Cortes Currents

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Klahoose First Nation may be close to signing a treaty with the governments of British Columbia and Canada.

In an email to the Strathcona Regional District, dated April 26, Jessica Jamieson, from BC’s MInistry of Indigenous relations and Reconciliation, the Klahoose were to be provided with an offer of treaty land and cash this spring. This has been put on hold while the government works with the Klahoose to secure one or more private parcels for the benefit of the Klahoose community.

The email was included in the staff report for the June 16 SRD Board Meeting.

Neither the audio or minutes for that meeting have been released in time for this broadcast, but there was a motion to protest the province’s lack of respect for the SRD.

Campbell River Director Charlie Cornfield moved, and Regional Director Jim Abram seconded a motion that a letter be sent to Premier Horgan, Indigenous Relations and the Klahoose Nation.

They wish to remind the Ministry that “Under the Community Charter, the local government is considered a level of government and we expect respectful treatment.”

The written version of this story will be updated as more details become available.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - There have been many droughts in Vancouver Island’s history. A University of Victoria study of tree ring data found that some of them were worse than anything in modern records, but also predicted a future mega-drought. This year’s wet Spring may make a difference, but there have been reports of wells running dry every summer since 2014. Consequently, increasing numbers of people throughout the Gulf Islands, Vancouver Island, Quadra and Cortes Islands have turned to rainwater harvesting.

No treatment is needed when this water is used for flushing toilets, watering lawns or gardens, and it dramatically reduces water consumption from wells.

According to the Strathcona Regional District, ‘about 70% of total water consumption happens outdoors in the summer time, mostly due to sprinkler use on lawns. Sprinkler or soaker hose use on other landscaping can also contribute to the high summer demand.’

Interviews about rainwater harvesting on Cortes and Quadra Islands

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Cortes Island is experiencing a wetter than normal Spring this year, but

Some of Cortes Island’s shallow well owners experience water shortages every summer, and scientists appear to agree that there will be more severe shortages in the future.

This is a global problem and there appear to be many causes: the depletion of forest coverage, growth of human infrastructure, natural drought cycles and on top of all that, the transition to a warmer global temperature.

Interviews with John Preston, Red Williams, Miranda Cross, Dr. Ashley Jollymore, Dr. Diana Allen and Dr Bethany Coulthard.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - As the level 4 ‘drought’ continues and some shallow well owners are concerned about their water supply, CKTZ News asked an expert about Cortes Island aquifers.

Dr Diana Allen is the head of the Groundwater Resources Research Group at Simon Fraser University. While she has not been to Cortes, Allen has been working on islands like Hornby, Mayne, Saturna and Salt Spring since 1996.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Last month, there was a celebration in honour of three women who returned 47 acres on Read Island to the Homalco First Nation.

“There's a lovely little sort of swamp on it, the bluffs and you can see the sea, but I live on Quadra and Helen lives in Vancouver and we rarely went out to it,” explained Eileen Sowerby.

Sowerby, Helen Turbett, and the late Su’zan Cook held the title for about 25 years, but never considered it as their personal property.

They were once members of a Quadra Island group that wanted to start a permaculture project with Central Americans. While this never came into being, they purchased 52 acres on Read Island. The founder of the group moved on, people dropped out along the way.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sometime in the next three weeks, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries, Joyce Murray, will decide whether the licenses for 79 fish farms will be renewed.

“I heard a rumour that the minister laid out her options or her ideas to cabinet and cabinet has the plans right now. They're figuring out what to do. We can expect that an announcement quite shortly on the plan around the transition of farms out of British Columbia and also the licensing decision,” said Stan Proboszcz, senior scientist with the Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

According to the BC Salmon Farmers Association, based in Campbell River, the province will lose more than 4,700 jobs and $1.2 billion in economic activity if the salmon farm licenses are not reissued.

The elected chiefs of the We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum are among a small group of First Nations leaders supporting this industry, but Hereditary Chief Arnold Chickite of the We Wai Kai Nation campaigns against fish farms.

The Klahoose, Homalco, Tla’amin and K’omok are among the 102 B.C. First Nations that signed a joint letter calling for open-net pen fish farms to be transitioned onto land.

Bob Chamberlain, Chair of the First Nation’s Wild Salmon Alliance issued a press release stating, “We are deeply concerned that wild salmon runs in B.C. have suffered from the impacts of fragmented management decisions at both the federal and provincial levels, decisions that have contributed to the precarious extinction-level state of wild salmon and which must now be corrected if we are to see wild salmon runs successfully rebound.”

A growing number of scientists agree with them.

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - An overview of what has led to the increasing number of derelict and dilapidated boats on the BC Coast.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Dr Chelsey Geralda Armstrong is an associate professor from SFU and the lead author of a paper, about the ancient forest gardens in Nuu-chah-nulth territory, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. While individual species do grow in the wild, forest gardens and orchards exhibit a sophisticated understanding of cultivation and are found adjacent to ancient village sites. In a related study, Armstrong and her colleagues wrote that forest gardens largely disappeared around the time of the smallpox epidemic that swept through B.C’s Indigenous communities more than 150 years ago.

(In the podcast above, Armstrong mentions three generations of a family that were still transplanting hazelnuts in the 1930s and 40s.)

She said it is difficult to say how long the province’s Indigenous population were tending forest gardens.

Some scientists believe that the Pacific Crabapple (Malus Fusca) is closely related to the Siberian crabapple, and may have been introduced to North America by the first people to cross over from Asia.

Armstrong responded, “People have been moving back and forth for millennia.”

She calls hazelnuts ‘the Swiss army knife of the plant world.’ It is a valuable food source that can be stored year round, a medicine, a dye, and a textile that can be woven or used in boat construction. While not native to the Tsimshian areas, it is found around ancient village sites like Kitselas. The people from that area used a Proto-Salish name for hazelnuts, which originated in southern B.C. 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

She and her colleagues have dug up the 400-year-old remains of hazelnuts, crabapples, Rubus species, and vaccinium species - “all the things that grow in forest gardens” - in Tsimshian territory.

They found 600 year-old remains in Coast Salish territory.

In the podcast above she talks about using oral histories as a key. Soapberries are native to the interior, but has been found on the central coast. There is an oral tradition that Raven introduced it back in mythic times.

“In the case of Nuu-chah-nulth territory, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, we have ethnographic records. Early settlers like Gilbert Sprout, in the 1840s, recorded that ‘natives are as careful of their crab apple orchards as we are of ours.’ And so we know that the cultivation of these things, at least predate that,” explained Armstrong.

“Nancy Turner, Dana Lepofsky and I recently wrote a paper on transplanting. We conclude that about 15 or 16 plants growing throughout BC are, in many cases, probably the result of ancient transplanting or historical transplanting events.”

While she has not specifically studied the Discovery Islands, much of what Armstrong said may be applicable here.

She's familiar with Judith Williams book ‘Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada's West Coast.’

“Clam gardens are showing up everywhere, which of course is a type of mariculture cultivation and so it would make sense that if folks are managing the intertidal in such extensive and long lasting ways that they would be also doing the same with plants.”

“Intertidal marsh gardens are another phenomena that have been studied and looked at. Those are a kind of Intertidal/ uppertidal systems of root cropping. Managing the landscape for things like Springbank Clover, Pacific Silverweed, and Wild Rice Root are a lot more common where you guys are. That would be another flag.”

Armstrong added, “I want to make sure folks know that it's not like I went out and did this research and discovered forest gardens. These places have been known by Indigenous communities, by folks who lived in the same place, for thousands of years. A lot of the stories that I've been able to put down on paper around forest garden management (come from Indigenous sources). Elders have always talked about old villages being good places to hunt, or good places to harvest. There's this understanding that these places exist.”

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - FolkU Field Trip Fire-scaping our Community!

Join Autumn and host Manda Aufochs Gillespie for this special Folk U Field Trip (simulcast on the radio) event where you will learn both the how and why of firescaping with native plants AND get a chance to see and learn how.

Friday June 3rd 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm in the CCEDA Tent at the Mansons Village Commons.

In this free workshop geared towards adults, Autumn will be sharing knowledge around Fire-scaping and talking about its importance in our community. This workshop will educate folks on how to decrease likelihood of fire-spread in our neighbourhoods and local ecosystems, thus empowering us to take action in Fire-scaping at our home and in our neighbourhoods! We will spend the last hour Fire-scaping and Fire-scape designing Mansons Hall, the Radio Station, FOCI Office and CCEDA Lands together!

The information in this workshop will help you achieve a lower Threat Assessment Risk. Once we've learned about Fire-scaping and put it to practice at the Hall, take your knowledge back home to your neighbourhoods and work together to get woody debris out to the roadside for the June 19th woody-debris pick up.

Come join us to learn how to take action in safe-guarding your home, neighbourhood and local ecosystems. Please bring pruners and gloves if you have them.

The first part of this program will also air on FolkU Radio on CKTZ 89.5 FM and CortesRadio.ca.

Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 /Mondays at 6:30 p.m./Wednesdays at 6 a.m. @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The streets of Campbell River have opened up with a series of free, family-friendly events and entertainment that will continue until September.

“We think that this is a great opportunity. Hopefully COVID is starting to leave us and we have the ability to return to a new normal. This whole set of opportunities with the downtown core is meant to bring us out of what we've been experiencing over the last couple of years in reduced ability to program and to get out and interact and socialize. This is really on the flip side of it. We want to be able to blow the lid off of this and get everybody downtown and enjoying what Campbell River has done. Campbell River has a lot to offer both the residents in the surrounding area and visitors to it,“explained Robin Mitchell, the city’s Manager of Recreation and Culture

“These programs and the opportunities with businesses and the various partnerships that Royce and Karen and Linda have set up, in order for us to be able to run all of these events downtown over the next three months are going to be absolutely mind-blowing.”

Karen Chappell, Adult and Community Special Events programmer, added, “We are offering a ton of stuff this summer. We have what is called our Campbell River Live Streets, which has six major events that happen every Wednesday evening in the downtown core, we shut the street and we offer a large event.”

This interview took place last Thursday. ‘Go by Bike Week’ is now over, but it is an example of the kind of event Campbell River is hosting. The associated activities included:

Thursday - a celebration station at Active Living Physiotherapy in Larwood Plaza. (bike maintenance, Track Stand competitions).

Friday - celebration station from &-8:30 AM at Seymour Pacific Developments (breakfast)

Saturday - Bike Swap at Spirit Square from noon to 4PM. All kids bikes sold for $30. Adult bikes for $60 and premium bikes for $100. Opportunity to test drive e-bikes.

Checking the community calendar on the City of Campbell River website, the next special events are both scheduled for Sunday, June 26: Greenways Loop Day and the Campbell River Buskers Festival.

School gets out the following Wednesday, June 29, after which this calendar will be bursting with activities. These include:

- Battle of the Brushes on July 20, 2022

- an Evening Street Market,

- Chalk Art Festival,

- Salsa & Latin Night,

- Music in the Night

- and Rockin' River Country Stomp.

“One of our big headliners this summer, which I'm personally really excited about is our finale of the summer for our large live streets. And we have Jesse Roper coming and he's a massive draw on Vancouver island. So we're, we had to really bump up our numbers for licensing and everything for that event,” said Chappell.

There are also a lot of activities taking place every week:

- Concerts in Spirit Square, every Tuesday at noon and Thursdays at 7 PM.

- The Farmer's Market, Sundays from 10 am till 2:00 PM, in Shopper’s Row until September 11th.

- Lots of smaller events like yoga classes, in-line dance classes, and other daily activities