Eyes and ears of the First Nations

From crab monitoring and bear patrols to rescue operations, the Indigenous guardians protect their communities' pristine shores

- Jimmy Thomson

It's Delaney Mack's first time pulling crab traps and she is unsure what to do. Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the job, which might include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation. But winching crabs up 30 metres from the sea floor was not in the manual.

Soon, the four-person operation is humming along. The crab survey is a vital part of their work as guardians of this Indigenous territory in the province of British Columbia. It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable.

It is the quintessential guardian assignment: remote monitoring work of immediate importance to a small community, far beyond the gaze of administrators at understaffed government agencies.

The watchmen are the eyes and ears of their First Nation community in their territory, which spans 18,000 sq km on the central coast of British Columbia around the town of Bella Coola, 430 mountainous kilometres north-west of Vancouver.

For Mack, being chosen to join the guardians was a godsend. "I had no idea what I was going to do with my life," she said.

Indigenous guardianship goes back millennia, but in recent decades has become more formally enshrined and recognised. Today, there are about 1,000 guardians in 200 Indigenous communities across Canada, according to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, a guardian advocacy group.

A new layer has been added to the guardians' authority: park ranger badges. As part of a pilot project launched last summer, five of the Nuxalk guardians and six of the Kitasoo/ Xai'xais guardians to the north-west have been granted the power to issue tickets for offences such as poaching and illegal logging on their territory.