Nuanced. - 56. Dean Werk: Great River Fishing, Conservation & Glamorous Camping Domes

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Aaron Pete and Dean Werk sit down to talk about the fishing adventures Dean and his team provides through Great River Fishing, and the glamorous camping experiences he provides through Fraser Canyon Riverside Domes. The two also talk about the work that goes into becoming a fisherman, the different types of fish, conservation and fishing tour guides. “The journey never ends when you share the passion” – Dean WerkBorn and raised in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Dean has been fishing British Columbia’s lakes and rivers for over 50 years. He became involved in the sport-fishing industry 34 years ago and has been dedicated to the preservation of the White Sturgeon ever since. Dean is heavily involved in the fishing community and sits on the Board of Directors for the Fraser Valley Salmon Society and the Technical and Community working groups for the Recovery of White Sturgeon. Dean actively shares his passion and works with children teaching them to fish and respect the importance of conservation. Dean is very connected to the river and all the people who share it. He has established solid relationships with many First Nations Bands, including the Yale First Nations who settle along the shores of our rivers. Dean’s true passion is Sturgeon and he lives for the anticipation of not knowing how big the next fish could be or how many times it will jump. Dean also enjoys Spey casting double hand fly rods for Salmon, Steelhead and Trout. He likes finding a private piece of river and trying to cast near perfect loops and capturing everything in his surroundings.Dean loves to share days on the rivers with new guests and friends sharing his knowledge about conservation and all our fish species. Ensuring that this resource is here for us to share with our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren for many generations is the key to feeling fulfilled.Learn more about fishing adventures: https://greatriverfishing.com/Learn more about glamorous camping experiences: http://greatriverfishing.com/uncategorized/fraser-canyon-riverside-domes/Send us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. REFBC is a philanthropic organization that supports sustainable, equitable, and socially just relationships with land and water. Learn more about the foundation's grants and initiatives at REFBC.com. So my name is Dean Work, and I am indigenous but not from here. I am the current vice president of the Stolo Business Association. And I've lived amongst the First Nations communities here in Chiluat my entire life and rubbed shoulders and hung out with all my friends. And I would have to say that Stolo means people of the river. And I would say that in my life, I was a person of the river.

Being that, my grandfather had a farm on the Vedder River for 47 years. I got my first taste of fishing. My father was a sport fisherman. He liked to fish. I got taught out of fish. I spent a lot of time on the farm. My grandfather's farm on the Vedder River, and I was able to go to the river

typically after chores, either with my father or to be able to go out the back of the yard and be able to fish where nobody was actually fishing in those days. You could walk for three or four miles and never see another person, and that would be hard to understand by what the Rotary Trail is done.

to the Vedder River now, and not in a bad way, just it's an alive place. I had an opportunity growing up to get the fishing instilled into my blood, basically, from the Fraser River, the Vetter River, going to lakes and fishing in summertime when my parents had a little bit of holiday time, which wasn't a lot. And I think probably one of the biggest factors for me is, was knowing. where our food came from when we were younger, you know, I think people sometimes believe that we had, everybody had money and that's the way it was. The world wasn't like that back then, and I'm only 58, but, you know, fish for us was food for our family. And when we would go to

the river, we would sport fish and catch these fish, but we would bring them back. And that was our Monday meal every, you know, all the time. That's, we would have salmon. And, and, And, you know, we would have farm animals or we would have chickens from the farm or we would have beef that was from the farm. And Sunday was a roast day. And I actually probably didn't like salmon for a little while because we would have salmon on Monday. And then on Tuesday I would have a salmon sandwich in my lunch to go to school in. And then Tuesday night I would have salmon casserole and didn't become very fond of that later on. And then I would have another salmon sandwich the next day at school.

And probably Wednesday we would have salmon patties, which I still like today. So, you know, to say that the fish and the food and the river is in my blood, I would have to say I am a person of the river. And although when most people look at me, they see me as maybe different, you know, than our indigenous people that are locally or are stolo people. But I'm on the river, and I've been on the river for 52 years now. It's ingrained in me. It is, the river runs through my blood. Like the river runs through the mountains. I feel the river runs through my blood, too,

and all those things around the river to, the history, the culture, the pioneering. And to know that I can make a difference. for the present and future generations. And knowing the people that I have met on my journey, being able to meet so many wonderful people, maybe some challenging people over the years that we've had not such good relationships with, but we've formed amazing relationships over a period of time.

And the acceptance of being on the river and maybe because I choose not to fish with a net, but I choose to fish with a rod and a reel as an indigenous person and promote my way of seeing things is through a tourism lens and a lens of my own lens of how I grew up sharing the things that I shared. And it's not that I haven't been out in a boat and been able to drift fish because I have done that with other First Nations leaders in our territory here. It was more about a way that I had the ability to make that work in my world.

that I could share with the world, developed something that was never developed here. There was only when I started in 1988, there was only a couple of fishing guides here. There was myself and Fred Elmer and Danny Hart. There was only a few of us. Nobody guided on these rivers. You know, I told that story when I was out on the river yesterday, and I said, in my first two years of guiding, you could not sell a sturgeon fishing trip. It was impossible. You couldn't not sell one.

You couldn't even give one away. Because when people came here, that's all they thought in the phrase of river as is salmon fishing or the Vedder River. It was salmon fishing. So people would get, you know, maybe there, one Chinook a day or two Chinooks a day. And maybe in those days we didn't fish so maybe a coho or something like that is a bonus fish. And at the end of an eight-hour tour, which didn't cost very much in those days. And we had little tiny little boats. It was like, okay, well, maybe at the end of the day you'd like to try sturgeon fishing.

We have a really cool fishery here. It's called sturgeon fishing. I'm probably through my day of being with them, spending my eight hours or ten hours with the people. I probably talked about it a few times. And maybe like to try it at the end of your day. No, no, we're good. Well, maybe just an hour.

I mean, I'm not going to charge you. I'm going to do this for free. And they're like, no, no, we got our salmon and we're really happy. So the evolution of things, you know, watching, you know, us move from our salmon stronghold here in the Fraser River and corridor, you know, other tributaries, moving towards a shift of loss of, you know, run sizes and the many things attributed to that has made a shift.

And we had to shift into and adapt our business to take on surrogate fishing. So how are we going to market that to the world? Because really, that was a fish that was known as, you know, a first agent's fish that was harvested. You know, they did a lot of ceremonial stuff and fed their families. It was a commercial fishery for many years where they harvested fish down and they took them and they sold them down in Vancouver. And there was a commercial fishery at this turn of the century where they nearly devastated the population of the Fraser River Sturgeon in the lower river from Mission Down. It was terrible. So we had to evolve in the salmon crisis.

And we had to adapt and figure out what were we going to do. And we began to market sturgeon fishing. And we still do salmon fishing trips. And we still do, you know, fly fishing trips and rafting trips for steel ed. It's just that the main focus has now turned over to sturgeon because there's really not a lot to fish for now in our river. And it saddens me. And I know that through the effort of a whole bunch of people that have inspired me over my journey, I feel that my calling is to ensure that I work hard in many different aspects of the river and what's around the river to try to create and have the ability to provide, at least if nothing else, a glimpse to the next generation so they can see what we did and how we grew up and how much that the food from the river and having the experience to be around other people.

the river was a place to gather and it never mattered whether you were indigenous or you were non-indigenous there was never a separation or a segregation when I was young we all just went to the river and you know my buddies would be fishing out there and this guy was fishing with a net and this guy was fishing with a rod and a reel but nobody cared you know we had a good resource we had you know one of the most incredible and we still have the most incredible river in my view in Canadian history like There's no other river in my view in North America that represents the meaning and the feeling of the phrase of river tributaries in the corridor. And it doesn't matter whether you're down in Vancouver or you're up in Lillowet or Boston Bar or Lytton or Yale. That river is deep.

And it's deep not in depth. It's deep in history and culture and tradition. And like I said, the people that I've been around and I've learned from, you know, which I call my elders. and I learned from young people too, but I've learned a lot. I've hung out with a lot of older people than myself, and that has allowed me to see things maybe through a different type of a lens,

whether it be conservation, whether it be an urgency lens, or whether it be knowing that I have the ability to help to make change, positive change. And without making that effort, and feeling that inside what I feel when I'm doing good work, whether I'm cleaning a river up or whether I make a call that something's not right on the river

and we need to report some riparian destruction. I feel that if I don't do this work, I'm carrying a big load of rocks in my backpack that I'm going to have trouble carrying around for the rest of my life. And sharing that knowledge and inspiration like other people showed me allows me to maybe pass that on through the next generations

and be hopeful that the stories aren't lost, that the livelihood, the social welfare of being to the river, the mental health that you go to the river and receive is, it's almost undescribable

to tell you the truth. That feeling of passion and caring and loving and you watch the Eagles and, you know, you see trees moving down the river that you know will land on a bank and it will become a great riparian area where where little tiny little fry may seek refuge people don't really see that they just see a mess you know of stuff coming down the river but there's meaning to all that you know the sand that's deposited has organic matter in it that comes from the fish that pass away in the in the river and they they die um you know the leaves that go in and they they make little areas where uh they get caught up in the grass and they get caught up in the grass. and the tiny little Chinook fry or the baby little sturgeon or, you know, or the little sock-eye fry gets to seek refuge in to get away from a bird or, you know,

some other predator that a little fish that may eat them up on the river. And knowing that, we have the ability to look at that and adjust, you know, to what we need in the next generations to save our wild salmon population and our sturgeon population because sometimes people forget about that because they're all related, you know, without salmon, we're probably eventually going to have no sturgeon. And so for me, the tourism lens was the one that I wanted to take, and I've seen great value in that. And I would have to say that probably 98% of my people don't harvest any fish.

We harvest fish when there's surplus fish. You know, if there's a run in the river that allows for food social cereal, FSC fishery, which is a food social ceremonial fishery, protected under section 35 of the constitution it's the right for sustenance and to bring fish to your family for the first nations people that live up and down the river at one given time of the year which is really a small portion of opportunity to fish now because of the way the stocks are to be able to have that and also when there's surplus fish to have an opportunity for other people,

other fishers, sport fishers, if you want to call them recreational anglers, to have an opportunity to get to the river alone is healing for those people. And probably many of those people never catch a fish when they're out there. And it's probably

it's probably a very big misunderstanding, you know? Many sport fishers think that First Nations take all the fish on the river and that's so not true. And it's a story that needs to be told. And it It's misconception within two groups, user groups, and actually three user groups because the commercial sector is also involved. The commercial fishery in river area e-gillet fishery when there's surplus fish, all those fisheries are misunderstood.

And we're now really doing some good work with something called the lower Fraser River Collaborative Table. And I just sat at a meeting there the other day for about six or seven hours. and there was representatives from all sectors and we talked about just what we're talking about today is learning, learning from each other about the misconceptions and understanding what the fisheries mean to each group in each sector. So just because you've been fishing on the river

all your life with a net doesn't mean you shouldn't give an opportunity to understand what that looks like through a sport fishing lens. And as a sport fisherman, you need to understand what an FNC fishery is or a surplus fishery and understand what that meaning is to the First Nations culture up and down our rivers.

You know, I talked to a lady the other day and I've told this story a lot and I feel there's a lot of value to this little tiny little snippet. And it's about the fact that when I'm preparing a rod to go out on an experience and I call it an experience, I take people, I don't take people fishing,

I take them on a journey, I take them on an experience on the river. And I instill this in my guide team. It's important to talk about all the things about the river. Not just that we're going there to catch fish. That's only a really little portion of it. It's actually about the experience and showing people where we live and being proud of our area in British Columbia and Canada

in the broader spectrum. But more so our area, you know, which is a big area too of the Fraser River. And I told a story about, you know, when I'm getting my rod ready, I'm tying a hook and I'm, you know, making those really nice little knots and I'm doing all that work to get things right. Everything needs to be perfect on that, on that rod, and I want it nice and clean and ready to go, so I'm very well prepared. And I translate that into a net, and, you know, I've been able to hang out with many elders in my day and send First Nation elders up and down the river and I watch them hang nets. and something I want to learn to do just so I feel what it feels like from their point of view

how they felt when they're weaving a net or they're hanging a weed line on a net and making that net perfect. So working on that net, mending those nets, in my view, is like tying a fly to catch that one fish or getting your gear ready and tying the knots and putting everything,

all the pieces together of your fishing rod. And then I say when I when we're out in the river and we're setting the net on the river and the net is coming off of the boat and it's reeling out. You know, that's like a person casting a rod.

My first cast of a rod in the day and I'm either float fishing or I'm fly fishing or I cast out into the sturgeon pool and they're putting a net out and it's fluent and it's how, it's high,

they can feel it in their heart. They're excited. Oh, I have an opportunity. and then in a boat you would see you know you get a bite and that's called you know the rod tip moves down and then you're excited the people in your boat are excited and to me i translate that to as as the indigenous people are coming down the river and they're watching their net they're watching it so intently and they're watching all they're watching for is a little cork bob that that cork on the net on the top of the net is pulling down and it pulls up and down a little bit

it. And that's like a rod biting for an angler. You know, they detach their boat and they're going to do something called hot picking and they're going to go over because there's a lot of seals and predators in the river. And they may take that one fish, that one fish that would feed their family, their elders, sharing with their communities on the river that that one fish would mean to them. And they go over and they get it and they pick that fish up. And that's like us setting a hook. It's a sport angler. Setting a hook. And then, you know, a fish explodes from the water. And that feeling, you get to have a well-rounded feeling. And I feel that the similarities are there, but in a different way.

And I think that if people could see that from that lens and understand that feeling, because we're all at the river, we're enjoying the river, it's good for our mental health. And it's important to us, whether we are just a Canadian citizen going fishing or a person coming from all, parts of the world to see and come and see our beautiful land, or whether you're indigenous and you're fishing with a net on the river. And there's a need for it all. Can I just ask a question? You grew up along this river. You had experiences that are starting to become less and less common. We hear more about mental health issues. There is a growing disconnect between people and the food that they eat. They don't know where it's from. And you're

starting to see more people saying, I don't want to eat something if it's done in a factory farm or something like that. You're starting to see tensions kind of growing. What was it like to grow up and have the river be like a second home to you where for so many now, it seems like they're so disconnected? Like what was, you have a unique experience and I'm just interested if you could tell us a bit more about that. Yeah, well, I, you know, I'm lucky because like I said earlier, I had an opportunity very close to my grandfather and spent all my time on the Better River. And then, of course, my experience is on the Fraser River being introduced to that. And at a young age, my father let me take a little tiny little boat on the Fraser River.

I mean, it must have been crazy letting me do that. But it's what I wanted to do. And sports took me really away from the river and fishing because, you know, I played some pretty high-level sports. and it was aggressive. And then, you know, my early 20s, I kind of, I went to Alberta for a couple of years to make some money and come home and come back home. I missed this place really bad.

And I said, what can I do here? And it wasn't easy to do the journey of creating a sportfish guide company, which really hadn't been done here. We were pioneers. You know, we took something. So later on, you know, I was so attracted to the river. I could not, never stay off the river. And the Fraser River became my,

my absolute home. Like, I really just lived, eat, and breathe that river nonstop. And knowing about, you know, I mean, I think we were so young then that we didn't even understand what we could be sitting on as far as, you know, historic tragedies of the river. You know, how we would ever see a demise of things like wild salmon. and having that feeling of now, you know, fast forward and real, you know, I mean, I'm 58 now, and I started this business in my early 20s. And the feeling now of what we have to lose, the disconnect, you know, to the youth.

For me, it's about watching, you know, the youth and putting the youth back to the water and letting the youth be a part of helping us for a better future. You know, modernization, you know, electronics, technology changes things for the youth today, you know. And parents have a responsibility and elders have a responsibility of passing on traditions and knowledge. And if we're not careful the way I see things now to get the young people involved, involved in the rivers, the land, even just being with people socially, we are going to be a weird culture, in my view, a different culture, evolve into something sad in the future. So if we can rewind, and I think COVID did a little of this, you know, you couldn't buy a canning jar almost anywhere. You could not ever find any, you know, widemouth jars, lids, you know, they were impossible.

always want to eat, you know, anywhere you can get some lids. No. So you see a lot more people moving backwards. So we're rewinding a little bit. And that's where the important of like things like wild salmon come in. You know, it's funny that you talk about the food. I was at an event the other day. And there was some salmon. It was on a little sort of a little bagelie guy cut out. And I was like, oh, do we know if that's wild salmon? And nobody's, really had an answer. I mean, I've seen some people putting it on their plates. But I, there was a lady there that I knew really well, and she took my piece and put it on her plate. Because of the unknown, I didn't want to eat that because I've only ever ate wild fish in my life, whether it

be a trout or an ooligan from the river at this time of the year, or it'd be a wild salmon, or back in the day when I was allowed to have a little piece of somebody had harvested a sturgeon when it was allowed to harvest back in the day, and somebody would give me a little piece. and I would cook it up and, you know, so I could feel the river. So I think that COVID, although there's so much bad and sadness from COVID, it was a terrible loss for my business in tourism for, you know, over two years. And I think I'm going to see a residual loss for probably maybe another five years more. It probably could be a five to 10 year, you know, residual loss.

It gave us the ability to rewind and have the ability to maybe possibly learn to reconnect. and reconnection would mean maybe the young are seeing it a little more, and it's a little bit more firsthand in their families as they're growing up. My parents are canning. My parents are planting a garden. My parents are being more responsible with the food that they give me now. And although the world is really fast-paced, I think it's something that we really need to consider and move back towards

is that would give the importance of riparian areas. That would give the importance to protection of our river corridors. uh and the youth will be the ones that move this forward they're the ones that have the ability through the teachings and uh the lessons given by elders whether it's parents or grandparents or great-grandparents if they're lucky enough to have them in their lives to talk about the old and move forward to the present and say we have the absolute ability to change what the world will look like in 20 to 40 years and to protect protect what needs to be protected and make priority gathering and being with people again and not being so separated or segregated. And I think that would change a lot of things myself. I agree. I think of like when I was growing up and it kind of reminds me of your salmon story of eating salmon so many days.

My mother was part of the 60 scoop and she's got a disability, which means that she struggles with recipes. She would buy all this amazing food, but she would struggle to utilize the celery or the carrots. And so we'd end up eating the same sort of meals each day. And I look at that now, and I'm grateful for it. But during that time, I was so frustrated by it. And I feel like there's a certain amount of struggle you want when you're growing up,

a certain amount of challenge, a certain amount of adversity that kind of helps you form, that you look back on with like a certain level of gratefulness and it seems like that's the same for you during that time it was like can I get something else than salmon but now you look back and you go like well this was what my family was doing to support me and this is how we lived and this is how we survived

and it feels like while we do still have struggle it doesn't seem like it's got that same maybe positive element to it where it's like my grandmother who survived the Great Depression really appreciated food and she understood if it's the expiration date she's going a few days past She had that gratefulness for it, and there were certain foods that she started to make and became standard because she knew how to conserve her food. It seems like that's something we're maybe missing right now.

It feels like we don't have that same passing on of recipes and that same connection with people that maybe we once had. And to your point, I think that maybe COVID is reminding us of, like, what were my parents' recipes? How did, I interviewed Tim Srigley, who's really into leather making, because he's like, we don't make things that last like 100 years anymore. Everything is like getting the newest phone, the newest TV, everything needs to be updated. And so, but there are certain things you want to treasure that are historic, that have a certain amount of heritage to them. And it seems like maybe we're starting to wake up on that.

Like, is that what you're feeling from the youth that you've maybe worked with? Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I mean, I see it. I've seen it with my own. children. You know, I've tried to instill good food values for them and understanding. I mean, I was lucky enough to have a meal with my son the other night. My son is a guide on the river and he's a Red Seal Electrician. I'm really proud of him. He's, you know, I never expected my son to ever be guiding him. I was guiding with him yesterday, actually. And he caught more fish than me

yesterday. You know, I might have caught bigger fish than him, but he got more fish. But I know he's telling good stories out there. And I was able to share a meal with him. And, and I took the time when when the kids grew up and and um you know i had a couple of divorces before i was 30 so my life was pretty challenged but i really spent a lot of time trying to create and develop good relationships with my kids um and and work hard to be be there for them as much as i ought as i could you know with the life i was leading at the time um growing a business and working and trying to make ends meet and support them and be there for them. But, you know, I shared a meal with my son, and my son's a great cook.

My daughters are actually all great cooks, and we didn't ever, really ever eat processed food in their lives. So that was instilled in them as a value, and we still do that today. And it's positive to me to see that nobody's putting. My son wouldn't even own a microwave. I don't have a microwave in my canyon house. like we don't do that we cook we cook our food uh every day and we try to get good wholesome food and i mean it's not that um everything is perfect but we try to live from the

land you know my my first traditional meal you know if i was lucky enough to get a few ulligans i would have my my meal that i would have would be six little ulligans uh breaded and a hole in their entirety i don't clean them or anything i just cook them up and like they do traditionally within the communities along the river and stinging nettles that I harvest off my property right up in the canyon and I take the tops off the off the stinging nettles and soak them and then I put them into the frying pan with garlic and onion and the nutrient value is probably about 20 times over the load of something like spinach and then you know I would pick a few morel mushrooms so river hooligans stinging nettles morel mushrooms and no I don't eat that

every day. But to be able to share that and my family see that I do that, it gives them the ability to think about the good food, where our food comes from. And again, you know, that whole COVID thing, I feel is going to reload the opportunity. And it's only an opportunity. It doesn't mean it's going to happen. But we have the opportunity to change the outcome of the future. so if we want to go backwards and we want to say we should try to do some more stuff from the land we should plant more gardens we should gather at the river gather together learn teach pass down these recipes and cook together as families like spend the time to give good meaning and value to the next generations because you know to me when i grew up going out for a meal out it was like an

absolute rarity like you had to pass school for the year and you got to go out somewhere like a really big deal would be to go get a whistle dog down at dog and suds like that's a really big deal in a root beer you know there was none of that because really on the most part people struggled in the 80s and the 70s and you know there wasn't a lot of bunny around you know you lived. That's how you lived. And we've moved so far away from that now that it's it's hard for me to even watch sometimes what actually goes on. And I think understanding where your food comes from, looking towards a future of being responsible and accountable, making our governments accountable and responsible for how they look after our wild salmon and fish.

And all of our animals managing in British Columbia, our forest, our trees, our rivers, our resources. I think that would be a great job for the elders to teach the youth as well, because I think we're doing a, I think we're trying to fix some of the real big issues with and around our water columns but I think we're missing it like we're really missing what we need to be doing in the future and so we're we're at an we're at sort of a teetering point I would say in in my career and in my life say that we're on the verge of losing our identity as both river people Canadian citizens and what the world actually identifies us as honestly as kind of

conservationists in our own land. That is frightening to hear. We also hear about like a sense of despair, like we hear about depression rates being high, anxiety rates, but then you start to look at like people don't have any connections anymore. It doesn't seem like my generation is overly interested in the idea that their elders or senior citizens have knowledge to share. There's this sort of pervasive mentality that like, well, since my grand.

doesn't know how to use, like, an iPhone. She doesn't know anything. Like, she doesn't have any information to share with me. And I think that that's, of course, a mistake. And, like, people like Eddie Gardner and Brian Minter really show the wisdom that can exist. But we often sort of put wisdom to the side for intelligence. And we look to perhaps the Elon Musk's or the Jeff Bezos and go, well, they're intelligent. They know how to build things.

And so they must know everything. And then you look at, like, their relationships. and they don't have great relationships with their spouses. And so there's knowledge to be gained from learning where your food comes from and having that connection. And when you have like a pre-packaged meal that you can pick up from Save on Foods for $5, sure, there's a convenience element, but there's a lack of connection. And then your whole life starts to become texting people rather than seeing them in person and having food that you don't know where it's from or who made it.

and you can maybe like live off the fumes for a while but there's something about looking perhaps at the stars when you're when you've just finished a day of fishing the fresh air on your face that you're experiencing you're having an experience as you said that's different than what other people are becoming more and more used to we're in apartments we're rushing to work then home everybody sounds busy but nobody seems that busy like everybody's on their phones scrolling away and saying, I have no time to get anything done. And it's like, well, it seems like you're on your phone a lot. Like, you're not doing stuff.

And so I'm just interested, what is it like to bring people to the water and, like, have them kind of shut those things off? Like, you're not having meetings on the boat. You're back in nature. Do you see kind of a shift from being on land to, like, the high-paced people to, like, this is magnificent. This is slowing down and experiencing something instead of planning for the future. Yeah, I mean, I see that, I see that virtually every day when I'm on the water, and, you know, I actually start my day out and talk about where I am and, you know, where I am in relevance to which, you know, which band or which First Nations band, we're going to fish through their territories, and we talk about all that.

And the other thing I talk about when we get on the boat is, is about, you know, having the ability to have me take the images that are needed to be taken for the day. and it stops people from wanting to go onto their phones. And I found it as a little key way of not saying you can't be on your phones. It's that let me create your journey through my lens. And I'll give you all the photos at the end of the day, whether we air drop them through technology or we load them up to Dropbox and my office will send them out to the clients. And it gives people an opportunity to just stop, you know,

because they don't need to be on their phone. They're listening to the store. as we go up the river they're understanding that you know we'll see yesterday we've seen two deer on the river and then the one guy at the end of they says well no i think we seen four and i said well oh i don't remember four and he goes well we've seen two that were over here and maybe it was the same two over there so we've seen four but we know he was paying attention you know we had big trees coming down the river because of the fresh shed and some of the flooding you know that it happened up river and spencer's bridge to merit we're seeing the residual of that and it's

interesting to people, wow, look at that giant tree or look at this or, oh, there's something else floating down that's some sort of pollution object. You know, it's a hot water tank or it's, you know, and we can't change any of that. We can take the garbage off the river. So slowing down the technological process in a boat, we're good at it. You know, it's a matter of what we do with the people in the boat. Maybe when they're done with the boat, they're back on their phones and they're scrolling and stuff, but for that eight hours or 10 hours or whatever we've captivated six hours, four hours, we've given them an option to say, this is nature, let's reconnect, let's create an experience for you that is not only fishing, it's about

the history, the culture, the tradition, about how British Columbia was born, you know, what's happened after the last ice age, you know, 10,000 years ago when the Columbia River basin was carved out and how the Fraser River was. carved out and we see, you know, we see transformer rocks or we see rocks that have fallen off glaciers all around us in that canyon area. It's like, you know, I fished in the lower river for so many years, Chilliwack, Agassay all the way down to Vancouver. And although it's still beautiful down there in a different way, it's more industrialized. And, and, you know, my latter part of my career has been spending so much time in the canyon, so much that I, you know, I couldn't

help myself. I look for nine years to find a piece of property so I could really connect with the water and I was lucky enough to find these three acres on this road where there's no lights you know the only noise pollution would be the trains you know when you hear that but you know you know that's part of our history too is the way trains travel through that canyon period and areas you know moving valuable valuable things that needed to be moved across canada that was the part of the evolution but when you when you sit for a minute and like you said you get to smell that fresh air being moved by the water current the water's starting to rise now the water currents are picking up it's bringing down smell and scent it's moving you know it's moving the wind

through the trees in a different way it's the sounds of just the river rumbling not the side of the banks and um and knowing that it's going to bring food to people or poor experiences to people throughout the year. Wow. I just, yeah, you know, I really got to say, you know, I think about it every day about how fortunate I am. And maybe it was through fluke or I don't know what it was. And I have the ability to, through my lens,

the way I teach, what doesn't mean it's the way that everybody needs to teach. We all garner things from other people. but my vision is a vision like I stated before it's kind of like it's the cultural tradition it's talking about all the netting and all the things that we need to do moving forward to protect our fish but also a tourism lens and I think there's a hard balance there sometimes but knowing that we can take people shut down technology and bring them to the river whether it's a tour whether it's a fishing experience whether it's at the Fraser Canyon riverside domes or whether it's at the fraser canyon tepee escape you know we can stop people from being so busy in the world to realize the importance to get back to some of our ancestors' origins and realize what we're what we're either missing or at least have the ability to balance your life in a better way for the future to say you know recipes and all this and grandma's words and great grandma's words are

are maybe not exactly what I see today on my technological pads and all the things that I do with my iPads, my phones. But maybe Grandma can navigate with you through the phone and talk about making a recipe that you may put in your iPad and in your notes and cook that recipe with you and you will take that with you

on a journey for the rest of your life. Yeah, I think that recipes are an incredible thing because if you have a recipe that's been passed on from generation to generation, you could be cooking something of your great-grandparent who's no longer alive and bringing their legacy back to life in some way. We often think of history in books, in statues, in museums, but I really like how you described the Fraser River as a piece of history.

And we kind of get caught up in, well, it's a flowing body of water. That's what it is. And so we don't give it maybe the same credence that we give, a really old statue or like the Mona Lisa you go there and you go wow this is this is a piece of history but that river has stories it has experiences people have died on that river people have caught an incredible fish people have reconnected with family members they've fished in the like indigenous people have fished in the same spot and passed on fishing spots for generations and so there's pieces of history all along that river and stories that have been shared and

passed on from generation. Can you tell us about you, how do you see the river? Because I've heard it described as like the lifeblood of indigenous people in the area. I've heard it described as like a highway that connects us all life. It has a personality perhaps. And I'm just interested in how do you see it? And I see it exactly that way, but maybe one step further. What I see is, you know the river isn't uh you know i see it as the indigenous river the people of the river the stolo people i mean there's people all the way up the river not everyone is stolo but you know through the 30 nations and uh the 24 bands of stolo that that i know of um that are on the area um you know in this exact area where we're we're kind of yelled down to the sailor sea um i see

there's the huge connection for them to the river, but on a more overlaying and layered approach, it's that everybody sees that. So you don't have to be indigenous to get the value out of what the river is. We as Canadians, as settlers here, are many generations, you know, so somebody's great grandfather could have immigrated from Europe and they settled in Montreal, or they settled in, lots of them settled into the, into the prairies. And then there was always this statement that always came through. I remember we talked about this with my grandfather, and they ended up in Saskatchewan when they came over,

and this is my father's side of the family, and then they became farmers, and it was go west young man, go west young, man. I mean, our family has a family named farm, still in Regina, believe it or not, and you would have not thought that would have gone by the wayside, but it hasn't, and that would be my grandfather, side. So whether you're indigenous or non-indigenous, that river brings us together. Because it is a cornerstone of where people have grown up through generations. Many people,

many people have grown up there. My children grew up on the river. They spent time on the river. They spent time on the river. I've had my great, or my part of me, my granddaughter and my grandson at my property in the canyon and they love down by the rocks and the beach and playing in the sand and it makes no difference whether you were indigenous not indigenous that river connects every single person and it it actually has the ability to bring people together to gather it has the ability to teach uh i think one of the happy little moment for me in my life is i remember my daughter saying hey dad can you go and pick up kaya um down in yarrow where i grew up a lot in yore i spent a lot of time in yore and i said yeah yeah i'll pick her up today and i know what

she's doing she's in she's in outdoor school it's a i think it was called leapfrog and um and i went to the river that day and I drove in and oh guampa guampa and she comes running up and it's pouring rain like her hair is soaked and wet and then I got to talk to the teacher there's a really small little group of students that were lucky enough to be enrolled in this program and it's learning from around the river so you know maybe there's 15 of them or 16 whatever the classes and their whole And part of their school, like what it was before school, but kind of their growing years, and she was only like four. And they would be down at the river playing in the dirt and, you know, learning hands-on things,

talking about the fish and the plants and doing all that. And the lady said to me, Dean, your granddaughter is so much different than all these boys. The boys are crying and they're wet and they're not happy and they're, you know, they're doing their stuff. but wow, your granddaughter doesn't matter to her whether it's freezing cold on her hands or whether it's pouring rain on her head. She wants to be emerged in this whole thing about this ecosystem, this delicate, cool ecosystem we live in.

And there was a takeaway from me from that. You know, I remember snapping a picture that day, a selfie of her and me, and I have that, you know, on my phone, and I look at that from time to time. And I remember sending that image over to my daughter, and my daughter goes twinning. And when you look, and I look at those two pictures of her face and my face,

and I see, wow, there's some of me in her. Like, there's some similarities between us. And knowing that she was on the river, learning and educating at such a young age that really I had nothing to do with, but I was on that same river in that same area when I was a little boy, is the connection that I take away from that. and knowing the value, the true value in what was passed on directly or indirectly. But my daughter has also the vision that it's important that the children are connected to the land

and what evolved from and around the river. So I think that's probably the best way I can describe. You know, again, it's a story. You know, it's a story of, I mean, you can sense there's proudness there, proud, proud feeling to know that they're emerged and that, that they understand that it's important how we have fish, how we look after our fish. You know, one of the stories that sticks out in my head, too, is, you know, we talk about the food. And growing up, my grandmother was sick and she, my other grandmother from my other side of my family. That's all my indigenous, my indigenous side of my family.

You know, my grandmother was in Yarrow, and my grandmother got ill. my grandma was 97 and my aunt said you know grandma's got a grandma's going into the hospital the night you know she's just not good and it was only a few years ago and my grandma's 97 and my aunt came and spent some time at my house and she flew out from Ontario one of many children from my from that family and it was a broken family and uh I cooked some salmon that night I took some salmon out I thought, ah, you know, I'm going to take my grandma some salmon. My grandma loves salmon, and I cooked a little tiny tail section that I had in the freezer of, I think it was a Chinook salmon, and it was a small one, just a little bit mellow,

a little bit more mellow of her flavor than it was than it is for a sawkite, which is a little more bold. And I got to visit with, went to the hospital that night, I got to visit with my grandma. We didn't know how she was going to do, and my aunt was staying with her all night. And I brought the salmon in. I said, Grandma, I brought some salmon in for it. Oh, you know, so nice of you. And one thing and next. And my aunt said, you know, don't be offended if Grandma doesn't eat that.

And although she would be really, you know, happy to know that you brought her a piece of this salmon in the morning, my aunt foamy. And she said, you know, sometime through the night when I fell asleep, I fell asleep. And then I looked on the side there where the salmon was sitting in and all that salmon was gone. and my grandmother said to her that, you know, it was one of the happiest meals that she had had thinking about where that fish had come from and knowing that, you know, those, because some of my uncles and people had fished,

you know, as I was growing up and took me to the river at times and her getting that piece before her final resting time gave her an opportunity to have that last taste of that salmon and I know that's the last time she ever got to taste some wild salmon and that's meaningful to me that's so beautiful and i'm just

interested to understand like we have this idea of legacies but we don't really talk about them as much i don't hear people like you used to have like third generation welders or blacksmiths or that used to be a thing and it seems like it's less so often children go and do whatever they want but in both of those moments there was a moment where you knew that you were making sure that you gave your grandma her last opportunity to experience that and have that connection. And with your granddaughter, you were able to see that she had taken up the legacy, that the experiences were able to continue. And it seems like we're hitting this point now where we're like, wow, my children might not get to experience the outdoors. Like I experienced

when I was growing up. Like a lot of the adults that I've had the opportunity to talk to talk of So, like, we went into the forest and we just had no idea what was going to happen next. And that seems to be sort of fading away where it's like, well, we have a playground and it's, it's licensed for this. And you get, you're guaranteed not to get injured if you jump off. Like, everything is so safe now that there's this kind of fear that maybe we've gone too far and that we won't have these opportunities to really pass on a legacy or pass on our experiences and make sure that they have the wholesome experiences that we ought and maybe protect them from some of the negative. experiences that we went through. And so they get the best of both worlds. And so it seems like that's what gives life meaning.

And sometimes we forget it. Sometimes we focus on the pay. Sometimes we focus on the career aspirations that I want to move up in this company, whatever it looks like. But we forget about the role of kind of developing a person and giving them a holistic understanding of how the world is from understanding the fish to the wildlife and how the ecosystem functions. I'm wondering if you could help walk us through that. What can people learn from the river in terms of like the fish? And what do you take away from that? Because I've had the

opportunity to sit down with Chris Koo, who's an expert in birding, and he loves owls and raptors and understanding ducks and telling their story. And I'm interested, what do you see when you're on the river? Because you might see bears and deer and you just, you see so much life intertwining with it with one another. And I'm just interested. interested, what does that look like? What are some fish that stand out to you? What is some life that you've had the opportunity to learn about? Yeah. And I, you know, wow, that's a deep one. There's a lot to that content. And I think just to touch back on the last point was, is that you asked me about the blood and what runs through the river is the blood. And I think what I was

trying to provide for you was, and I hope that came through, is that there was, the blood flowing through my veins was the same blood flowing through my grandmother's veins. And hence probably my great grandparents and their ancestors. And to watch that go through my own children and then to see it in my grandchildren and to know that that's just there. And it wasn't something that I had to force to develop. It was something that was naturally the blood that ran through their veins. There was something. It's like when I say, I never believe my son would be a fishing guide. And I can honestly say today how proud I am of him of what I watch when I see testimonials come back from clients and friends that have been out with him to say he absolutely, and even more so maybe, understands the gift of

what the river and what we have here in British Columbia can give to other people. And he sees that now. And it'll be just interesting to see down the road, you know, what career choices my grandson will make or my granddaughter will make. and, you know, good to see them at all really much. But what I'm saying is that that blood, that connection was there. Now, to move forward into the sort of the fish stuff, wow, there's just, you know, when we grew up, it was a matter of catching salmon and feeding families and still a sport of being able to catch and release, which is quite misunderstood.

In my view, people don't understand catching, releasing. And probably the most fascinating fish would be the dinosaur ball, you know, like salmon is a really big component for me but but you know a number of years ago i got sort of introduced i i want to catch a sturgeon i want to see what that's like and i i just wow it the the fish just blew me away uh not only you know people look i'm saying oh they're kind of ugly no they're beautiful like they're really truly beautiful creatures like you know and and to know that you know i used to tote them as Jurassic and then realize that man i i was wrong they're not Jurassic they're not 100 million year old fish they're triad

they're two to three hundred million years old that they had been on earth and you know i i have some fossils that have been gifted to me uh from some people i have a scoot off the back of a sturgeon that was dated by a paleontologist is 70 million years old and i have it and it's like wow that has like that's like unchanged the scoot on the top the platelet is exactly the same as what a fish looks like today and i'm like wow that's really cool So, I mean, I think all fish, because they just bear life to the river and what's around the river, they feed the trees, they feed the bears, they feed the eagles. I mean, they feed the microorganisms that keep that river alive and beating. But I think, you know, that fish, that sturgeon with its resilience, and kind of like us as people, we need to be resilient, you know, these fish need to adapt and they need to be resilient.

They're perfectly designed. They're aerodynamic. They have sensory parts on their bodies, impule larenzini that, you know, people think they see the bait. They don't see the bait. They can't see the bait. Their eyes are little tiny, little golden eyes to a larger body mass than what it is. So, you know, how do they find food? Well, electromagnetic field. It's given off by a little tiny piece of bait. And we're fishing in a giant river and you throw it a little tiny little bait. and these fish forage and they find it in amongst this, you know, rocky corridor and stuff. And, like, even that just amazes me how you can do that. And then moving forward, you know, we had a die off of a whole sturgeon in the river in 1994. And I became really, really great friends with the biologist who looked after those fish, who were doing the necropsees and looking after cutting them open and the hands on. What happened to these fish?

and there were a lot they were big 34 fish between 8 and 12 feet or something you know it was a real sad time in the 8 and 12 feet yes so like bigger than a person way bigger than a way bigger than a fish that were you know upwards of a some of the bigger fish would been upwards of a thousand pounds that he sampled you know dr marvin rosano you know i've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with him uh gotta say he's one of my truly best friends and um you know he comes at everything for me and a really big unbelievable science-based area and I come to him as Dean the fishing guy who has on water experiences and you know he learned so much that guy and I've learned so much from him from a technical scientific part of of these fish and and of all fish on the river but that fish in

particular and him and I do sampling days we take out you know I volunteer I donate a bunch of days to the fish and wildlife program he was the sturgeon biologist for bird Columbia firm I think 1993 to 2001 and then he took a job in a position at BCIT as a fish wildlife rec program instructor so he does the two-year program there and then there's a graduate program that Dr. Ken Ashley does anyway so what we see is we see the ability to educate through fish and fishing experiences so I donate a bunch of days to BCIT every year I took out the second-year students for winter limnology on Mill Lake, as well as the graduate students. And then I had the opportunity.

Winter limnology? Winter limnology is they're doing sampling within small bodies of water to see what's living within the water and to understand better. And these are our future fisheries managers or environmental managers. And they're, you know, people, when I say students at BCIT, I believe there's a that two-year waiting program to get into that program. But so I call them kids, but they're not kids. Some of these students are 22, 23 to 45 years in age.

They're making career decisions that are going to affect our everyday life on and off the river and around the river or in some sort of an environmental role down the way. These are fisheries managers in the future being developed through guys like Dr. Marvin Rosenol and Dr. Ken Ashley. and yeah so getting these these young students out to do a hands-on project especially through COVID we had to go through all these protocols but we had masks on everybody and gloves on everybody and we still took them to the river and they got to sample little juvenile sturgeon

so we see these little babies that were catching under 60 centimeters and we're sampling these fish so that we can understand you know what the juvenile recruitment failure could be you know because there's so many theories out there right now, oh, well, gravel mining did this damage on the Fraser River. Urbanization did this. Pushing the dikes in did this created juvenile recruitment failure. And then there's all kinds of other scientific things that we see and in-field things, which is like you catch a sturgeon

and you could do a stomach sample of that fish and realize that that big sturgeon is a cannibal and he's eating the small sturge. And maybe like a giant tree sends out, you know, millions of little seeds. But then that giant tree overshadows those seeds so they can't grow is nature's way of the big, strong tree surviving and all the babies not. There's, you know, there's this weird balance in nature that just because it's a tree doesn't mean the same thing couldn't happen with the sturgeon.

So maybe a lot of sturgeon are being missing, a lot of small little sturgeon because maybe our salmon crisis has put us into a realm of maybe the fish are a little hungry and maybe they need to supplement because we don't have as many salmon and they're not given as many nutrients as maybe they need. So now maybe they're looking at eating their own. And maybe it's not gravel or maybe it's not many different reasons about these fish. And I think probably the captivating thing for me is, is since 1995, when this fishery became catch-release-only,

potentially serilistic as a species of special concern, it was about what do we know about this fish? Because we really knew nothing. And even today, after we've started to study, and we've got 75,000 fish tagged and probably scanned over 200,000 fish, we still you know if you put a table there a big table a four by eight table out

and you put two grains of salt on that table for a fish that has lived over been around on the earth for two to three hundred million years lives likely to be around 200 years of age not proven

but we do know that we've caught fish that are 125 to 150 years old as old as Canada is today is mind-blowing. And that those two grains of salt on a four-by-eight table represent what we really know

in a fish that it lives such a long life. That is so crazy because we get into this mindset like from somebody who's not a fisherman, not a bird or not a bee expert. I sit down with people like yourself and I expect most of the answers

and so, but each time it's like we only know so little but we can do so much in a day like we go grocery shopping and everything's priced out the way we expected to the lights work the internet works everything works so that we get kind of like well then we know stuff we must know stuff because everything works and everything's reliable and we get heat and we have plumbing and we have all these great things that i think there's a certain arrogance that we start to develop and feel that we understand and that um if we can name it

if we can say great sturgeon then then we know about it And it's like, well, we know so little about it. And I think that that we need to be reminded of that. We need, like, light pollution is a real problem because we can forget that we're like hurtling through space and that there's, where there's meteors and comets passing us that are just so close to hitting us. We kind of get comfortable thinking like, I've got this life thing figured out and everything's going well and I got my bank account and I've got my savings account.

And when a pandemic hits, we go, oh, well, I thought we had this all. figured out. I thought everything was going to go the way I thought. And so it's so like pausing and thinking like 200 million years, 300 million, this is an incomprehensible number to us. Like we can't formulate an understanding because we're here for 80 to 100 years and trying to span that out over time. It's like what would have been going on 200 million years ago is infinitely like even thinking 100 years ago of like people driving their, their cars and like the first cars starting to develop around 100 years ago. It's like we are so, we expect so much from like our hondas and our jeeps and we expect the world of them. And they only

came about like 100 years ago, the first car. And now we're really trying to push for electric cars. And we're like, why aren't we there yet? And it's like, we just invented the car like a hundred years ago. Like this has all been a progression. We used to rely on horses and on dogs. And like our mode of transportation was completely. And that's only 100 years ago. So imagine that. over 200 million years and it's like it's incomprehensible and I like how you describe them as dinosaurs because that's really what like alligators and crocodiles are and they freak us out like it is so interesting to watch those beasts move in the world because it's like oh you're just you're out of your time like you're you would just eat me and not think a thing of it

where even bears seem to have like a hesitation but a crocodile they don't have any hesitation and so it's really interesting to learn from your perspective because it sounds like you still have such a passion for learning more about these things. Yeah, and I think, and I think that's really well put. You know, I look at this as a, you know, to me, the sturgeon fishery is a very misunderstood one. Without the time and effort that we put in, you wouldn't know anything about the sturgeon. You know, we would have the indigenous culture that would talk about the old stories. I mean, I was at a meeting the other day and we talked about that.

Well, Sturgeon to us were food to our family and, you know, we would smoke some sturgeon or, you know, one of the favorite things that they did is they put a piece of sturgeon on a stick and they would roast it on the fire by the river. You know, something I had never heard about it. I just learned that the other day, but I could imagine that. You know, to realize that we have the ability to protect this fish, more importantly that if you drove to the river or the youth of the river, or older people going to the river because of the coloration of the Fraser River, and it's not clear and green, and you can see down

30 feet, the majority of the river during the year is turbid. You know, it's billions of sand particles being moved down the river in a 1,340 kilometer river from all kinds of feeder rivers and all pushing into the Fraser. When you look at the river, the river looks dirty, but if you

put the water in a cup, it's not that dirty, but it's the refraction of the light to the sand particles that are being moved down the water. So now in the last five years, I see the river as a dirty river almost 10 months out of the year, whether that's likely that's all from the all, and I'm not depicting any industry.

I'm just saying, you know, pine beetle and logging near the river corridors has caused water to rush down into the rivers at a faster rate, which causes rivers and small feeding streams to beef up and create dirtiness into the water. It's just sediment. Whoa. So what happens,

is that you or anyone else, they're not going to just go to the river and see a sturgeon. They're not even going to know really about a sturgeon because they think of the river as salmon and fish and those type of fish. And that's why I think it's so interesting. When we get to share that, whether it's in a documentary, like the heart of the Fraser, you know, and we talk about sturgeon and rearing habitat

and the, you know, the healthiness of the river and the ecosystem, or whether we get to take a student out or a grandpa and a mom and a daughter, you know, outfishing three generations of people coming to fish, we then get the ability to take, talk about where we are, and we get the ability to show them whether it's a little tiny sturgeon. We get to show them the science, what we're learning. We get to talk about what we're learning from all the different sizes of the fish. and we can help people to understand that without coming and using something like we do,

like my business, Great River Fishing, is to be able to take people out and provide this experience. The likelihood of people doing this is not possible. Because it's not that you go to the river and you can just throw in a line and you're going to catch the sturgeon. The likelihood is that isn't going to happen. So we, through our ability, through our capacity and our lenses, we get to show people a whole, another aspect of why science and data becomes really imperative to learning. And it's not that we want to catch and release these fish. They're the most resilient fish on, in my view, on the planet. Really? They're, you know, they've, in my view, they're left unharmed. Yes, we catch and

release them. Yes, we do. But trust me, we love these fish. We kiss them. We, you know, kind of, we keep them watered. We, we have even changed all of our. principles and the way that we do things from when I roll back and I first started Sturgeon fishing things have changed and evolved we've better handling practices we're developing a film right now about better good handling practices so that we can share that with the world and anglers that are coming to our area that are doing it on their own we can share that ability and how do we learn we learn because we took the time I'm lucky enough to be a pioneer in the evolution of sturgeon fishing and

there's no there's no way to learn without doing it. People could say well you just leave all those fish alone and but how are we going to know about age and growth and science and stuff so if the fish don't have any more food and they're going to die off wouldn't we want to know about that?

Wouldn't we want to know that we can change the outcome by giving the better habitat by giving them the ability to remove fish farms from the Pacific Ocean and say that we need to have more fish moving back into our corridors of the Fraser River. Well, we lose a lot of fish

in Discovery Bay or in the archipel. And we lose all these fish coming up because they're being attacked by sea lice. And we need to go back to those roots and say, we need these fish so our sturgeon can survive. What's sea lice? Sea lice is something that's dropped off

or it attaches to... And it's very prevalent around fish farms in the ocean. Wow. And there's ways that they try to defuse that with chemicals and this and that to get that off. But our little baby salmon, our smolts and our larger salmon, a larger salmon typically can fight off the sea lice. But as you are going through the migratory roots, as these fish go from the Fraser River all the way out to the ocean,

they go off to mystery land, and they go all over the place, and they feed and they grow, and they're either coming back, every two years or four years or five years these salmon. Sorry, can you walk us through that as well? That blows, that wrinkles my brain. Well, yeah, it's, so when our salmon runs come to the Fraser River, they travel, many of our salmon, some of the sockeye salmon will go as far as Stewart Lake. So they'll travel 900 mile journey from the ocean all the way through turbid water and,

you know, different conditions and maybe some garbage on the water and, um, Maybe some pollutants here and there caused by many different things that I probably don't want to get into all of it today. But there's many challenges towards a fish coming home to their natal river. And they come to a river 700 miles ago. They may come to the Chilko system or they'll be going up to the Thompson River and migrating through the Fraser River. And then they lay their eggs. The male comes and the female comes, and a female salmon, wild salmon will build like a nest. It's called a red.

And then their eggs ripen on their journey as they go, the females, and they become loose. They come out of the skein, and they're now single little eggs, little salmon eggs, and they build a bed, a little spawning bed. And then the males will come in and they fertilize that. And these reds are in all these rivers. So it's like when we see flooding, a natural disaster caused by many different things. atmospheric rains or we get a heat dome and the rivers get too hot you know all these things are really detrimental to the life cycle of our fish because if they don't spawn properly and and their habitat is not looked after in a in a responsible way like where they make their beds like

you know it's like you're going to go to sleep on your messy bed but it's all stacked up full of papers or you're going to make a beautiful little bed and that's your nest where you get to sleep at night. Well, they need to have a home. These fish need to have a home if they were going to survive. Well, on their migratory route, then we now have our spawned fish. And in the springtime, all these little fry, like even now, when you see the, when you see, and, you know, a month ago, you'll see the river is alive with these little fry and they're moving, they're moving through the wetlands going on their way out to the sailish sea, and then they will travel out into the ocean and be gone. But these little tiny little fry and some of the smallts that are like

little trot-sized, they have to make it by these fish farms. And it's probably one of the strongest messages I could say that the Cohen Inquiry identified 75 different things that we could do to save salmon in the Fraser River. And one of the most important things was, I think it's number 19, if I'm not mistaken, the 75 recommendations, and is to remove all salmon farms from the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, all Atlantic salmon farms. And I'm not against. jobs and having jobs, what I'm more so saying is that if we give these fish a chance, a proper chance, we have to take some of the things out of the equation. You can't have a salmon. And never mind all the viruses, because the virus is a really big scientific thing,

and it's so big that we can't even get involved in from the effluent coming from these fish farms, is that if we don't do what has been recommended to us and has cost the taxpayers millions of millions and millions of dollars. Then both the federal and the provincial government are being irresponsible with a publicly owned resource. That publicly owned resource is also owned by First Nations as well as non-Indigenous people. As a Canadian citizen period,

you have a right to a publicly owned resource. And the government managers, who manages federal and provincial, need to listen and understand that a recommendation has been made, the biggest recommendation that could give our fish the hope and the Fraser River in my view at this time, and others who are around me, scientists that are around me and I talk to me and I listen to, also feel the same way. Providing an opportunity for our fries

and our smalls to come home safely and have against a journey that's in these rivers already gives them a chance that we can be resilient and they can be resilient and they can change and have an opportunity to flourish again in our rivers. But without knocking off some of these big things that, in my view, are big things, that's the number one to me, first and foremost thing that we can change right now. And fish farms licenses are renewed here this year. I know my good friend Eddie Gardner would be right here beside me, holding my hand, and we'd be hugging each other, saying, yeah, wild salmon forever, just like the hoodie I'm wearing today.

Can you actually tell us about that? Well, this is their design and their art, and I'm a big supporter like you are of the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance. And, you know, I met Eddie a number of years ago, and I took the time to understand about our fish and, and, you know, the importance to the fish to all of us, indigenous and non-Indigenous, to the people of the world, wild fish. And Eddie was so inspirational, you know, it's another, you know, I kind of just say in my journey of life, I've been so. fortunate to meet with people who inspire me and they create this journey that I feel that I'm on and they teach me and I listen to them and I respect what they say because first of all they're my elder. They're older than me. They have more much wisdom and knowledge than I do and they share that with me and that's the nicest part they share and I get to listen and learn.

And, you know, the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance has had lots of challenges, lots of people say, well, you know, we got to have jobs out there. There's got to be, you know, other fish, other ways of fish. Well, I stand beside him strongly and say, we need wildfish. We need the wild fish. It's important we have the wild fish. We don't want our culture, our tradition, and our heritage to go away. We don't want that to happen.

And, you know, Eddie sends a, with many others, sends a voice out there. He stands so tall and strong about the fish farms. And it seems that, and he's on that journey. He never stops on that journey. And, you know, we just had him at our AGM. He showed up to our Fraser Valley Salmon Society, Andrew General Meeting, and we gave the presentation of the heart of the Fraser. And it really doesn't matter.

I mean, we called it the heart of the Fraser back then. I know this has been brought up to me in the last week, actually, is that, you know, maybe the heart of the Fraser isn't the right name it. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the name of the documentary is that I helped to produce or I was a part of for a couple of years. More importantly is we brought attention to the region and the sector in the area between Mission and Hope, which was like we call it's the lifeblood of the Fraser River. It's where a lot of stuff really happens, the meat and potatoes of the ecosystem and the delicate balance that needs to be restored here and looked after. Eddie Gardner is all

about that. Eddie Gardner is in support of that and whatever that looks like in the future is if we can connect some of these dots and add some of these, you know, missing pieces to these puzzles and get government to understand. If you give a chance to these fish, to look after these fish, to look after where they belong and provide them good nesting areas and good habitat and streams to go to and, you know, a good river and look at the forestation and how we adapt. you know don't maybe take so many trees off in certain areas and create a balance the big thing we can change right now is putting pressure on the federal and the provincial government to say no more fish farms that's where we start that's one and we need to do that as people second of

most is we can work on habitat we can work with agriculture to say you know maybe we're putting too many fertilizers or we're clearing too close to the land and to the waterways maybe we're clearing too close maybe we're ruining the shading from the creeks where some of our little baby fish nurture and live. So, you know, at Elk Creek, you know, they get a coho run right here in Chilliwack at Elk Creek. You know, how many people know about that? It goes through people's land, through their yards. But for many years, you know, when you add fertilizers to farmland,

and farmland is important, but when you add fertilizers, whatever it is, chemical fertilizers or natural fertilizers, whatever it is, it causes growth. And when you get growth, you get choking out of it. little streams choking grass grows really quick and fast and it chokes out these little areas where our fish need to swim. So these little fish in Elk Creek are attributed to part of a run size that comes up the Fraser River, the same as it is in Coltus Lake where Sokai spawn in a lake, not even in a river system, which is very rare. Or how the cocahalla just blew out based on an atmospheric rain and we're seeing ever-changing weather patterns. But the growth of things like trees,

or if we're out in the Fraser River and we strip an entire island that's 200 acres and we take all the trees off of it, for instance. Maybe we should continue to do that inland. Maybe that doesn't belong anymore. Maybe we need to find balance and the world, the governments,

need to be open up to that. And the people that I get to talk to can spread the word too that we have to do these things. And I think you alluded to it earlier, you know, until the house is burning to the ground, we don't do anything anymore. And that's, and to me, I see that's the disconnect to the youth, right? It's, you know, I advocate for many different things,

but we don't see a lot of young people coming to meetings. I try to educate young people, whether it's my son or, you know, one of my youngest guides is Lan and Gill started fishing with me when he was about six years of age. He's one of the most successful guides on the Fraser River still today. He fishes more days than anybody, but he tells a story. He learned from me. And one thing he did when he was 16 years old is I made him come to conservation meetings.

You had to come. If you want to be a part of this thing, and he wasn't even a guide yet, if you want to be a part of what we do together, you're going to give back. You're going to provide some sort of your learning and your knowledge and you're going to hand that down and you're going to pass that on to other people. You're going to spread a word of goodness to people. So guys like Eddie Gardner, you know, I just, I look up to Eddie and I say, wow, you have taught me. so much and I'm so happy to be supportive of you and the Wild Simon Defenders Alliance and you know if he ever asked me for anything I always try to provide whatever it is he needs and and and and and and that again shows indigenous people working with industry people trying to

protect which would be the salmon society at that time or anything that I do with Eddie could be you know the the whole Gil Road aspect you know about protecting that area and how how important that should be to First Nations that are here, Staza and to the Chukwake tribes and all the bands that are in and around that area and how we need to put more pressure on the government to say, you know, we understand that many people recreate out there, but there's other places for recreation. Can you tell us about that? Can you tell us about the Gil Road incident because you were vocal during that?

And I think that it's so easy to get wrapped up in your day to day, but to tell us. take a stance the way you did to make it clear the impact that this is having because I saw them complaining like this is our fun time and I think to your point like this is madness this is such an important area like for that to be sort of the defense seems like silliness and I'm just interested how did that come about what was the original incident that kind of caught your attention and how was it kind of received? Well, you know, we've been doing garbage pickups in and around the Gill Road area, Fraser Valley Illegal Dumping Alliance, which Eddie is a part of.

And many people, Kevin, Kevin Raffle, I mean, I just, there's so many people, Steve Kleg from the city, a group of people who got together to create a cleanup. Kevin Raffel was the leading driving force of this. And that started about, you know, we always knew that there's problems all in and around the river area and it really started with garbage and as we were picking up garbage Gilrow was an accessible gravel bar that people could go to so when the water's down and the side channel's not running like now it'll be cut off and it's going to be hard for people to get through there's a side channel cutting right through there so people can't get through to that

giant island wetlands area and and as we were cleaning up garbage and I tell you one of the most successful uh historic garbage cleanups in Canadian history I believe at one time a couple years ago we had 785 people uh cleaning up garbage and it really came off the back of kevin ralphley really hats off to that guy as a younger guy uh who who took his time to understand that he we needed to do better and we've taken i think the number of somewhere around 120 tons of garbage off about a 10 mile river corridor you know and the majority that came off of Gill Road. So you have, you know, younger people or older people, they could stop around our community and pick up pallets and go out and burn pallets. We call them pallet fires. But I know a guy named Ross Aikenhead

went down there and he takes these really high powerful magnets and, you know, he works on the weekend and one weekend he took 900 pounds of nails off of the one portion. And this has been done multiple times. So pallet fires, pallets of sometimes have toxins in the wood. There's nails and they're destructive. I mean, I just recently, the boys were down cleaning up Gilroad area

and there was so much garbage there. 900 pounds? 900 pounds of nails, just nails. That's only one, that's one of two-day session cleaning up nails. And this happens at Jesperson. It used to happen at Pegleg. It happens all over.

It's a message, you know, the people who work for me. You know, one of the young ladies that works for me, my EA, Alyssa, what a wonderful girl, so inspirational to me as a young girl who wants to clean up and take areas. And she understands the value of this. But when she was young, which wasn't too many years ago, but she's still young, she's 27. But when she was younger, she would be a part of the people going out to the Gil Road and having to pallet fire and hanging out and, you know, being with your friends. And I'm not saying how important the area is for people to go and visit, you know. and it's been generations and it's and it's hard because this is my community it's hard for me you know when people are you know upset at me or oh we should stop sport fishing and how would dean

like that you know i'm not telling people they can't go and recreate i'm saying that as responsible people of the river and around the river is it not our duty to look after this like people don't even understand what shingling is there's an armoring built on a gravel bar. And if you look the way the river flows and you look at the way all the rocks are placed on a gravel bar, it's really interesting. And it's not like I'm a scientist. I'm just a Deanwork guy hangs out on the river and I learn from people around me, but I understand because I take the time to listen. There's an armoring. It's the way the river, the rocks are layered against each other. It's like putting shingles on a roof. Okay? And if you went out to a gravel bar

and you looked at one that's been undisturbed, you'll see the shingling. and it's the armoring protecting the layer of what's underneath there where eggs dropped and reds are built for spawning little nests and all that kind of stuff and if it's dewatered or ruined or turned up it changes and alters fish habitat it ruins jumb habitat in that area and for instance at gill road it ruins the most important one of the most important Chinook rearing areas is being ruined not only from garbage, from toxins, from just the dearmoring of the whole gravel bar itself is changing the landscape. So in a very short period of time, 30 years, 40 years, you know, if you rolled

a clock back 30 years ago, maybe there would be 10 or 20 people going out there and hanging out and doing the things on the river. It wasn't so impactful. Now you've got people living there throughout the year. They're leaving their trailers. They're running their gray matter, water out of their trailers right onto the land. They are ruining this. They are digging up critical fish habitat. And I don't mean just sensitive little area where, oh, there's only a few fish. No, this is absolutely critical fish spawning habitat area and rearing habitat to the Fraser River.

And because we're in this corridor that I talked about is we're going to call it again, the heart of the Fraser, whatever you want to call it, the most delicate ecosystem, that whole from mission all the way to hope, that area. area is critical to the future of us saving fish while we're already in a salmon crisis. So we're in a salmon crisis. So why can't the city of Chilliwack, the province of E.C., the federal government, be accountable and responsible to every Canadian citizen and to our fish and say, we need to close this area down to vehicular traffic?

I mean, we call this, our name for this place is Mad Max. This is like, you know, where Mad Max had the show Fury Road. This is like Mad Max Gill Road. And I'm not against people going out and recreating. You know what? Why can't we have some bike trails through there and people can ride a bike? Why can't people go down there and park in a beautiful parking area? Maybe the city needs to buy up some of the land there on the outside of the dike.

And we create a beautiful parking area. People go in and out. They can walk out. They can walk there. They can take their families there, and we can create a facility where maybe we even have campsites in there that are responsible campsites, small little area where we have a boat launch and we have access to get into the river. There's some balance there, but it needs to be common sense approach.

And right now, both the provincial and the federal government are being irresponsible. I mean, we've been battling this for a few years now, and people listen, you know, we're going to have some people here on the river. You know, I'm not going to just really throw that out. But I will say the likelihood is in the next two months, we're going to have the new provincial minister in my boat, maybe Finn Donnelly. The likelihood is within the next couple of months,

we're going to have the new fisheries minister, Joyce Murray. She's already been invited, and we've got a positive response. And we are going to show Joyce Murray in a high water condition, like what's going to happen here in the next few weeks. The river is going to get high. And how imperative we're going to take out a little beach saying, and we're going to take this little tiny thing with Dr. Marvin Roseno, and Dr. Ken Ashley and Fish and Wildlife Rects teachers who know so much about this river corridor.

And we're going to go out and do a little sane with the minister there. And we're going to show that minister or provincial ministers. We're going to show them that here, here's 25 little tiny little juvenile Chinooks right here, right close to the shore, in the weeds. seeking protection and refuge from all the predators, in amongst us the branches and the trees are flowing down the high river flow. They are all in amongst there, in those little fish, and how imperative it is that they make it to the sailish sea

and have their journey in the ocean. And then furthermore, we talk about the delicate ecosystem. We talk about then and move forward to the fish farms, and how imperative it is. We remove those fish farms in the year, this year, not renew those licenses, and have the ability to say, we're going to make change, positive change,

and that's the same as Gil Road. It's only responsible, accountable change and understanding the fact that we are sitting there ruining the most critical salmon and sturgeon habitat, and we are allowing this to happen right within our own community.

And that really, you know, doesn't bode well to me when it even comes to thinking about, you know, we need to partner. we need supportive first nations we need you know we need the indigenous people to talk about how imperative this is and to help move they you know together together collaboratively we can put enough pressure on the government and people need to speak out and don't be afraid to speak out

and you know people are angry at me for wanting to do this type of stuff but i'm only one of a few that has a voice that's able to speak and talk about it and then we back this all up with beautiful presentations. You know, we probably have a 50-page presentation that we can provide and show to anybody as a captive audience and show why this is important. And although maybe not everybody's going to like me for this, again, it's like, I know that this is my calling to spread this word and to try to provide better for the next generations, because I'm not being responsible, and I don't want to be responsible for the demise of the Fraser River and all that it encompasses. That is beautiful. Did you hear about what happened with Carrie Lynn

Victor? She was working to restore chum habitats along the Fraser River, I think, in a very similar area near Shiam First Nation. Did you hear about that at all? I think that was a couple of years ago now. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I've heard a little bit about her, trying to connect with her, but of course we all have such busy lives. But again, that's the same exact thing, you know, is someone young like her who wants to make a big difference for the river and the land and her people. And whether it's her community there at Chiam, and I have been good friends with Ernie for many years. We actually, we co-chaired Fraser River Peacemakers for 10 years. And, you know, it was the ability to bring people together on the river. And it was

It was a recreational sector, recreational sport fishing sector, and indigenous fishers and representatives from the indigenous leadership that we needed to get together and talk about safety on the river and when critical things happen on the river that we work together. And again, that's somebody like her who's trying to make a difference within her own community. And we see this a little bit now. I think it's on the vetter corridor where they're working hard. So if they take gravel out of the Vetter River, for instance, some of that gravel needs to be saved for future projects. And they're restoring habitat on the Vetter River. They're building in wood and structure into little over flooding,

over flooding areas. Okay. So that would be the same as what Terry Lynn has been doing. You're restoring areas that seem to be meaningless. But when the water comes up and it comes high and there's this over flooding of the phrase river, and I don't mean flooding isn't breaking the dikes. I mean flooding of wetland areas that are encompassed the islands, the back channels, and all the things, that we need to have that so that there's refuge for these fish. Instead of that, people just want to go drive around and ruin all this stuff.

And I understand people want to get out and recreate and COVID has kept people balled up and it's important to go to the river. But providing the efforts to work on restoring for the future, for fish, education, education is huge, is educating. Terry Lynn would be able to educate people through her work and her efforts and say, here, we can create a documentary even. Short little documentary tells about my work, and that could be instilled through schools or through, you know, I wouldn't like to say that we only keep that into the digital. his teachings. We need to put that into the general public so people understand. And she's a messenger. You know, she's a leader, you know, who is understanding, in my view, some of the stuff that I've been lucky enough to be a part of and to do. And we need to do these parts along the way. It's so nice. It's inspirational to know what she has done and the work that she's done. And, you know,

I would only support and say that partnering with people creates projects that can enhance in the future. So she's on the right road, in other words. I mean, she's doing good work. Yeah, I just, I think it's so wild how much the average person doesn't know. Because when I sat down with her, she was like, yeah, we need to get rid of like the blackberry bushes. And I was like, why? And she was like, well, they're an invasive species. And I was like, I didn't know that. And she's like, yeah, it makes it really difficult for like the native species there to have the natural habitats that they've always had. One of her concerns was all the gravel that's coming through that's making it more difficult, I guess, for fish to thrive because it's

becoming, like, it's starting to wear down and we're not taking care of those areas. And it's so, like, you don't know what you don't know. And when I get this explained to me, I'm just mind-blown that there are A people that know, but then there's the vast majority of people who have no clue. And I think ATVing and that approach is going to become more and more of a challenge because I sat down with Lee Harding and he's a biologist and his focus is like caribou populations and his concern is that like we have these spaces up north that like you're allowed to go snowmobiling and stuff and that's creating tracks for the wolves to be able to travel so much faster than they've ever been able to travel before to go and kill all the

caribou and so his argument was like maybe wolf culling isn't the solution but the challenge is that we're making it so easy for the wolves to kill the caribou because the caribou sink in. They're very heavy and then the wolves aren't. They're able to run along the tracks. And so it seems like outdoor recreation is giving people like a pseudo outdoor experience. Like ATVing is like, I'm outdoors. And it's like, but you're not really outdoors. You're on a machine and you're shredding through this area.

And it seems like maybe those people have like I'm sure there's a place for it. But it seems like those people have the wrong mentality of. maybe what nature is, of what their connection is, because if you're able to, like, ride through and you can hear them from very far distances, that seems like it would have effects beyond just the habitats. It's like, a bird's hearing that are going to be like, I don't want to go over there. That's very loud, and it's going to disturb maybe natural migration cycles. It's going to have other effects. And it's just interesting to me that those people claim to be the outdoors people when it's more like people like yourself, people like Eddie, people like Kerry Lynn,

who are the real outdoors people. Like, there's like, if there's like a hierarchy of it, they're perhaps low on the totem pole because they're sleeping in RVs. They're sort of disconnected from the nature that they're saying that they're trying to connect with in some way. Yeah, and you know, I think there's there's way that we can accommodate many different things.

And evolution changes all of that, you know, the technological world. All of this things get changed. And again, we talked about it earlier. You know, we're kind of rolling back the clock where we're planting gardens and canning and, you know, doing some of the old school things are coming back now. And, you know, it's about some form of balance. And it's about, you know, government having, you know, a common sense approach to management and educating. You know, if we spent more time on the educational tools, especially within the youth, you know, teaching, responsible

responsible outdoor ed in school. Maybe we shouldn't be doing phys ed and volleyball, not that it's not a part of it, but maybe we should be taking a component in our schools and having elders or young, inspirational people like Terry Lynn or Eddie Gardner go and talk about

that. And, you know, I don't just say indigenous people going to schools. I'm talking about everybody who can contribute in a responsible, accountable way you know you're not going to typically teach a lot of the older people about change you can talk about it but we may not see what we need to see we can we can get an ear and people will listen and they will take a part of that but who's going to change the future is the youth of tomorrow it's the young students it's the teaching them within our curriculum of schools as to the

importance of, you know, maybe we should stop and maybe we should just walk through the forest and maybe we should just listen. Maybe we should just look. Maybe we should just sit and do nothing for a little bit, you know? One of my concerns, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, it seems like the people who are perhaps more environmentally conscious, the very vocal minority of those people, they seem dead set against fishing, commercial fishing. They seem to go perhaps too far in some regards and believe that, like you could sort of mention that catch and release is unpopular amongst some people, but it's like a misunderstanding of what catch and release is all about, that they just kind of assume that that's stupid and a waste of time

and why are we bothering doing this. And then with issues like they say like, well, I'm a vegetarian or a vegan. And so I don't even eat fish. So other people shouldn't eat fish. And there's been a little bit of this movement of like maybe meat shouldn't be real. Maybe it should be like produced in a laboratory. And there's been steps in that direction. It seems like those are the people maybe I hear the most from, but they don't seem to have your expertise of like how these ecosystems function. And I've seen some of your conversations about like when there's challenges with like the salmon population, the mindset of the government is like, stop all fishing. And your response has kind of been like, well, that's not the solution either. This isn't,

like, you're choosing to impact me, but you're not going after like the farmed fish. You're not going after the real root to the problem. I'm just a small fish and you're kind of coming after me in my business. When I'm not the problem here, I'm trying to do good on the river. Can you elaborate on kind of your thoughts on, like, the people who say that they care, but maybe don't have all the information and what it's been like to sort of navigate that? Yeah, that's a broad topic. You know, I think I can share a little story just recently in April on the 8th. I had an opportunity to take out Fish and Wildlife rec students again from BCIT. In my boat, actually, I had four vegans.

Like, you know, and these were students. that so wanted to come on this adventure, you know, and I, and I've taken out people who's like, oh, no, these fish scare me, or, oh, no, I don't want to hurt this fish, and no, I don't really want to catch. And I said, you know what, come on out with us. Give us an opportunity to show you what we do, you know, the whole journey of everything, the fishing, the culture, the tradition, as well as the catching of a fish and how we treat the fish. And I can honestly tell you that probably 99% of all the people we have taken out that have had that resistance to embrace an opportunity to learn or to see it through a different lens have absolutely changed

the way they feel about fishing. That's beautiful. And they don't have to eat the fish, but we still need to understand about that fish. And whether it's a salmon or a sturgeon or a sailish sucker or whether it's a dolly Varden, we need to be able to understand. And without some form of science, I mean, the vehicle is really sport fishing, you know, and there's nothing against all the traditional knowledge from indigenous people about sturgeon, and it's all great information. It's all part of the whole, it's part of the whole landscape of what we're trying to learn. But right now we have an ability, through tourism,

or through fundraising, we have an ability to show people what it is in the river going on on a daily basis if we choose. Build in the value added component, which is all what's around the river, and change the way people see that they're not so much as haters. There is a catch-release sport fishing is proven, and we'll prove it again, and if people want us to do, let's get some more money and let's prove it time and time and time again. Sport fishing of Sturgeon has a 0.00-125 mortality rate. like you don't go out to the frays of river and see sturgeon floating all over that river they're not dead they swim away we give them love we give them a kiss you know we tag the fish that we need to tag you know we're putting acoustic tags in acoustic readers so that we can see where fish migrate to we need far more work that needs to be done stomach samples we need food samples we need aging studies the stuff that we had was so old it doesn't it's not even relevant to today's world whether the impacts are on the ground gravel. You know, there are so many people out there that just don't even understand what we're trying to do. We're not trying to harm the environment or that. And we've got to touch that

delicate ecosystem of those fish to be able to move forward in a scientific way to say there is, and could we make mistakes? Could we find out there's juvenile recruitment failure and maybe my business won't even be a business anymore? Maybe we won't be able to fish in the future. you know people want to direct arms to the commercial fishermen and say those commercial fishermen in the river in the oceans that shouldn't be allowed anymore the commercial fishermen in the area e gilnet fishery in the end fraser you have to realize that there's three four generations of people that fish just as there are indigenous people who have handed down fishing spots in their families of fish just like sport fishermen who have sport fished some of the rivers of British Columbia and Canada of their lives they're all a part of this component and they all have to be handled in a different way. So again, what you say is, you know, the government's answer is close down the fishery. What are you going to learn from a closed down fishery? You know, what they need to do is, and I said it in a meeting the other day. And we're seeing, one thing I can say is we're seeing is through this group that I've invested a bunch of time in over the last three years. It's

called the Lower Fraser Collaborative Table. It has indigenous leadership representing 30 different nations. Murray Ned, LFFA, Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance, works heavily on. on that he's the executive director uh we have the commercial sector the area e in river fraser river fishery that's been you know it's been around for generations um and then we have the sports sector as well there which is represented heavily in the tackle industries and you know just the whole thing and what we're started seeing now is we're seeing where we continue to talk about collaboration can we fix all the problems that maybe the commercial guy doesn't like this fishery or maybe the indigenous fishery doesn't like the sport fishery or we you know we cross over

on the river and it's not always it's not always cohesive and nice and we can massage it and it's malleable it's sometimes it can be challenging and there can be arguments had or there's disbelieves or misconceptions and what we're starting to do is after a three years of meeting and I've been doing sort of the same type of meeting for like I can't even tell you it's so long but what we're seeing as a result recently is saying like we need to understand your fishery better we need to understand the commercial fishery better and we need to understand the sport fishery better and we're not saying that we should have it all closed down what we're saying is through understanding and collaboration if we can all work together hard to to protect riparian

areas to bring fish back to maybe shut down the fish farms we have to have some small wins together as teams and as different groups and user groups of the resource and we need to come together and I feel that we're on the verge of that and once we can make breakthrough for that we can start understanding a little bit more about where we need to spend our energies and how we need to learn together and again this is together so you got to have buy-in and without people coming to meetings that are such important is the very first time in three years we invited government to the meeting. And that was this week. You know, we met without federal fisheries. We met without the provincial government. Not that we didn't want them there. We wanted to learn and

create a process that was, I think they're all harvesters. So all of us would be harvesters. The recreational sector is a harvester. Indigenous fishers are harvesters and the commercial sector is harvesters. And through good leadership at the room, we created terms of reference, we created a strategy, a budget plan for moving forward, and we're inviting NGOs in now, other organizations, and we're asking for funding and helping for support so that we can move this vision forward to doing better for the future. Does that make a lot of sense? That makes a lot of sense. Do you feel like that it's going to be easier to move forward. Can you describe to us the differences between commercial fishing, sport fishing, and

recreational? Because I think for some, we have perceptions of commercial fishing. We have perceptions of sport fishing. And they maybe don't get the respect that they deserve because we can easily put them into the maybe they're less sustainable. And then we think of traditional styles of fishing as like, oh, well, you're just taking what you need. And then we think of the other two as like, well, sports fishermen are destroying and they're just, they're doing itself. Like, we have perceptions of what we think they are that perhaps aren't accurate. Yeah. So, you know, in a quick matter, we could say that, you know, when we had abundance of fish,

there was a, you know, a robust commercial fishery, and this is a large commercial vessel, a big boat, typically in our river. Let's speak just for the Fraser River, because this is where we're really talking about is our sort of an area. So the Fraser River from the Mission Bridge, the Mission Bridge, the Mission Bridge, is the tidal boundary, and it doesn't mean that the tide only goes to there. It means that's a boundary that was a cutoff for where commercial boats were no longer to go any higher.

So they weren't allowed to come. So back in the early commercial days, when we had a robust fishery for sockeye, which let's just use the sawky for it, is they would go in and there was a surplus amount of fish, and they would have an allocation for a certain amount of surplus based on a run size. So if there was 20 million, you know, I'll just use some easy numbers, 20 million sawky returning, the commercial sector would get a portion of that. And maybe the government would say we need this much fish for escapement. Escapement means how many fish we need to try to get to the spawning grounds. That's escapement. How many fish need to go and spawn to the spawning area? Well, we need 8 million

fish out of the 20 million fish. Let's just say 10 million. 20 million fish, 10 million fish need to get to escapement. That means a successful spawn for the future generations of that fish species and all those natal rivers. The commercial sector may, they may say, okay, well, we're going to give you and provide you an allocation of three million of those fish or four million of those fish because there's surplus now. They're more than what is needed to reach what we need to have on the grounds. Then, of course, more importantly, first of all, we have to have FSC fish, and that's the First Nations fish for all the pans up and down the river. That's the first and foremost. So we have a playing field and there's a rule form. Not rules, it's a guideline. Conservation first.

Always conservation first. Okay. That's us. second of most is FSC food social ceremonial right to fish based under the constitution section 35 to sustenance fish for food fish only for indigenous people on the river okay then it goes to commercial fisheries when it comes to Sokai and Chinook that's the next allocation if there is the amount of fish in the river system that allows for a commercial fishery and the support sector kind of gets the last you know although we're open to fishing 365 days a year somewhere for something, we are probably the least on the totem pole. But then again, we probably generate some of the most amount of revenue and conservation. So do you think that that formula is correct? It sounds like you're sort of challenging the idea that sports fishermen should be below commercial fishermen. No, I don't think that it really matters to me where everybody sits on the totem pole.

What matters to me most is that we have a proper accounting and the government is responsible for ensuring that these fisheries have meaning. So I think part of your question was, you know, how are they different and what do they mean? And the commercial fishery means a lot to those families that are fishing third and fourth generation. It means a lot. The indigenous fishery on the river, that's FSC or a surplus fishery where they're getting an ESSR fishery a sales opportunity on a on a run size that's very large uh that's important to have a sales component of that fishery and then the sport sector which bring people from all over the world or

just to get your family out fishing you know my kids went to the river we camped on the river we fished on the river you know it's part of their upbringing it's part of what i did something that i wanted to always do all my life so each one of these fisheries is slightly different in its own way based on, you know, how they were introduced to you as a young person. If you grew up in a commercial family, you're going to probably be a commercial fisherman on the river. The unfortunate part is we've lost the ability almost to have a commercial harvest on the Fraser River now, like a fleet of over 3,000, 3,500 boats. It's now whittled down to 200 and some boats. So, you know, maybe there's no place for that anymore, you know. I'm not, but, you know, I'm not,

But if we have a super run of sockeye like we potentially could have this year, we could have a super run. It's the super run year. We could have 20 million sockeye show up. I hope we do because it's good for the ecosystem and people are happy when they're catching fish. When people aren't happy is when we don't have any fish. So that's when people start to begin to fight and they're not happy with each other. And oh, you got this and I don't get that and I want this, you know, or these fish are mine.

And you shouldn't be out there. That's where you create the animosity and not understanding which each fish. fishery means to each sector or each user group is what I mean. You know, there is time that we need to sit, educate, and understand better. The government should be responsible for providing that. And as a sense of what I'm talking about is I proposed the other day at this meeting. I said, you know what? Maybe while we're training guardians and stewards on the river through, you know, money and

funding to create indigenous stewards and guardians on the river, maybe, you know, you you know, to introduce them on the river, to go with them, you should have a blended, a blended field of people working on the river to educate. So maybe you have a representative from the commercial sector, if they'd like to. A representative from the indigenous sector, First Nation sector, as well as the sport and recreational sector. So then if that boat goes out and educates people on the river, and I think this should be a really important part of the thing.

So we have a surplus fishery. Maybe everybody goes to Chilliwack one day, Red Island 22 boat launch, and we're taking a survey, a creel survey, like a little survey as to how many hours real fishing, and when you see a sport person with a commercial person, with an indigenous person, there's no kind of animosity built up, you know, but the unfortunate part, if you've seen two federal fisheries people, trying to take all this creel, as in data survey, you know, how did you fish for today? How many, how many fish? how many fish did you catch how many fish did you catch you know what were you fishing for how many hours did you fish it's kind of like the old logbook program from the salmon society we had a logbook program

the amount of average hours put in to catch one Chinook by an average sport fisherman on the Fraser River was about 200 hours 200 hours invested to harvest one Chinook for their families and years ago we did this it was a logbook program it's how we identified and how we figured out what we were catching in a day in our CPU, our catch per unit effort. It's how that we do the business, science business.

So again, these sectors getting them together and the government said, oh, no, no, no, this isn't, this isn't, you know, at the meeting. And then the federal government said to us to me directly, well, you know, we have our ways of doing our assessment and maybe what you guys are going to do isn't going to meet what our science and data people are going to talk about or what we need for our stop. no problem and let's tailor whatever program it is let's bring the people together let's do the work and we as a sports sector have always been known as volunteers we are some of the best conservationists and volunteers out there we're willing to go clean up the river we're willing to fix the problem we're willing to input money to help right whereas other sectors maybe don't have the that maybe they don't have the ability to have that kind of money to help we as sport fishermen are a really big part of this equation because we have the ability to go out there and clean up Gil Road.

We go there and clean up the better river. We go out there and want to restore habitat and be involved in all these meetings where we volunteer and go for free. I volunteer tons of time and effort for free off of my time where I could be sitting at the river and watching the river go by or doing whatever it is I choose to do. But no, I choose to provide my knowledge, my my time and also money to bring money within to our communities to hopefully responsibly understand what we need to do moving forward and we can't be shut down by government people saying that's not a good lens to look through no no we need to look at every ability we can do to bring all user groups together and have a cohesive way of maybe looking at the

future. Bringing people together from all different sectors allows it to be very transparent and it seems more truthful, right? And then indigenous fishers and First Nations fishers up and down the river will understand a little bit more about what we're looking at in the, oh, wow, look at that. Well, I thought those First Nations guys catch fish all day long, every day, and they get a ton of fish. When in all reality, they get very few openings that are regulated by the government to go and catch even their first salmon for their communities. You know, it's one of the things that's always bothered me. You know, Quatlin, for instance, down at Fort Langley, you know, applies to the federal

government to get a first salmon so they can hold their first salmon ceremony for their small community. But the federal government doesn't want them fishing, right? So they got to go and get one from the test fishery or somewhere else where that guy needs to go to the river and actually feel that fish going, and then he can translate. translate that story to his indigenous community and say, this is what the first salmon ceremony looks like to me. I mean, if you've never been to a first salmon ceremony and you ever get an opportunity to be at one, it's powerful. It's moving.

I've spoken at them before. I've spoken them and given my values of the river, been asked to talk about what I do and how I see the river at a first salmon ceremony. And I'm welcomed within that community. And we take the bones back to the water and we take the cedar back to the water from that fish. eat that we eat that fish and now important it is you know i've seen 750 people at a gathering you know and how the indigenous communities work so hard to share that with some of the people and it comes a little commercialized after a while which is takes away from the takes away a little bit from me but but it's the importance again of understanding that we can all make a difference

but we need to not fight and argue about each other's fisheries we need to we need to not fight and argue about each other's fisheries we need to learn better about each other's fisheries. And the government needs to support that, both provincially and federally, allow us to learn and provide good science and data for the government. You know, if we need a monitoring program that takes creel and data, we can learn from that because they're going to shut down a fishery. And you know why they shut down the, oh, we don't have enough time,

we don't have enough capacity. We can't do the creole surveys ourselves because they want it done a certain way. Work with us. Work with the different user groups. and create a formula that allows us to do the creole for ourselves. You know, some people will be paid, some people won't. It doesn't matter. We're all willing to do the hard work and, you know,

get under there with our shovels and pickaxes and dig through those trenches and make that work out there. I love that. I spoke to Chris Kuh, as I mentioned before, and he used this term citizen scientist. And I love that because there's this feeling if you don't go to a university or maybe you didn't do that while in high school

that you could never consider you, some sort of scientist. It sounds like there's a little bit of arrogance from the federal government and just people who get an education. There's this kind of default to like, I know, you don't know. And there's no even bother me pretending that I could teach you what I know so that you know as well. There's this kind of feeling once you get an education that this is your leg up in life and that you now have this over other people. And I think it's really detrimental to like our community to feeling like we could understand like I've gone to law school and the response I get from people in regards to that is like oh wow you must just like see the

world through a whole different lens than me now and it's like I can tell you how we go about doing the readings like I can tell you what the sort of the underlying process of law school is it's not like something I have that you can't access there's YouTube videos on on how to go about reading a case and understanding how judges make decisions and how precedence works and how this whole system underlies our civilization. This is not secret knowledge that I now have over you. But I think once you get that education, there's this sort of feeling sometimes of like, well, I earned it, and I paid whatever it costs to get my law degree.

And then you want to have that over other people. And it does us a disservice. And I think there's also a danger in having separate groups and pitting them against each other. And it seems like there's way too much from government. entities to gain from having us infight. One term that I really, really just don't like is white privilege. And not because white people don't have privilege or indigenous people don't have some advantage. And like, we all have privileges. But the problem with that is it pits us against each other. It makes one group seem like they have everything figured out.

When I know when I was going to school, I had friends who were completely white whose dads were beating the crap out of them. That's not a privilege. Like, he was not more advantaged than me. And he's still, I can see him on Facebook. He's still struggling with these things, these demons because of what he went through. And so I'm not going to say he has a privilege over me. That seems like you're simplifying it too much. And it seems like one of the challenges within the fishing industry is it's so easy to point fingers at each other and forget that there's this overarching body that's accountable to the people. But we sometimes think of government as like something separate from us. We help form the government. We, with our

votes help make sure that this government is healthy. We hold them accountable. We call them if things aren't going well. You can call your local member of parliament. You can call your MLA and say, hey, I don't like what's going on here. And the more you do that, the more incentive they have to go to whether it's Victoria or Ottawa and say, hey, our constituents are getting really mad at us. And we want that to stop, please. And so there's like these processes that exist for a reason. But I think one of the challenges we face right now is there's this feeling like what you have to say doesn't matter and your voice doesn't matter and you couldn't make a difference because it's one vote and it's such a sad way of viewing the world and I tried to compare it to like

one meal isn't going to make you fit or healthy but over time that makes a huge difference and one phone call to your MLA might not change anything one vote in a local election might not change the outcome But over time, you sharing your voice and sharing your perspective is going to make a difference. And if you team up with other people, it's going to make even more of a difference. And so there are avenues you can take to make your voice resonate. And people like yourself, like you've done a beautiful job of not trying to separate indigenous and non-indigenous people. Because that does seem like one of the perhaps paths some people are choosing is like, we need to just return everything to indigenous people and like everybody else step away and it's like

well you're here now like other cultures are here now we can't we're not we're not shipping them away like they're not leaving so we have to find a way to work together and it seems like that is perhaps one of the conversations that needs to be kind of reminded is that we're all people like we all have stories from this river we all have family members who traveled here like some of the most beautiful stories i've gotten to hear are immigrant stories and of like, I had nothing in my country. And then I came here so my kids could have a better life. Like, I don't want these people to leave.

These people enrich our culture. We can learn from the foods and their culture and their stories. And, like, this is what Canada was sort of founded on. And despite bad actors, perhaps, in history, who had negative viewpoints of indigenous people, we can all agree that these values of being multicultural, of sharing the beauty from each culture will enrich us. And we can learn from the different stories

and the different life experiences of people. And so I'm just, I'm interested to understand what it's been like to start your business. Because your business is like, people think of like business as like just work and hard effort. But you've also created experiences for people where they can kind of grow and develop themselves. And these will be memories they'll have in albums and they'll tell stories of how they went on this river. And you've created this from the ground up. And I love entrepreneurs because it's always sharing an experience. It's always trying to bring something that was missing from the community.

Can you tell us about the journey of starting your business, tell people what it is, and what that kind of experience has been like? Yeah, well, you know, wow, to think that, you know, later on when I talked to my father, you know, he said, oh, Dean, I would like to start a sport fishing business in 1975. The world was too big. The world wasn't connected like it is today. And I remember handwriting letters to potential clients and taking the little ad in a magazine. And, you know, I'm one little tiny boat with one guy who had this sort of a dream to create a sport fishing entity within the Fraser River, along with good guys like, you know, in my view,

has put a lot of effort and conservation and hard work too. It's Fred Helmer who started a business back then. And then subsequently a number of other people, you know, in the years now. You know, there's so many people, there's so many people kind of starting and leaving it. But it was a challenge because I knew nothing. I didn't understand about marketing. I didn't understand, you know, and we've gone from writing letters to clients way back when. And, you know, a phone call to the United States was a big phone call and it costs a lot of money.

You didn't phone people in the UK. You know, that just wasn't, that just didn't happen. You didn't connect. There was no internet, you know. It was like go to a little trade show or put a, add in a little magazine for a couple hundred. box you know a little tiny little you know two by two square and try to get some people interested in what we we we have to offer here for a fishery and along that way we develop experiences you know based on where we live and sharing that knowledge but the challenge is wow to start you know

one guy you know there's no way i could support my family and i had a young family in those eight in those days i had a daughter and then i had two more younger kids too as well so you know i had three children and I'm trying to manage and build this and I'm trying to make a living at the same time support a family and try to look at some sort of a future and you know what I remember coming back from Alberta and I came to work here for five dollars an hour in my own community I had to go back to work like as in I left the oil field came back here had some money was able to buy my first little house here in Chilliwai for like $56,000 it's not even fathomable today and and then try to build a business to try to be an entrepreneur, try to even understand what something is about

that I know nothing about the industry because there is no, there's no, there's no blueprint. There's no map. There's no, there's nothing here. So, you know, you learn your way along as you go. And I became a, you know, when I went to work, I went to work in a friends of my family growing up. I went to work at M&H machinery here in Chiluac and I became a steel fabricator because I felt is important to get education, have a trade. And along that journey, they were supportive of me to say, you know what, Dean, go out there and try to market yourself and do what you do. And I was so fortunate to have, you know, good bosses.

Not everybody understood that, oh, Dean would leave for a month or two months. And as we built this business, it was a matter of, you know, I would get one month of bookings or I'd take some time off this week or that week. And sometimes it was inconvenient for the industry that I worked in because they were busy and they needed to make their money too. but there was an understanding. I was very fortunate. And I even took my boss's fishing sometimes

because they love sport fishing, so they got what was going on in my head. And we would go before work and catch some cohoa on the Vedder River, be like, yes, he would love it because I was a good fisherman and he wasn't maybe as good, but he learned.

And we shared stories. We had time together. So it was an understanding. As we grew this business, it was like, wow, okay, well, wow, we're busy. And now we're going to collaborate with another guiding company in town

and we're going to do a little bit work and then I was like oh I see a way that I could build team around me and we could educate and then I hired another guide and then I hired another guide and then our boat started to grow in size and we weren't locally right here just in this Chilliwack corridor from say Mission Bridge to to Peters Road or Agassie Rosdale Bridge area we we started to evolve and we built larger boats with bigger motors and we moved up and down the river into farther corridors to to I guess, increased the experience, the vast majority of the area in which we now got to cover, and we also got to fish in new locations, which gave us the ability to create an uncrowded experience.

Can I ask, how did you go about choosing those employees? Because you have such passion around what you do that it must have been, there must have been a bit of hesitation towards just bringing somebody on that maybe doesn't share your passion, your vision, the stories. How did you go about doing it? It's a great question. It really is a great question. And I always said is, you know, you can, if you have the passion, you will become a, you will become a great leader on the river as in, let's just say, guide and guide meaning many different ways, whether you're fishing or you're guiding, meaning guiding and talking about the area. It was the heart for me.

I tried to watch people and understand people as I was, as I was giving them opportunity and to see whether or not they fit them. meld of what I what my values were so I pulled my values and my passion like you've identified with and say you know what Dean's passionate and I am passionate it gets me in trouble you know I just if you have that I want you to work for me right I want that as as part of that because I can see that because you can you know and you can you know there's this you know okay to the boat lunch at eight you're back roll up at 3.30 back at 4 o'clock that's not how I ran my business you know yesterday I was on the river I didn't get back to seven o'clock I don't ask all my guys to do that or all the people who work for me to spend all that extra time on the river people but you know maybe we're

not having such a great catching day and maybe we're not done the whole storytelling that we need to do for the day and talk about the area in the region so maybe we need to give those clients an half an hour an hour we don't run it like a business our guides actually have heart they have heart you know being able to teach land and you know he wasn't come from an upbringing of a young you know was my best friend's son right and i and i'm friends with the i was friends with the grandma who's since passed on and the grandpa and and and through work connections and then and then i grew up with that with landin's dad for instance landing gill's dad i grew up with him in high school graduated with him he was my best friend hung up with his brother is which would be landin's uncle and then

land and having an inspiration to go fishing when he was younger my kids were they fish because they were kind of forced to fish but it wasn't that i seen that they they were you know They would rather be doing this or maybe be on a computer, but I would make them go to the river. So Landon was more of a guy that didn't grow up in a family of fishing people. He grew up in a family, and it's not that they didn't fish, but it wasn't like I fish. So he started at six, and he would go fishing for me, volunteering up at Coltis Lake, to be in my boat, and to be with me. And then I would take him to Chilliwack Lake, and then we would go to the river. And then he had the ability, once my team grew so big, and, you know, back into the late 90s, early 2000,

2006, I probably had an amalgamation of a number of companies working together under one leadership incorporation, and we had 28 boats and guides, 28 boats and guides. And I identified at that time, it was just too big to manage. Because of my, I would call it a little bit of OCD issues, you know, and I don't call it an issue. It's actually, it's just being detailed. and because I'm detailed, I need to be able to touch the components. I need to know what's going on in the office. I need to know what's happening every day on the river. I need to understand my guides.

I need to make that phone calls. I need to understand all the clients. And I have to be receptive to all those people that are making this, you know, putting the gas and the oil into this engine and making it all blend and work. So I identified the fact is I was run down. It was too hard on me. There's too many people. I dissolved.

I still own that corporation. That corporation still runs as an entity, but I dissolved any partnerships I had, and I have now 15 votes and guides. I have four office staff that work wonderfully where they don't always perfectly get along, but we're cohesive, and they listen to me because of my knowledge, my time, my business understanding, things that I've learned, all the mistakes I've made have treated, you know. And each and every person, whether it's in the office, working hard, they're all an intricate part of this of this beautiful sphere that we have here working together

whether they're in the office they're on the water they all have passion they all give back they all understand this isn't a job this is a privilege this is an honor to share the resource to share what we have and i see it from when i'm in the boat with clients where somebody will say wow alissa in the office is amazing like she just did everything that we i said there was nothing that was too much of a question that we could ask. She was always attentive. She answered the call. And we talked about government before and the way the government is. And it really irritates me a lot because what happens is I'll send an email about something really concerning to me on the river. And it's really important. And all of a sudden, I don't get an answer. And

it's a week. And then it's two weeks. And it's like, hi, Alyssa, who is my executive assistant. Alyssa, you know, can we follow up? Like, it's been two weeks. I haven't heard anything. and I learned one thing about business and it was attention to detail and as we talk about this journey how hard it was in the beginning how many hours I spent and I still spend a ton of hours working every day

on everything that I do but what it was was the rule in our office is very simple every single email that comes in on every single day on a business day Monday to Friday is answered before the end of the day every single email Now, that's Rick as my VP of operations, you know, the Ann receivables, Barb doing some of the work in the office too as well, myself doing office work, a list of doing office work.

And that is the, I feel, is a huge success to our business. So we take out all the problems and everybody can rely on us and we say, we don't need to wait for an answer. All we need to say is if we don't have the answer to the question that day in the office, we just say, thank you, we receive your, we receive your, we receive your, email today. We're addressing this issue right now or we're, you know, we'll be back to you first thing tomorrow morning. We just want to acknowledge that you sent the email to us and, you know, we'll call you on Monday morning or whatever. And even on the weekends, we answer all emails. And although it may not be in the same time frame, you know, if there's a problem with a trip, somebody phones, everybody gets a message to me, I've sort out all the problems, Alyssa will answer

emails on the weekend, Rick will answer emails on the weekend. I answer a ton of emails on the weekend we answer social media things and it's all become a component of i i feel our business is successful because we have attention to detail and we're not afraid to answer the questions or to go out there and you know i think in an industry that i'm in it's hard to drive business right now it's hard you know to figure out the right thing to put your energies in whether it's you know marketing on instagram or facebook or taking ads out and it's a really complex roadmap to learning and it's part of the reasons why I was I was really drawn to being a part of the Stolo Business Association and asked through some meetings with Stolo Community Futures

Mike Watson at the time and Rosio Zelensky and Shannon Smith you know who I got to meet with numerous times and they said wow you know Dean you do a lot of things you do a lot of work and we need to figure out something and you know we want you to be a part of something to do with Stolo Community Futures and one thing. And what was born was a thing called Stola Business Association. And I ended up being the vice president of that. And many great directors and many great people in our short time as a kind of a career move with the Stola Business Association. It's five years. It would be in the sixth year. But what we did was, and it lays back into this, is it was about mentoring and helping indigenous businesses, startup businesses and other businesses to give them

some of the tools and to learn about what it takes to run a successful business. And it's one thing to get government funding or however you get or you want to do a startup, but it's a whole other ball of wax trying to learn how to run this. Because in my view, the way the world is today, it was a lot easier back in the day when we could make a phone call and write a letter. now you've got to be on social media you've got to be on instagram you got to be on facebook you've got to have a website you got to manage all this stuff you got to micro manage all this stuff and it creates so much intertermile into a person's mind and brain that i'm not even sure how

anybody can even muster up enough strength to do all this stuff in a day and i remember that i remember working 20 hours a day i remember working day and night i remember being up sending an email to the UK at 3 o'clock in the morning because that's only 11 o'clock in the UK in staffordshire or anywhere over there in the UK it's 8 o'clock there it's 11 o'clock there it's 3 o'clock in the morning and I'll have a client of mine oh dean you're still up and for me is like I still have work to do and in those earlier days as I was learning and growing the business I could not afford the ability to keep adding more people to the office I was the office I was the on river guy I was the guy managing all the guys teaching all the guys

you know making sure those windows are clean and those boats and those floors are clean and creating that beautiful magical experience that was what my belief was and instilling that into the values of all of these people uh you know one of my longtime guides he was going to retire this year and i had a nice little chat with him and michael you know he came to me as a fishing guide and over the last couple of years he said to me you know what dean i came to you as a fishing guide already, but when I got to hang around with you, I got to be out in a boat with you, and I got to learn from you, and you teach me and guide me. I'm not a guide on the river, I guide my own people. And as in, he said to me, he said, wow, I thought I knew a lot. And he said,

when I came to you, and I've watched all the things that you've done and all the, you know, I knew nothing. That's what he said. I knew virtually nothing in comparison to what I know now. And I talked to him last winter and early spring, and he was going to retire and not fish anymore. And I said, no, you're so valuable. You're so valuable to sharing experiences with people, you know, I don't want you to leave. I don't want you to stop doing this. There's no need for that. And, you know, he was out yesterday on the trip I was on yesterday.

And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, he did good. He had a good trip. It spreads lots of great knowledge. And at the end of the day, I sent him a message and said, you know, Michael, man, you know, just in the last. seven to eight years you've come so far you know you you've learned you're just turned your whole thing around you like to go out with you is an absolute experience like it's an experience to go with you and he's like thanks boss I love you you know and although we clash times you know I'm maybe too detailed at times and I and I understand that but again the point of this whole thing is

is the amount of work and effort put in to run a successful business is in my view quite overwhelming and it takes a certain amount of certain type of people one thing i can say is about you know indigenous people in general and it's just a you know it's a nice ploy for indigenous people is that indigenous people are natural born entrepreneurs in my view and they just need to be given the tools you know and and that's the great thing about things like stolo community futures or the stolo business association or other other places in british columbia have these unique abilities. And I think, you know, SCF, Stolo Community Futures actually was one of the first people, they're lenders, their growers, their mentors. And that's why the brainchild of the

SBA was born to do that, was to help to give these tools. But I think indigenous people are like such entrepreneurs. They just, unfortunately, maybe didn't have the time or the ability to get all that education to understand how to run the successful businesses. And I got to tell you, it's been a real journey for me. And now, you know, I feel that, you know, COVID was not a really good thing for our business. It was terrible. We really suffered, you know, immense losses. But the thing is, if you continue to work hard through these tough times, you will become resilient.

And that's another lesson of what the world will throw at you and how business has to adapt. nobody got laid off in my business we were able to save all the jobs we worked hard honestly to tell you the truth in COVID times we were busier in the office than we have ever been in the history of the company and a lot of it wasn't good it was refunding money but we kept up the communication with all of our clients

and that's probably helped us to come out the other side as well as we took it upon what I talked about earlier is that fellow named Ron Fink who taught me back in business in the days is the time when business is stale and the economy goes bad or something like this pandemic happens is when you need to go and make the effort. You need to spend the money.

You need to go out there and keep working hard. If you have the money, spend money. And I did that with when we developed the domes of Fraser Canyon, Riverside domes on that beautiful canyon property of mine. And it's separated. You don't notice that you're there and there's a house on the other side of the creek. You don't even notice it because there's enough trees and stuff

that you can't even almost see the one dome experience. And, you know, last weekend was a beautiful one because we had two guests. There was a couple in, and there was a family of four. I got to take the people fishing, and I picked them up, take the jet boat up, and I picked them up right on the shore, the beach at the property there, and they come walking down and they see. And, you know, I spent a really nice long day with them, and then they went back and had a nice steak, and they were sat around the fire table, and I have a wood-fired hot tub. And, you know, they got to take it all in, you know, I have a beautiful bathroom facility for them.

I'm a giant rainhead with a big window out looking into the forest area if you want the window open, and you can see it at seven feet tall, and it's warm, and it's comfortable, and the furnishings are all beautiful. I want to get to the domes. I really want to dive into those because I think they're amazing, but I want to slow down because you said something that I think is so important. It's so easy to get lost. I'm a huge fan of the UFC.

Dana White, who's the CEO, the president, he didn't lay off. off any of his employees during this time of the pandemic. He pushed through and you did the same and it feels like we go through sort of ebbs and flows of like our love for capitalism. People have their own viewpoints. But at the end of the day, businesses support people. They take care. The staff are often relying on that paycheck. And I sincerely think with inflation going the way that it is, that we're going to see a recession, that we're going to see more tough times ahead. There was a lot of government spending and you can agree or disagree on how money was spent or whether it was done strategically. But at the end of the day, I think we're going to see

more tough times. And it's been a long time since 2008. And that's when I was first looking for work was during that 2009-ish time and no one was hiring. And right now we see so many places hiring. I don't even know if people realize what a recession feels like. It feels like something that can get kind of forgotten about. And COVID impacted businesses. And so for so many people who maybe work for non-profits or they work for the government, they don't know what that's like to have somebody at the helm who's kind of responsible for whether or not you go out of business or you continue to succeed. And I don't think that business owners get the do they deserve during periods like this.

like places are hiring and nobody wants to work for them that is crazy to me to think of like the job the work that goes into creating a job because it's not like you open your business and you hire 15 people it takes a lot of work to go okay now now I'm at that point where I'm making enough money where I could support somebody and could I support them for a year do I need to do it contract work what makes it like it's not just an automatic decision but when you're not an employer it's so easy you're to forget that. It's so easy for you to think like, oh yeah, well, why aren't I making $20 an hour? Why aren't I making $25 an hour? And it's like, well, you need to bring in, justify that revenue coming into the business. So if you're willing to hop on social media and start

marketing the business, if you're willing to start getting the word out and like telling people about it, if you're willing to do things to justify bringing in a job, it seems like that part of people is sort of missing because like I remember watching movies where it's like, oh, I'll clean your stuff for you. I'll wipe down and mop the area for you so I can have this job. And like, I'll earn it. There's that sort of feeling missing. And it scares me when individuals like yourself make such sacrifices for the staff to try and keep them on.

Because the selfish, what our idea, like our image of what a business owner is is to lay everyone off when times are tough. But when people don't do that, it's not like they get anything. big in return. It's not like somebody comes down and goes, oh, you were just a really, really good person who made kind, thoughtful business decisions and kept the community that you've created together despite there being financial incentives for you to do otherwise. We don't do a good job of rewarding that. And so it can end up being just kind of slipped past, which is like, oh yeah, and I managed to keep all my staff on anyways. And like, to me, I think we just need to slow down and recognize how important entrepreneurs are, but that they create jobs, they allow

people to share their passions. Like, it sounds like your guides do the work they do because they love it. But you create, you facilitate that opportunity that they can't just do that independently because from what I would guess is you have a lot of overhead costs with the boat maintenance. That seems like it's going to be one of the biggest challenges is if a boat has a problem, I can't even imagine how much that would cost. But making sure that you have the right boats for the right season for the right circuit like that's going to be a huge overhead investment and then to have 15 and then to have even more than that at certain points that's a huge cost where it's like I could have this boat or I could have a staff member and you have to make these tough decisions and so I'm

hoping you could just maybe elaborate a little bit more on what that meant to you to be able to continue that for your staff like what was that like to go into the pandemic and go I'm I'm going to do everything I can not to lay people off when again you could say oh it looks like this pandemic could go on for a while we'll just shut everything down i'll lay everybody off and then i'll just sit back and wait for things to get better and then if there's an opportunity i'll bring them back you chose not to do that so could you just elaborate on what that journey was like yeah but these are these are all heartfelt people that work with me to create the team and and you know i i've never been good at you know not supporting those around me um and knowing that they rely on

this as their paycheck. I mean, the world's different today, you know, when you talk and touch about the economy. I'm like you. Like, I so feel that we're going into recession, you know, I feel that with an inflation rate higher than it's ever been in 30 years. I see gold going up. I see oil going up. You know, I see house prices almost to a point where, you know, it's not impossible for a youth to even buy homes today unless you have parents that have money. I mean, it's just impossible to really, in my view, to live. And we talk about, both this and and you know I could sense that there was some concern within the office staff because I you know when pandemic's going on we got more time with office staff than we got with guides

because you know you have a 50% loss in your revenues based on we're cut right down the center we've lost 50% of the business right off the top so you know I mean our losses were probably you know and not have to you know maybe the stress was even more I'm not sure but just in loss and revenues in two seasons was $1.4 million of revenue loss. So, you know, what people forget is, is that, you know, when you have a fleet of boats, you still have to insure them. It doesn't matter whether or not that boat is going to work or it's not. Your 50% loss of revenues is a 50% loss in revenues. And how you're going to cut up that pie to sort out all the rest, $20,000 with the boat insurances, then you've got all the trailers that have to be insured. You know why? Because

next week, that boat might have to go to work. Or next week, that boat, two boats have to go to work. The boats still have to be insured. So the fixed costs are the same. And I remember Alyssa coming to me and saying, you know, wow, you know, Dean, you created a bonus program for us. It's an incentive in the office to sell trips at a higher ratio and to hit a plateau because you feel the value of that experience is worth that much money. And if we do that, there's a bonus system for us. Every time we sell that experience at that price that you've made for us, a guideline of prices in this sheet, I get a bonus. I remember her coming to me and saying, you know,

well, that's sad about the pandemic. And I'm so sorry. I feel so bad for your loss right now because I see, but she's directly listening to the cancellations and can we have our money back? And I chose to give all the money back to the people that said they want their money back. And there was lots of them, you know.

But on the most part, I saved a lot of money over the years. You know, I grew my business in a responsible way so that as I move forward, I typically tried to buy things as I could have the money for it and didn't lay out a lot of money in loans or things like that. So it was a real slow process growing, this long-term business. Now, having a list that come to me and say, you know, Dean, wow, I guess that I'm not going to be getting my bonus this year. And she didn't mean it to be like, oh, sad and I'm not getting it.

throw in my face she just meant you know it's kind of sad that we got to that and then all of a sudden the stuff kind of crashed and now we're kind of in the position i said no i said i'm going to tell you right now if you still sell the trip at whatever price or area that we want it to be in you're all getting your bonuses yeah it makes no difference to me you know we've still done the job at hand and that's my problem that that we have a loss i can't change that but what we can do is we can continue to work harder and the guides didn't get as many trips you know we were segregated with land land areas so you know anywhere from laid law or wherever hope this way could not go to the canyon and do a canyon trip because we had travel restrictions oh wow people from the interior could come down

and do a fraser canyon trip but they weren't allowed to go and do a midriver trip where the price might be less money than a canyon experience so the Vancouver people or the Vancouver island people couldn't come up and do a canyon trip because they weren't allowed past the travel restrictions so we had a lot of really weird parameters to our business that we were to trying to work through, through, you know. I didn't even think of that, yeah. Protocols and, you know, then where people lived because, you know, my main residency is up in Yale in Dogwood Valley.

That's my, that's where my license is. But I also maintain a home in Chilliwack, you know, that I've had forever and grown up here. So, you know, for me to travel back and forth, I stayed in the canyon because we, canyon adventures are what I love the best. That's my thing. Like, I love that canyon more than anything. I fish down here my entire life. And now my energy is there.

So, you know, we really had to work within our own business and then some of the guides that weren't trained in the canyon because there's only a handful. There's only six guides that are trained to create canyon experiences and that takes time to develop that. Like you can't, you know, we talked about it earlier a little bit. How long does it take? Honestly, to tell you the truth, to develop a Fraser River fishing guide and tributary guide, it's a two to three year process. That's from zero learning how to run a boat, learning about all the stories, learning to tell you. about where to fish at different water levels, all the different techniques, learning about the whole gamut takes forever. You know, I was very lucky to be able to do that with my son in

three months. It was a challenge. But, you know, as we talked about having blood, maybe it was his, you know, maybe some of the things that were instilled in him when he was younger, made him to have the ability, maybe through the bloodline to absorb it in a better way. Mind you, he got to spend every day with me and be able to do it. And he's a brilliant fishing guy today, you know and there's just something in him that runs through his blood that says he's a natural at it so the challenges of seeing so much negative going on with the pandemic and I said okay guys you know you know maybe the guy down admission being my guide can't come to the canyon maybe he wasn't trained from the canyon he's lost a little bit more revenue some of these guys had

to go out and do a little part-time work but all the trips they all sustained and those guys are all still with me today, all of them. And I had to take it on the chin and I lost a lot. Yes, I did. But we are survivors of that. And that goes to show with good leadership in my view is we, you know, we worked as a team. We came together. Everybody understood and it's, you know, in today's world, people don't want to lose their jobs. They need those jobs to sustain their own. They're young. I have a lot of young people and I look to them to say, you know, these are the next leaders of our future. These are the people that could run my business in the future and keep this legacy going and I need to be good to those people I need to do whatever it takes

me to muscle up enough strength to support them all through business and take the losses that we're going to take and I'm not here on a crying towel I'm just saying we got no support really not a lot of support from the government I mean there was a business loan that we were able to take you know a portion has to be paid back and there was a little bit of grant you know I'm lucky that you know I had I had good support to indigenous tourism, BC, and indigenous tourism businesses, indigenous businesses in general, especially ones that were run on and around the reserves or ones that, you know, didn't pay tax or did this or that. There's really a big problem with some of those indigenous run businesses because there was no government funding to help them down the way. But people like Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada, for instance, or Indigenous Tourism of BC. have been big voices and asking the government for support to support indigenous businesses like my own

and to realize you know my son is indigenous he works within the business i feel that all of the people who work for us as our team are all involved in an indigenous run business and i think that we needed to have maybe some more support it's a it's kind of a pittance as to what we had for any sort of support and created to the the revenue loss that we had it's not even even measurable. And so many indigenous businesses folded up due to complications within any type of funding avenues. And other businesses, so I'm not segregating this as only indigenous. I'm just saying that all businesses, there was many businesses that struggled. But the government had the ability to help out indigenous businesses who are, in my view,

some critical part of, you know, moving forward with many different things of, whether it be a drip, undrip, or reconciliation. It's about, helping those, those really grassroots businesses that need to be supported through the thing. And I just want to say that, you know, it's been really good to me. I know it's still a little community futures reached out to me numerous times. People would say, hey, Dean, there's this maybe grant available that might work for you or indigenous tourism. BC said, you know what, we're going to get a little bit of support from the federal government

and we're going to help. So you've got to apply. You've got to jump through a few hoops. You've got to do a little bit of work. We're willing to give you a little bit of seed money for a project that you wish. And that's where kind of the whole Fraser River, Fraser River Canyon, Domes, Riverside Domes came up, was that we have an ability now to have a little tiny bit of funding. Let's take that seed money and let's create something where we could create an accommodation, unique experience on the water.

Whether people fish or they don't fish, doesn't matter. We're not asking people to fish. We're giving them an opportunity to take a tour if they wish or to take a fishing experience. And that money through that resiliency of all the efforts in which we made to hold our money in, support our own, team has created an opportunity for us to now move onward and build the Fraser Canyon Riverside Domes. Okay, let's get into it. To support the T-P's too as well.

So the same thing, right? I find what you've done through this pandemic so inspirational because I agree with you. I think that we are hearing more and more about reconciliation and then the question that I get asked the most is how? What does it look like? How do I get involved? How do I learn?

Where do I go? Where do I get information? Because my fear is I want people to understand the atrocities that have taken place throughout history. But that's not all we are. And that's my big concern is that people are like, where do I learn more about Indian residential schools? And it's like, you should learn about that if that interests you and if you feel called to learn about that. But you should also learn about the beauty of our culture pre-colonization and like the values that we carry. Because like you think of people who have been through like World War II.

They're not just the Holocaust. They're more than that. They are resilient people. And that seems like the piece that sometimes gets forgotten is that we survived. We endured. We overcame. And now we're making a comeback. And that's all very positive.

And your business really highlights that. It gives people a pathway to learn about the beauty of the culture maybe that they didn't expect. They're okay with learning about the fishing. And then all of a sudden they're learning about the beauty of indigenous culture. And it's nice because it's not in your face. the same way maybe having to watch a movie or read a book or watch a documentary is going to be because it's more just a part of an experience. And so can you tell us about these domes?

Where did the idea come from? They're brilliant. For people just listening, hopefully we can put some pictures of them in the video. But can you describe these domes and how this came about? Yeah, well, you know, a good friend of mine up the road on my Yale property in Dogwood Valley. she worked for Siebert Island for many, many years managing the dental program. And her and I became friends because I would be jetting around up on the river up there and doing fishing excursions.

And she's known as the sturgeon lady. And she fishes from shore up there. And she's brilliant and she's passionate. Actually, she takes, she's very good friends with many of the First Nations communities. And she worked within Seabird Island and material, you know, helping and managing people in the dental thing. But her passion was being at the river. and she ended up getting into some medical concerns and issues that didn't really allow her to work as well anymore.

And she's still working through those things right now. But what she said is, you know, Dean, and I've known her for a lot of years, Colleen Hume is her name, a wonderful lady. She actually works for us doing all of our shore fishing trips. So there's another component. It's not, doesn't have to be a jet, boat you can be doing kind of a cultural tour and then go do some sturgeon fishing from shore

on these private beaches in the canyon or some of the public ones anyways and and and and she said you know i've got to think of you know being diversified what am i going to do i'm going to have this sort of a medical pension here a little bit and then and what am i going to do like you know i'm not crippled i i need to work and she's a she's a hard worker and she said you know i think i think we should do some accommodations up here. Let's, I'd like to build a, I'd like to have some Teebies here. And, and, you know,

she went to Yale First Nations community and talked to, you know, we're friends with numerous, she's closer friends with everybody than even I am. She's really ingrained in the family, and I make my way in because I've been up there, and I was good friends with Chief Hope for many, many years, probably. He was a chief there for four decades, and him and I created

a relationship, a responsible, mutual relationship of hard work on her and trust and uh and she's best friends with bob and so she went to the community and said you know i think about doing some teepees and they said oh well you know up here we had pit houses and you know and that kind of thing and and you know so but she says you know i'm not here building a business that i want to have a teepee and saying that this tepee is part of the culture here in the area i just want a teepee so she started to research it all and she built the She ended up finding the people who made the teepees for the movie set, Dancing of the Wolves.

The Kevin Costner film there. And it's down here in Oregon, and she researched all the different teepee once. She bought this beautiful 26-foot teepee, 550 square feet. And her vision was luxury glamping right on the river side because she owns an acre on the river. Right at the river's edge, you just look down. The river's right there. We actually pick people up right at that residency, too. And she's only like, as a birdfly, she's five properties up the river from where I am.

So that was her vision. I worked on her. I co-partner, co-marketed with her. I brought the indigenous tourism flare into it. So ITBC embraced it. High-TAC embraced it, Indigenous Tourism Association, Canada, Keith Henry and, you know, all the people within Indigenous Tourism, BC. And we did some visits. We actually had Yvette John come and sing and do an opening, kind of an opening prayer in a song, blessing the TPs.

We got the blessing from, you know, First Nations and Chief Hope did some interviews with us at the TPs. And it opened up and it was kind of a really cool thing. Like people just like were blown away by it. Global News did a little piece on it. And we market it. We already have the ability to market because we're marketers. And, you know, so because she went through the pandemic, so we have a 22-foot teepee. and then a 26, built a washroom facility separate to that.

And it was sort of like, okay, well, now in the pandemic, we can't have people, two different types of families. You can't have a family in the 22 without a separate bathroom. So there was challenges. So she only booked the 26-foot TB based on, unless you're a family and you want both TPs. So now, since then, moving forward, we've now created a whole new platform for the 22-foot

with its own bathroom facility and its own outdoor living kitchen. and then together we built we bought wood-fired hot tubs that sit right at the river and you're looking down on the river from the hot tub and you would fire it and you know a little fire obviously if there's fire season we don't do fires we do a gas fire and a small little gas fire out there like a campfire um but wood like wood like what wood fired yeah wood fired and then and then electricity and custom-made king-sized beds and then local some of the local first nations donated Yale First Nations donated some of the things like, you know, Chief Hope came down with a dip net. We talked about the dip net, and inside the tepies and things hung there that were, you know, part of the area, you know, that were indigenous kind of artifacts and things from the area.

And it just became an overnight success, in my view, and it ended up being sold out in the first year and sold out pretty much in the second year. And so that's now three years in the running. and that's open just this weekend for the large teepee and then it'll be another week before the other TV goes up or it's up already but before it's marketable and we wanted to get all new pictures of it all but it really was a warm welcome by you know the indigenous community

people from around the world to get that type of experience we weren't selling an indigenous cultured experience for the area we were selling something that was like from my heritage Okay, so, you know, the Cree and the Métis people were separated from the reserves, you know, and I think it's really misunderstood, you know, people think, well, you know, your Métis or your Cree, or my background, and my lineage goes way back and it's all fully documented, you know, and even within our own cultures and our communities here and amongst the river, I've looked upon slightly different. As in, as so are many of my friends that are indigenous, but maybe not. And it's not a, them against us it's about it's about ensuring that we're not creating an indigenous experience there we're creating luxury glamping and we're not depicting from any portions of but that's the way may tea people were when they were separated from their areas that they lived in their reserves and pushed off they lived in tepees and they moved around as they needed food in this area or that

area it was part of the culture so for me i identify with those tepees very closely for coline it's it was an opportunity for her to market something that gave her an ability to make a living and it's right on the river and we provide experiences. So whether it's shore fishing or boat fishing or just going to the area and hiking up into Hope by the Spirit Caves or, you know, walking down, going to Yale, historic Yale and understanding about what all went on and the pioneers in Yale or going to the water and go gold panning. We created that unique accommodation experience. That could be whatever it is you wish it to be. But in no way are we saying that that's, you know, an absolute first nation experience from that area, right?

That's not what we were charging this about. It's about part of, I'm already a tourism-based company. So this is about tourism and people getting to the river again, people gathering at the river, families. So then what happened is it became successful. We got into this full-on pandemic, and I'm like, wow, like I'm losing so much in revenues. This is like bad. And then, of course, we got some seed funding from Indigenous Tourism, BC.

And they said, okay, if we give you some money, what would you do with that money? what does that look like? And we put together plans and projects. And I said, you know, I got this property here, three acres, a thousand feet of river frontage. And I just go over there and I cut the lawn. And the lawn was beautiful. And it was all blackberries and mess, you know, and then I have all the trees right on the river's edge, all the riparian area, all intact and it beautiful in the trees. And, you know, it's kind of like wilderness. And it has, you know, stinging nettles and all the things that are in the little wilderness area.

And I thought, well, this is a good opportunity to do something. This is like, you know, we got some time because we're not on the river every day. We're working and we're trying to figure out how we're going to get through the pandemic. And Colleen sort of like, yeah. And she says, I think you should make some domes, something cool. I've seen some domes and you should do these geodesic dome things. I'm like, what are you neat cool? idea. So we started to research them. And then I purchased them a couple years ago. I purchased

them and then with the space and then we developed the space there on the property and we created this beautiful, in my view, a beautiful facility. Oh, it's incredible. Nestled into the trees and the wilderness. And, you know, I mean, I guess you could say it's commercialized a little and I wanted it to be absolutely luxury. I wanted it to be like you're going to a hotel room in Vancouver and better and you're doing it in its luxury glampied. I mean, you know, you know, sometimes a little millipede runs into your room or, you know, this or that happens. I mean, we're not, it's eco. We want it to be. They're compostable toilets. So it's eco toilets. There's no flushing toilets. There's, you know, there's running water in them.

There's heat. There's beautiful gas fireplaces. There's king-sized custom bed. I had couches made that were with a chaise and a full queen-sized pull-out for people that were all custom-made. And we did, I pretty much did all the interior design and all the bathrooms in the utility room. So it's there. So people just roll in. They come into a separate entrance. I have a big shop up in the back. They park there and they look forward towards the river. And they come in. And it was like, to me, it was a no-brainer to develop it

so that we had an opportunity to fight what we were going through in the pandemic. And it's another way of focusing, staying busy. And we completed the project last year about, and I think we had our first guess on August 20th. The only unfortunate part of last year is we probably could have extended. ended our season, you know, a lot longer, but without all the pictures of finished products, you don't get an opportunity really to market. So we pretty much lost all of, you know, 20, 21 for any marketing ability. And, you know, we got a bunch more pictures and some videos

and a bunch of stuff going on. So that made it even more challenging for our 22 season, you know, because we needed to ramp up marketing now. We really needed to work hard on the marketing. And we're there now, but we still got things to do. We need to. We need to, to wait for the green area of the springtime and the lawns to be developed back. And then we ended up getting some flooding because my creek flooded over top of my road. And we had to take the road out. But we created like an atmospheric river in my own yard on that side of my property outside. And it created a little hole in the bottom of my property.

And some of the water ran through underneath the domes and created some movement of gravel. And I had some big holes on my property. It was really bad. so we've worked really hard since early spring and then our winter was tough we had six feet of snow in my property six feet of snow at the domes we could not even mark it through the winter time and all created you know simply put because you know some of the catchments in our road area were not maintained by the road people and so anyways that's caused me a lot more grief and again that goes back to you know sending emails and having people work with you and people ignoring your need for help And, you know, I always say is, listen, you know, we need to make some money back, so we need everything to be perfect. So I had to work really hard this spring to get the property back to the area in which, to the way it kind of was prior, pre-flooding and all the winter from having all the snow. So it's been a good spring already, and we were able to market, and we're going to do a new film. We're going to stage the whole place with people enjoying their time.

and we're going to do a really nice local tourism has that Chilliwark tourism a great supporter of mine and Hope tourism and we're going to be doing a really big super promotional video about touring in a boat and coming up and staying in the domes

and barbecuing and being with your family or being with couples or being there for Valentine's Day or Mother's Day and just escaping the busyness of every day and no TV's in there so if you got a TV you're bringing your laptop up or you're bringing your you're bringing your iPad but we don't support any TVs there and we want

it to be in a big big fire pit that people can be together at and we chop all the wood from local areas and I harvest the wood as a harvester I harvest because of my heritage I have a harvester card and I harvest wood up in the forest I bring it down and chop the wood and provide that to the people so that they have that and for the hot tub and yeah and and you know so it's really we're just at the beginning of marketing the domes and all about it so we're hopeful that we're hopeful to have a successful season. It'll take time to market and fill it up. And I don't really even,

doesn't bother me that it's not full anyways. I kind of like to walk over there and look at what has been created and to say how nice of an appeal that is to me. And like I can just say that last weekend, we had those guests. There was two ladies that came. One of the ladies works for Finning Canada

and she is a lease manager for finning equipment, believe it or not. her best friend came and her friend was now leaving from British Columbia and flying back and going to live in Quebec again now where her roots are from. So they spent a weekend there and the comments that they made, they did a, they did a short little video and that's what we're encouraging people to do to help us with the social media, you know, create a, and it will enter you into a contest for a free stay. So come, tag us in the thing, create your own little pictures or your moments and your memories and then use that, tag us in that, our fishing company

as well as our dome company or our TP company and to be able to tag all that and to talk about the great memories and gathering at the river and your experiences and those girls did a bang-up job. They did a little reel and it was brilliant. And then they did pictures and then the other family that I got to fish with, the Sumner family,

the 18-year-old boy, 16-year-old boy, the mom and the dad, they were blown away. They just said this whole thing from the office to the communications to the guiding, of the river catching fish the historical cultural part of the traditional tour as well as staying in that domes those domes they said were this whole thing exceeded their expectations they just could not believe when they walked down the stairs in that big stairway that we have to see what those domes were like and then to create that entire experience for a whole weekend for them they were

blown away like for me that was like you know a little breath i get to breathe and i get to say yeah Dean we did it right and we and we did it as a team you know Ellis had input Rick came and how to my son was here doing electrical because he's an electrician and he had to go to work for his dad for free and you know like this this brought the team together and we worked hard to get this thing going and upright and it gives us the ability to market tourism again in a different through a different lens not only that it has to be fishing it can just be sitting around a fire talking about the stories of the river and

where you brought up or all that kind of stuff and also involve hope, the Cascades, the Canyon, and really bring some marketing tools that we have and helping within their community. Some people say, well, you know, you're not directly, you don't pay taxes to hope. No, I don't. I'm Yale, so I'm considered outside of that,

electoral area, regional district, we pay our taxes. But we're bringing people there. They shop, they come to Hope, they go there to Mountain View Brewing. You know, they may go to the coffee shop or the blue moose or they go to the rolling pin bakery. And the tourism value of dollars spread so far. So again, we don't need to go always in harvest of fish

and say there's the value of that fish. The value of tourism and sharing experiences, whether it's indigenous or it's a sport fishing experience, it doesn't matter what it is, that value of those type of experiences is probably one of the best generators of money and funds that get spread across, communities in all the British Columbia and Canada, the world, period. Yeah, yeah, just the memories that you get to make.

I'm a big believer in entrepreneurship. Like, I wrote a paper on First Nations Economic Development with the belief that you don't understand what it means if somebody doesn't get to chase their entrepreneurial dreams. Like, we all miss out. Like, had you been forced to play it safe or not received any support, we would have missed out on this ideal. Like, the memories that these people have made never would have existed. And I think we miss out on that.

You could have a hundred of the domes. And I still don't think it would be enough in terms of like the memories that that creates for people, the opportunity to experience something simpler, something outside of the hotel industry. Like we get so used to, I just interviewed Squatch Eyes Lodge out in Vancouver. And they're trying to create each room so it's unique. And it's like, when did we lose that? When did hotels need to be? Every room looks the same. The paintings are tied to the walls or bolted it.

when did we stop caring about having like where we're staying be an experience and i just stayed there i just stayed there oh wow outdoor adventure show i made it i made a point of staying there i stayed in the water room oh wow my time but i was at the and i wanted to stay there i wanted to have that experience you know that it's important to me i i i promote that that that hotel i promote that and i mean they have you were you were there i'm assuming no i just interviewed caroline tops i got to go When you go there, you know, they have all that the artists have done work there. You can buy work from the artists, the creators, the carvers. You know, it's all downstairs in the store.

You get a whole experience of staying in the room. You get to read the book as to what that room meant and what it's all about. And, you know, I had a wonderful stay there myself. And, again, it's all of what you envision your stay to be like and how you embrace that stay. And I just can't say enough to what you've said there about, you know, that indebted. Indigenous entrepreneurship, you know, is having that ability and having those tools to be able to live your dream, to try to work hard hard work. And I mean, you know, it all boils down to hard work. You're going to get out what you put in. And, you know, you can't sit here waiting with your hands out and expect the money just to drop into your hands and everybody to support you and do all your work for you. You have to go out and you actually have to do what you say you're going to do. And you need to grow through the hard times and learn and, you know, fall down and skin your knees and skin your hands and get back up and get back to work. You know, you've got to do those things. You've got to go through the tough times to enjoy some of the good times. More importantly, it's about those things

that are created and knowing the stories that are told. And, you know, one of my very best friends lives in Staffordshire, England, Martin Jackson, you know, a guy that I've been in, my life has been changed by that fella. You know, he came over here as a client 25 years ago. You know, a UK guy flying from Staffordshire to come here. He spent 45 days a year with our business every single year. He was an accountant on a little accounting firm in Staffordshire, a Sutton Coles Hill, and he came over here. He came in April. He came in July, August, and then he came again in October, just not only to enjoy the fishing, which he loved to do, he fell in love with British Columbia. He fell in love with the things that we did.

I got to spend so much time with that fella. 70 years old, a little bit of skin cancer right now. He's been away for a couple years because of the pandemic. He's coming back this August for two weeks. He's staying with me. He's actually in all the years, and no offense to anybody, he is the only client that stays with me. Like, he literally, like, no, I don't mean my accommodation.

He actually stays with me. We cook together at my house. Wow. He goes and monitors with me on the river. He understands all my First Nations connections on and off the river. He's embraced all of those. one of the things he did, because I do a lot of fundraisers and conservation work and try to do things for other organizations, and I use the platform of sturgeon fishing

typically to create funds to do things like work for the Wild Sheep Foundation of North America to work for the Wild Sheep Society of BC Guide Outfitters Association. And at times in the past, BC Wildlife Federation and Ducks Unlimited, some of the things that I created as a fundraising model to help them with raising funds for what they do. and I had Martin come one time to a big banquet I do and so usually it's a two-day event and you know you've got about 56 people

out fishing in boats but we talk about conservation and do our thing and we raise them a bunch of money and we work collaboratively together to do this right and so Martin gives this speech and he told he was up and so

I want to be a part of this dean I'm like okay yeah that sounds good so he got up and he takes this tape measure and it's like you know one of those tape measures from fabric land and it's 10 feet long and he talked about the tape measure of life and and it was about okay well um here's our tape measure of life and you know i just want to talk to everybody about how beautiful it is to come here and be here in british columbia and enjoy this and i've been coming for so many years and

and you know i've seen everything here that i that i that you know i've been up north to the skeena with dean i've been you know i've been many places with dean since i've been in British Columbia and I just want to give back something and what I can give back is a little lesson about the tape of life and he rolls out this tape and he says okay so I'm 70 years old and he says okay so let's go to 70 inches on the tape and we cut the tape off at 70 inches he says okay now we got this to 120 70 to 120 10 foot tape and he goes the life expectancy of a you know of a normal person is probably about you know let's just say it's 85 and he clips the tape off again at 85.

So now he's got this piece holding from 70 to 85. And he says, okay, so that's my age now. And this is what I've got left to live. You know, maybe I'll have more. Maybe I'll have less. I don't know. But this is kind of the average. And he said, I love to come to BC,

and I love spending my time fishing here. And he said, so let's just say you spend a third of your life sleeping and not doing the things you want to do. So let's clip off a third of that. So now we've got 85, 7. 50 and we've got another five years off of that so now we've got 80 70 to 80 there's 10 more years so I've got 10 years and in this 10 years um you know the likelihood of me coming over I want to come over here and spend my time he said that's all you have of your life left to experience

what bc has to offer to come fishing to come out here to enjoy this and he's talking to all these people who are big players in conservation participants and he's telling them of about the value, and that's all we have left of our life. And to encourage people to go out and chase and to do the fun things that you want to do and create these memories that we talk about, whether it's on the river, or going to Vancouver Island or going up to Comsheen and experience rafting or going to the Okanagan and going to wineries or doing whatever it is you choose to do in life. Out of his lens is about spending his time at British Columbia and being with good people

and fishing and creating experiences on the river. And, you know, him and I cook together. And that, that still today reminds me of how the people looked at that and how short our journey really is. And to understand that the value of what we can take to slow down our lives, to enjoy this and spend the time and the money, because in the end the money means nothing because we're gone. But the memories about what we've created and what we can do to change our experience

in life means a lot. And I'll never forget what he said to me, you know, and I now tell that story a lot. You know, we talk about that story. It's not just to encourage people to come fishing with us or to have experiencements because we want them to do that. But it's a good story, in my view. Absolutely. That is amazing. Can you tell people how they can connect with the fishing side and the dome side?

Where would they go to have these experiences? Yeah, well, first of all, it's simple. My business name is called Great River Fishing Adventure. And our office runs from 8 to 5 Monday to Friday. There's always somebody in the office at 604, 792, 3544. We're registered in the yellow pages. We're highly available on the website, great riverfishing.com, pretty simple. Social media, we work hard on social media.

I think we have 60,000 followers on our Instagram account, which is, our Instagram account is called at Fishing Sturgeon. these platforms can be reached through the website. We have another Instagram account and a Facebook account that is called Fraser River, Fraser Canyon Riverside Domes, at Fraser Canyon Riverside Domes. We have the at Fraser Canyon TP Escape. All of these can be reached through Facebook, through our website. We update our fishing report, which talks about a commendation.

It's kind of called Dean's Dino Blog, and we use that to highlight some of our specials or the things we're doing or to attract people to new business. So Great Riverfishing.com pretty much catch it anywhere you want to navigate. At Fishing Sturgeon, a big social media platform that we talk about everything. Fraser Canyon, Riverside, Domes, and at Fraser Canyon, T.P. Escape on Instagram. And there's Facebook pages attached to all of that. So we're very attentive to details and phone calls and email. and we get back to everybody right away

and we would love to share you know, our knowledge and our ability to see things maybe differently than most people would look at a tourism business I guess through our lens and have the ability to showcase where we live and what we do

and the things, I guess more importantly, the things that we can do to help with the future and conservation moving forward to protect our wild salmon and our fish and all that surrounds our rivers and areas. That's beautiful. So for the domes, do they book, I saw it on Airbnb. Do they book through Airbnb or is it better through yours? Absolutely. That's a really good question. You know, most people wouldn't even pick up on that. You can book directly through us. Airbnb is only a platform for us. You know, eventually probably we won't even be on Airbnb and nothing against Airbnb.

But they take a slice of your pie in this. They take a slice of the people's pie as well as our pie. So they're winning on both ends. So this can all be done directly through our office. And again, Great Riverfishing.com. My personal number is on there, my mobile numbers on everything and attached to everything, as well as our business number. And, of course, email. I always encourage people, send us an email.

We're going to get back to you right away. Leave your phone number if you like. We'll pick up the phone. We'll talk to you about all these types of experiences and what we can offer. And we'll just talk you into it, actually. if you're hesitant, we'll talk you into it. And along the journey is we will be competent in showing you how important this business is to us

and how much your experience means to us and we'll do that through showing you through the way that we keep in contact with you and what we do is we create an experience for you and we'll make sure it's as good as it could ever be or even better. It'll, on the most part, I would say we exceed most people's expectations always. I'm absolutely confident in that.

I'm hoping that we can perhaps just conclude by talking about how people can make a positive difference when we're talking about conservation because it's actually one of the questions my partner had, which was we were watching the trailer for the upcoming documentary, Heart of the Fraser, I think that's correct. And she was like, well, what can we do? Because the thing that stood out to her is she wants to make sure that that river, if there's projects to help maintain the river, that she can support that in some way. But there's lots of ways to show your support for conservation, whether or not it's sending an email to your MLA, donating to, like, the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance.

So, like, what different avenues can people get involved in conservation? What would that, what would you recommend based on working with so many organizations? What would you say they can do to show their support? Well, I think, first and foremost for me is, you know, people just have to jump in and get involved. Like, you know, everybody sits on the outside. Or not everybody. A lot of people sit on the outside and say, what can I do to help? And that's the greatest question of the world.

What can you do? Well, you can make change. You can make positive change by jumping in. So I say it doesn't matter whether you belong to the Fraser Valley illegal dumping alliance or you belong as a member or a donor to the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance or whether you're a member of the Fraser Valley Salmon Society or the Public Fisheries Alliance or the Chilliwack Fishing Game Club or the Vedder River Cleanup Coalition. It's a matter of immersing yourself and taking your boots off and your socks off

and jumping in the water and making a difference. you know, it's, it's us who are responsible. It's us who can make change. And it's us that can show through leadership. And it's our commitment to changing the way the world will be in the future by getting involved. And every one of those platforms is a platform that you can do. You can create your own. You can be as simply put as going to the river one day with you and your friends and picking up a bunch of garbage and or, you know, or changing something to, you know, not ruining any, any, uh, parian areas or anything, but being responsible and even going to talk into somebody and saying, you know what, hey, you know, this is a really highly sensitive area for fish and fish spawning.

You could educate through even talking to people and awareness and spread that on your own social media platform and say, hey, me and my friends went to the river today and we did some little bit of cleanup. And every little piece of cleanup matters. Every time you send a letter to support an organization in my view that is trying to do good, it's a letter. It's a letter support. It could be a letter from you that says, you know what? I had a chance to interview with you, Dean. And me and my partner decided we wanted to write this letter in support of your efforts in cleaning up and protecting the riparian areas of the area. You can phone your MPs and your MLAs and you can write them letters and that takes a lot of time. And sometimes I feel that if you're,

if you don't have that direct connection to your MLA or not willing to withstand the the onerous system of trying to always get, you know, get their attention, which I think can be hard, you know, if you're not the right person sometimes, you're not getting their ear. And so simply writing a letter in my view doesn't always help now. It's a matter of going out, making a difference, changing that, and also including in being involved with some sort of an organization in my view that's doing good. So I say if you have an extra $10, you know, be a member of the Fraser Valley Sam Society who has had a history since 1984 to do all the good work. You don't have to be an active member all the time, but you've attached yourself to an organization who does good. And I'm not promoting only that the Salmon Society. It could be the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance, and we're going to go out on a little field trip, and we're going to talk about the critical area in which salmon rear in the Fraser River, or going to an auction and a fundraiser and doing your part. So there's many different avenues, and it isn't always money driven if you know what I mean you know how often do you go out and like to me like what's

ten dollars to people in today's world what's ten dollars to be a member what's what's a donation of a hundred dollars we created a lifetime membership for the Fraser Valley Samad Society when I was the when I began to be the president and said oh yeah I don't I don't need your ten dollars every year I don't need to bother you every year but what I do need is you as my member or my vote or my supporter for the rest of your life so we now went from like no lifetime members $100 to be a lifetime member to Sam's site, we now have over 100 members that are lifetime members now

for only $100 of one-time thing. And I know it's $100 may mean a lot to somebody, but I'm saying that's a lifetime vote forever. And making that difference by just going and sharing some of those experiences on social media, saying, you know, and you don't have to be on social media. You could write a letter to the editor of the paper to Jennifer Feinberg, and you could say,

you know, this is something that's meaningful, me and my partner and we went to the river and we made a difference we went and picked up a bunch of stuff or we went there just to look at what's going on there and this is our opinion you know what I mean so none of this costs money it just means people got to make an effort and that's my concern in today is you know there's not always enough people everybody's crying wolf and that there's a big problem with everything but you got to have the boots on the ground you got to have people wanting to immerse themselves in this which then full turn down the road if we look at you know if i could visually see 50 years down the road when i may not be here

could i see that wow we made a positive change for the people of this country the youth and the generalization of all the next generations to come and we can actually change that outcome by the by what we do you can actually make a difference and each and every person that we talked to or gets to listen to this has an opportunity to change the outcome yeah yeah i think that that is something people just need to feel like there's this feeling that we're like we can't do anything that we're like not able to make a difference and I think that it can feel so discouraging to learn about the challenges the river's facing but you can make a difference and again you might not be the person who fixes all the problems but you are a part of the solution

and that's so much that gives your mind a piece of ease that we seem to be lacking right now Again, I just think that so many people feel like things are not going well. Things are getting worse. We talk about biodiversity and that being an issue. We talk about climate change and people are just like, there's this weight on our shoulders of like, oh my God, where is this going to end up? And I think that that can be really scary. But you can take steps to be a part of the solution. And I think that individuals like yourself, I don't think people who fish or people who hunt get the credit they deserve in terms of like they're the ones fighting for the environment.

most at the time, like, I'm pretty sure it's the same here in Canada, but I know in the U.S., when you pay for a tag or something, that money goes back into conservation efforts. It goes towards trying to address the issues, which is far more money than the average person who's just complaining about the environment not being the way it needs to be. These, like, people like yourself are involved in trying to be a part of the solution. And a lot of it isn't paid, and a lot of it is because this is your home. This is where you want when, like, personally, you want to be proud of the river and be able to look out and say, this isn't filled with garbage. But on another level, it's like, you also

have people who are taking these tours with you. You don't want it to be disgusting and gross and be like, yeah, and we're just going to eat this fish connected to this like bunch of garbage. Like, that's not a positive experience. So like, there's so many levels of your involvement in trying to improve the experience people are going to have, improve the waterways that we sometimes forget that, I think, and think that the best thing to do is just complain about things. And that seems to be so easy for people to voice, oh, we need to be doing more. And then it's like, what do you know what's going on? And it's like, no, I don't need to know any of that. I just know we're not doing enough. I know one person who was like, oh, we need to have like forest police officers.

And I was like, oh, like conservation officers. And they were like, yeah, but we need more. And it was like, you just found out they exist. And now there's not enough. Like, how do you know? You didn't even know. And so I think that it's good for people to be able to hear a story like yours of of sharing experiences with people because once they experience it, there's a commitment to it. There's a, wow, maybe I have a responsibility. Maybe I can do something. And I think that that's, that's the story we need to hear more of for people. And I'm grateful that there's someone like yourself giving people these experiences because I don't know if you saw, but we're giving, we're diagnosing people to go out into the outdoors and we're like recommending that

is like a prescription. And it's like, where are we where that's not the instinct that we've we've lost something where we need to be told to do that and individuals like yourself make it exciting to go do that to go connect with nature to humble yourself again i'm sure that there's beautiful starry nights that you can experience again if you if you attend these domes and it gave me a lot of hope to to see your work uh to see the social media platforms that you're on and to go like wow this person's doing something they're giving some people experiences they're giving them memories. They're giving them a reason to fight because when you hear about all the problems we're facing, it can feel like this is not going to end well. But when people have that buy-in,

that experience, they're committed. And I think that when we have people like yourself, they just, they remind us of how important that is. And there's just, there's not enough people like you who have not only the business strategies, but the commitment to people. And you can see that the way you treat your staff, the way that you try and approach being. detail-oriented, you have to be detail-oriented. It's your business. It's, your name is stapled to everything, whether it's a good experience, a mediocre experience. It's on everything because at the end of the day, that's what impacts whether or not they come back. And so it's a huge responsibility that business owners like yourself take on to make sure people

have memorable experiences. And each time you hire out or you bring someone else in, you're taking a greater risk that the experience might not be what you want it to be for them. And if they have worse experiences, then they might not care as much as they could. They might not invest in joining organizations to protect these things. And I think that we're just, we're so blessed to have individuals like yourself who are expanding in times where everybody else is closing down to be taking those risks on people, on the tourism industry, to be betting on society. I just think that we're so lucky. I've learned so much from this conversation. I hope we can sit down again because it's very clear to me we've scratched the surface of your knowledge and expertise but it's been

an absolute pleasure to sit down with you today yeah well i i can say the same and i just think that your grasp as to you know being so young i mean i'm actually i'm very inspired i'm blown away you're already an elder and you're and you're so young um you know it makes me emotional actually to think about it and um uh you know i i don't say i have the solutions for everything you know some people love me some people don't like me i can't change any of that what i can know is is that i feel that the work i do is honorable it's heartfelt it's important and i think you know we are part of the prescription of what people really need the prescription needs to be written that you need to come out and you need to enjoy what we have to

offer and there's many things around me wherever i am whether i'm in the valley or i'm in the canyon or where where i'm in litton or boston bar there are so many things around us that are meaningful and we need to embrace that in these tough times because I think a lot like you, I feel that we're on the verge of something not really good happening, economic downfall, some sort of more distress that we're going to get in the world,

and I feel that we have to identify with that. And so to have the opportunity to sit down with someone like yourself, who I've looked at a bunch of your interviews and seen all the people you've interviewed. First of all, it's a privilege and an honor to sit with you. Second of most is to get the message that I'm trying to send out,

and I think you're right, we've only scratched the surface on what maybe I have to say. And I would sum it up at saying, you know, one of the things that happened to me the other day at a meeting, and I'm surrounded by people. There was a guy there that was 84. There was a fellow there that was in his mid-70s and, you know, people in their 50s.

And there was the odd young person, you know, maybe a handful of people, maybe in that, you know, 25 to 38, 30-40-ish range. And then there's me at 58. And I sat at the meeting, and we talked about all this gathering together about these, you know, First Nations, commercial sport people and the journey of that it's been. And we talk a lot about Fraser River peacemakers and, you know, a 10-year run that we had. And we dissolved that whole thing because, you know, after a while, things get, you know, we're meeting once a month. And, you know, things just fall apart eventually. Processes fall apart.

So you've got to be always looking to create new processes, which is, in my view, this lower Fraser. collaborative table I sat around the meeting and I talked about you we did introductions and I got to tell you I sit around a table and introductions took over two hours okay and there was questions they asked about you know who are you you know what brought you to this process what is your history organizations that you belong to and I'm there telling a story as a 58 year old guy and I talked about the first First Nations dialogue meetings that we ever had back on this river and first of all I remember Nick Passauk, a local here, he's in his 70s, and he's the vice president of the Samad Society, and he was at the meetings as a guy to contribute his knowledge. We had Lester Mussel here from Squall Reserve here, and then we had Chief Hope came from Yale First Nations. There was other leaders, maybe June Quip had come, or Ernie Cray had come, you know, many other people that I can remember that came to this thing. And that was so many years ago that I started in that process, realizing that we had,

to overcome some barriers between, like I said, I choose to fish with a rod and a reel at this time. I'm indigenous, like, you know, some of my ancestors and other people who have been in this area of the river. And just because I'm not from Stolo territory originally in my descent, it doesn't mean I'm not a person from the river. So although I choose my platform to fish with a rod and a reel, I'm not any different than someone fishing with a gill net or how it is that, you know, maybe at one time they dip net or they had a fish weir or they had a soap, trap and a little net that they used on the river back in the day. I'm no different. But what it made me feel was is that, wow, at 58 years old, I'm talking about a process that I started with people

and volunteered for again. And remember, this is all volunteer for me. I volunteered in a process that not one person in that entire room even knew about. And that go to show me that, wow, some of these guys that have been involved in the fishing industry for that many years, didn't even know that we sat down and looked at those exact same visions of what I'm still doing today, three processes later, and we're still having the same issues, the same problems, and we're now starting to blanket that together and blend and understand there's a need while we're in crisis for fish here in this Fraser River and protecting fish. We can identify and agree there's a crisis.

How we're going to get to sorting that out is something we need to do together blended. And it's not going to be figured out as to the silos that the government has put us in over the years, you know, they like to put, as you were reflected on earlier, put us in these separated silos and try to sort of the problems. It's not going to help. We're here together now, battling together for the survival of the Fraser River and the future generation and the future generations.

And if we can put that together and we can move forward in a positive way and keep this process rolling, I think there's hope. And, you know, I think you said it, I seen some of the notes and it was like, I told this story yesterday when I was on the river. The journey never ends when you share the passion. And it's my words I came up with, and I put it in a book, a 50-page book that I created for my friend in Staffordshire, England, about his memories. 50-page book I built him.

And at the end of that book, it wrote my scripture, The Journey Never Ends, when you share the Passion. And that's what I'd like to leave this conversation with. That's so beautiful. And I think we're lucky to have individuals like yourself who commit years, years and years. Like Eddie Gardner was like, I've been doing this for like 12 years now. And it was like, there are people who kind of hop on issue bandwagons and then hop off and it's always the new thing. When people commit themselves like you have, it sets a huge example for other people to think long term, to commit to an issue and follow it through to its finite end.

And I just want to thank you again and say that we've basically done three and a half hours. Wow, it's unreal. Feels like it's been 15 minutes. Well, I appreciate you again coming and sitting down. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you.