in part because there is no way around it. It's a measurable loss for part of the industry he's very familiar with, dairy and cattle. I really do feel this one is theoretically fascinating because it shows how climate change and rising sea levels and climate disruption are really going to challenge some of our entrenched beliefs and our entrenched visions of what is the right path forward because at the end of the day, as sea level rises in this region, we're going to lose a really critical wetland in front of this land. and that's just science. We can't argue against it. And so the argument comes to how is it best to proceed. This debate is occurring against the backdrop of the tipping point in global agriculture, says Lenore Newman.

Globally, we're actually celebrating a bit because we're starting to use slightly less land. We think we think we are at a point called peak farmland, at which we currently use about 40% of the Earth's land surface to produce food. And we're getting so good at producing food through technological advance, through breeding advance. We are actually reaching a point where we can feed everyone. I mean, with the caveat, we don't feed everyone for political reasons that most of us can guess. But in theory, we produce enough calories for everyone, and we can start turning some of the surplus farmland back into wildlands. But that good news globally comes with a lot of caveats. Number one, we're still converting really critical primary forest in the tropical region into new farmland. And in regions

around our major cities, including in Canada, we're still seeing land shift out of farming, sometimes the best land, shift out of farming into urban uses. And so we have these tools, such as, you know, the BC Agricultural Land Reserve or the Ontario Greenbelt that are trying to fight back against that. And in some ways, the land reserve in BC has been a huge success, partly because we were really hardcore about not letting land shift out of the farming category. It's why BC looks the way it does. BC is also changing. BC is being hit by climate change a little harder than many other. regions. We're seeing extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme rain. You name it, it's pretty well come

and attacked our farm industry. And so we need to shift our mindset from preserve the land at all costs, which we really did need all through the 80s and 90s. We need to shift from that to how do we make sure this land is farmed and farmed well and farm systems? sustainably, and because of the need to buffer against climate change, protect our rivers, especially the salmon rivers. In some cases, we have to be asking, maybe this land should be put back into natural ecosystems because they too produce food and they protect critical environmental infrastructure. After several years of delays, the people involved in the SDRA project are losing patients. You know, Calhican tribes basically stated that they were just tired of begging for their food. And that's pretty powerful.

I know Jared Williams posted on Facebook a whole update and he had hundreds of responses from people across the province, basically saying, we'll come with a shovel. The recent ALC decision does mean that that small portion of the dike won't be removed. And there are follow-up steps that might come from that. That's all in discussion. Bethany Culfard, acting manager of the Lula Mechen Land and Natural Resources Department of Cowich and Tribes. But in terms of the removal of the rest of the dike and the reconnection of the rivers back to their estuary and back to the ocean, You know, that's all moving forward and the project continues.

By reconnecting the estuary, Cowichin tribes also hopes to reconnect people with the land. As I listened to plans to restore this ecosystem to its natural state, I kept thinking that this is a very tangible physical example of the idea of land back, which may be one of the reasons it's touched such a nerve. Have there been any moments that you kind of really stick in your mind of, like, like seeing community members reconnect with these spaces or for yourself about, yeah, like having, you know, the land back in that very, you know, literal and also metaphorical way. Count some people have a presence in this valley for sure, right? For thousands of years we've been here in relationship with these spaces on the land and in the water,

instances of cultivating, you know, what's there, right? and building abundance that supports, you know, thousands of people. But we also had a huge presence within the Gulf Islands and on the lower mainland. So we're like, had different village sites. And with the loss of the ability to travel and just, you know, the changes brought by the modern world, etc. Colonialism, et cetera. When people are stuck on a reserve, like illegal to leave the reserve without permission, right?

Like, you lose the connection to those really important spaces out within the territory. You come to a point where, like, a lot of our members have no access to those spaces, right? No access to those foods. As a child, I had no opportunity of being on a boat and being on the water. And so, like, for me, it's really special to be, have these opportunities to go out. And, like, our crew is out there harvesting seerchin for community. gatherings. And so just like reintroducing the idea that these are our spaces and that, you know, we have this responsibility to care for these spaces.

When producer Pauline Holdsworth visited the estuary, the Couch and Tribes v. Canada case was still making its way through the courts. In 2025, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the nation has aboriginal title to an area that includes parts of present-day Richmond, BC. It's the first time a Canadian court has found that Aboriginal title and private property can coexist. Since then, the question of what landback means in both philosophy and practice has only grown more urgent. I'm obviously a large advocate for the idea of land to be returned, but I just want to highlight while we're having this like chat. This is the idea is not returning everyone's house to anybody else, but just trying to return land to the governance of indigenous individuals

who know how to look after. As I was just like, hey, he referencing, if we could be utilizing the resources that we use to produce Western agriculture on this land to produce indigenous agriculture, no one would be hungry, right? We wouldn't have to use this constant use of the fertilizers and like heavy machinery, when I look at land return or land back, it's about returning to like wiser ways of existing with the land

instead of just existing on it, I guess. What's your vision of abundance in this estuary? Oh, gosh. So my vision of abundance is that we don't ever have to feel like we're in competition with other beings, right? That it's just a matter of course that there are sea otters and seals and sea lions also eating fish and clams and crabs. And there's so much that we're all just happily sharing the space together and, you know, and respecting each other that way. And that every cowich and child has had the experience of coming down to, say, the estuary or one of the islands and has,

You know, every year has the opportunity to harvest clams and harvest crabs and go out and get sea urchin. And then maybe clean their hands with the gumweed. Clean their hands with the gumweed. That's right. That there's enough gumweed. You won't feel nervous about taking some to clean your hands with. Couch and Tribe citizen Kim Lajamodier. This is Ideas.

I'm Nala Ayad. Hi, Donovan Woods here. Hey, hey, it's me, Tom Power. We're here to tell you about our brand new podcast. It's called The Big Five. So Donovan, what is the Big Five? Yeah, exactly. What is the Big Five?

That's what the Big Five is all about. Every week, Tom and I will sit down with a special guest and dive into new topics, debating things like, what are the Big Five farm animals? The Big Five types of hat. The Big Five guys named Paul. Martin, Revere, Mezcal, McCartney, John Paul. The debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country. It's like a game show.

It is a game show. The Big Five. Available now wherever you get your podcast. Just you can see what's happening with the dike here is the, there's a few spots where it's starting to start slough down. Tom Reed stands on a dike built over a century ago to keep the water out. But the water keeps finding its way back in. It overtops regularly. It exacerbates flooding coming down river.

And so we're kind of in this like, A decision has to be made. The decision facing this community and so many other coastal communities is whether to harden the shoreline with more walls or to begin a managed retreat. Like this dike we're standing on right now, if we were going to meet the one and 200-year flood, basically the regulatory requirements, we would probably be standing five meters higher, and the footprint of the dike would be huge, massive. And if we did that, we would basically be signing off.

on thanks for coming out, couch and history, but we value this 100 acres of corn more than the heart of the ecosystem. It's a question with deep implications for how we live, how we farm, and how we relate to water in a changing world. This is the second part of a two-part series called What the River Wants to Be.

Producer Pauline Holdsworth brings us this documentary from Vancouver Island. Water people say that water has memory, and that means water will go where it wants to go despite our attempts to subvert it. And if you look around the world, it's really obvious that sooner or later, water does always win. My name is Erica Guys, and I am the author of Water Always Wins, Thriving in the Age of Drought and Deluge. You know, in the mainstream culture, we have an ethos of trying to control water. for what we want. But the people in my book, I think of them as water detectives

because they instead approach water with curiosity and they ask, what does water want? And really, what water wants is a return of its slow phases that we have disrupted with our development. It's easy to imagine that when you take down a wall, the water rushes in. But the Cowich and Estuary Restoration Project has a different goal. Slow the water down.

So in our estuary, we have great potential once this dike is removed to really restore, like, I think it's 70 hectares of this estuary, back to the salt marsh it once was. Salt marshes and inland marshes, of course, provide a really amazing service, right, so that they're slowing down that water as it enters the estuary. having re-channelization or allowing the river to spread out and have little side channels and slow down. We have some great work that's coming up on the island through, it's like beaver dam analog, so like creating slow down spaces and in some cases creating what is like an artificial beaver dam, hoping that a beaver will come along and take over and allow for that natural channelization. slowing down in systems that are very flashy. We have been trained to think walls are the best way to prevent flooding, but they're not.

They're just not. And they function differently, whether you're talking about a river or a seawall. So let's start with rivers. A lot of rivers have floodplains, which exist to absorb floods. But a lot of development has straightened rivers from their meanders. and cut rivers off from their floodplains by building these levees. And the problem with that is you create fast water, which is the opposite of slow water, which is I call the water detectives globally part of the slow water movement,

because they're seeking to restore these natural slow phases. And so fast water scours and not only causes a lot of life systems to collapse, It also can increase flooding because you are eliminating those natural floodplains where waters can go to slow down and to enter the river system over a longer period of time. Leavies are also an environmental justice issue, really, because when you cut part of the floodplain off, you're raising the water level in the river. And so that actually increases flood risk for people who can't afford a levee. or who maybe can't afford to maintain their levy. In other words, dikes or levies usually come with advantages for some people and disadvantages for others. I live on a reserve very nearby here where when the water floods down our river, it has been straightened and levied so it won't overflow onto non-reserve lands.

but now when it reaches the reserve lands, it'll flood. And then in a seawall situation, you have a lot of power from that wave energy. So if you think about North American football, like when a player is tackled, they often roll. Right? And the reason they roll is to diffuse that energy of that hit. So when you have a seawall, that wave is just hitting the wall. And so what happens is it bounces off, and then that wave energy is direct. to, again, a neighboring community who maybe can't afford the seawall. And you're also increasing

erosion just underneath the seawall. And so that requires a lot of ongoing maintenance and money to keep it up. Whereas if you have those natural ecosystems that give with the wave, they absorb the water, the power of the wave by moving and by reshuffling the sediment and by reshaping the coast. And there was a study a few years ago in nature, climate change, that found if we allow these natural ecosystems to be in place and to perform the role that they do, we can actually reduce by half the number of lives and property at risk from rising sea levels. To get provincial authorization to take down the portion of the dike on their land, Tom Reed says they've had to prove they won't transfer flood risk to neighboring properties. But that hasn't assuaged community fears about flooding and what will happen when the ocean returns. Yeah, this is a really common sentiment around the world. And I think maybe the example that I've researched that might be most applicable is in England,

where, you know, there's an incredibly long coast and the government has identified millions of properties at risk of flooding by 2080. if nothing is done. And I looked at a project in Selzee, which is on the southeast coast. And basically, it was very similar to Cowichin, where a few centuries ago, the Lord of the Manor had built a barrier to basically reclaim a tidal marsh from the sea and create farmland. But this area is incredibly prone to flooding. And in fact, it has like a one-in-one flood risk, which means it has a one-in-one flood risk, which means it has the potential to flood every single year. And so every year they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds shoring up, you know, basically building another big rock barrier bulldozers on the beach to try to protect it.

And, you know, it's just not affordable to do this all around England. And so in this area, they went and talked to farmers and they asked them if they would be willing to give up some of their land, to return to the sea. And this area is really interesting. Like, people have lived there with the sea since the Bronze Age. So there's a long history of working with the sea, and it's only a couple of centuries where they've tried to exclude the sea. I talked to one of the farmers who agreed to give up his land,

and his family had farmed there for 400 years. So, you know, it was no small thing. to let go of the land. That farmer told her, I walk along the trail bank, the Bund, and try to recognize which fields were which. It becomes harder as time goes on. I visited that project

like five or six years after they did it, and it was already this incredible wetland, and there's new recreation area. There's a lot more birds in the area, so, you know, it was a bit economically depressed, and now they have an uptick in birding, that ecotourism. So that was part of the process, too, and talking with the community is like, you know, it is going to change. It's going to behave differently. You know, in this case, they also talked about moving towards something better, which is an idea that a scholar in the United States, AR Siders at the University of Delaware, talks a lot.

about. We're not just leaving, right? In Cowichin Bay, Jennifer Grenz says they're trying to make the case that it's not a choice between climate adaptation and food security. Both goals can work hand in hand. I think people tend to separate climate resiliency from food security, and that is a mistake. Climate change is indeed a threat to certain food systems for sure. we're experiencing this. But in a context like this, you know, we already can draw upon knowledge is where we know these systems worked for thousands of years. So it's not bad news. It's not like, oh, you know, the dikes are failing. All is lost. We can't grow food here.

Now it's like, no, we need to build climate resiliency because we don't want all the properties that are around here to flood, right? But we can address that issue while at the same time addressing one of the most substantial issues facing most Canadians today, which is the price of the food that they're trying to feed their families and to provide healthy food as well. The food plants they're trying to restore, like Camus, were bred to thrive in the brackish mix of fresh water and salt water found in the estuary. And it seems they're also resistant to drought.

In our plant nursery that we've established, that's five acres, we don't need to irrigate. So we planted plants in the first year and did not irrigate through a very hot summer because the plants don't need it. Whereas neighboring fields that are practicing more conventional agriculture, their sprinklers are running. That speaks to the climate resilience

and the ability to adapt that this estuary holds. It can give us a lot of clues about climate resilience, and it has been a climate resilient place for a long time, even though, you know, climate change is posing new accelerated changes and challenges. Cowichin people have been dealing with change for thousands of years. PhD student novice Sachs from the Indigenous Ecology Lab. We're standing in what we've learned is the most intact portion of the estuary right now. So this is the biggest collection of native food plants that we have found in the estuary.

And I imagine this is an important place for your work in terms of understanding what the rest of the estuary could potentially look like. Totally. I mean, I think it's a really special place because it gives us a window into the past but also into the future. In that same vein, one of the most interesting things that we've observed is, how continuous the camus beds are here and how the reed canary grass kind of marches right up to them and then almost stops. And so I think that points to the resilience

of the food system that still is here and the immense potential to revitalize it elsewhere in the estuary. You know, plants always find a way. They, you know, they'll outlive us, right? So we should pay attention to them even as teachers. when we're dealing with planting in this era of change. At the end of my time in the Cowichend Valley,

I went for a walk in the woods with Seith Namit and Genevieve Singleton. Oh, right there together. Oh, look at that, eh? Yeah, talking, singing. Okay, they're happy you're here. What are we looking at right now? Okay, we had two bald eagles drop in to visit us. They've landed on the top of the cottonwood trees And I don't know

It sounds like they're singing a song of happiness So they must have just come from munching out on salmon carcasses Yeah And so yeah, so they come to visit And they wanted to have their little say in our interview Against the backdrop of the fractious debate About reconciliation and the future of BC Playing out in this valley and across the province

They're hoping to provide another way forward. My name is Ken Elliott. I am a Cowichin Tribes member. I live on the Quamachin Reserve and Cowichin here. My Halcaminum name is Sish Namit. It was handed down to me from my mom's mom. Hey, my name's Genevieve, Singleton, and I'm a nature interpreter and a biologist.

My husband, Dave Polster, and I have been working together for 50 years, taking care of nature, many years. years ago we were blessed to meet Scyth Nomet. Unfortunately, my husband has Alzheimer's, so he's not able to be with us here today, but him and Ken Cianomit formed a very, very strong partnership. And Cis Nomet and I have a lot of fun talking to children in particular, adults as well, and we've kind of made a commitment to each other to work together. We also bring forward to that I'm not indigenous, and Cisthnaumet is,

and that we can work together across barriers and boundaries. So that relationship that we share, it is basically a subliminal message. We want the entire community seeing us standing together. Doing the work I have been doing, I've tried helping adults understand our point of view, our history, and I would say 99 times out of 1,000, you will be opposed. Everyone you talk to would argue with you. I say it's like two Rams, backing up, running at each other, budding heads, back up, do it all again.

It was as if we both turned around and walked away going, holy cow, what was that all about? Did I win? So then I thought, it's not really worth trying to talk to adults, trying to change adults. So that's when we started going, okay, let's do these nature walks. So started bringing kids out on nature walks. As they walk, Sith Namit and Genevieve talk about how both their families relied on the natural world. walk along here, I bring the attention to the big leaf maple and help people understand that that tree, the ancestors would be looking at it kind of basically shopping for a part of the tree that was long enough to be a paddle. And so then they would go, okay, I see the part I want.

And so then they would do their bottom cut. And so then as they're splitting their material off the tree. As it goes up, it starts to narrow, and that also starts to thin out. And so they just keep using their wedges, and then eventually it'll get to a point where it's almost like the stuff they wanted jumps off the tree. Here we've got all these big trees, some of them did, although I was growing up to always believe there's no such thing as death in the forest. Everything's just recycling around. So I use that word. you know, cautiously. But these great big ones are the cottonwood.

So there's three, I call it magic plants, cottonwood, right away is your dogwood, and willow. And for my family, is what put our food on the table. Because it's those three plants that used in the right way, as Kim Cianometh was describing, will grow to these huge trees, creating shade, insect habitat, all those things that baby salmon need. I ask the kids, you go home now.

Doesn't matter who you are or where you're from, what color your skin is. Your granny, your great-granny, or your great-great-granny was no different than my granny, my great-granny, my great-granny, went to the forest for food, went to the forest for medicine. Then we often, if we have time, we love to, or I love to, but I think we both enjoy it, do this. string game where I've got a ball of wool and we throw it between us and each child holds on the piece of wool and mentions something that they've seen or done in the day. So everybody's holding a piece of this. It looks like a huge spider web and we talk about interconnectivity that we all can make a different, that we could all be doing something to help fish and the forest carry on together.

This one day I gave a nature walk on a Monday. I was in the yard, weeding my pots. And this vehicle drove by, come into the yard, parked in the parking lot. This man got out, stood behind his car with his arms folded. Didn't look very happy, but he's just staring at me, weeding the pots. And I thought, gee, I wonder if he's lost. Before he could get up, the man left. But the next day, the same car returned. Arms folded again, staring at me, watching me.

So I started to approach the man. and he didn't change his facial expressions, and I thought, wow, he doesn't really look happy. I said, hello, sir, is there anything I could do to help you? Are you looking for someone in particular, or you need directions? He just looked at me, and he said, well, I don't really know who I'm looking for or what I'm looking for. And I went, wow, that doesn't sound that good. And so I was a little bit scared.

He said, I wanted to find who spoke with our children. child. I went, oh no. I said, that was me. And so he said, I wanted to meet you. Reached his hand out. I wanted to thank you. I went, whoa. And so he said, up until Monday, our family was in our own little worlds when we got home. Child get home on the computer chatting with their friends. Other child video gaming. And mom gets home. She's in the kitchen preparing dinner, looking after the family needs. Dad gets home, turns his TV on, oh, cool, there's a hockey game on, or I'll watch the news today, or like me, I like to watch nature shows. And so he said, we were all in our own little worlds. Dinner would be

ready. We'd all go get our plate and go back to our station, and that's how it was until bedtime. But that week, his son made everyone sit down at the dinner table to talk about plants. Mom, why do you buy the plants that you buy to put in our yard? Mom, you should talk to the man that talked to us today. He grows his own plants. His plants belong here. His plants are from here. And so the man shook my hand, thanked me for doing...

What I had done, plants, salmon, other habitats, everything is being affected by us as modern man. And that's what I had to learn to do, is not say, oh, all you non-First Nation people are kind of the part of the problem here. What I had to do was not kind of divide the group. I had to pull us all together and clump us together. and so I call us modern man. And that's why, because we all fit into that picture. We're all changing the world in an unhealthy way. It's not too late yet.

We can help Mother Earth. We can help Mother Nature. We can help all of these gifts that the Creator gave to all of us. Cowichin Elder Sithnamat. This is the second and final episode in our series What the River Wants to be. If you missed part one of this series, you can find it on our website,

cbc.ca.ca slash ideas, or wherever you get your podcast. This episode was produced by Pauline Holesworth. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production by Emily Chiarvesio and Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nicola Loshic. Greg Kelly is the exact. Executive Producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad.

While we've been on the radio, perhaps you've been able to hear the Kingfisher's calling. We've had Yacala Eagles calling above us, and you may have heard the splashing sounds of likely co-host starting to come in. Sneak a peek again. They'll say goodbye to you. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.