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Efford, Meaghan

University of British Columbia

For millennia, səl̓ilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), a Coast Salish Nation, have been stewards and cultivators of səl̓ilwət (Tsleil-Wat, Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, Canada), their home and traditional and unceded territory. səl̓ilwət has experienced devastating changes from the colonization and settlement of what is now known as the City of Vancouver. səl̓ilwətaɬ stewardship has been increasingly impacted through colonial development, resource extraction, and settler government polices. Extensive shoreline habitat loss and settler forage fish and Pacific salmon fisheries have reduced the overall health of the ecosystem. This work is led by səl̓ilwətaɬ experts through a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach to archaeology, historical ecology, and ecosystem modelling. We answer two research questions: 1) how many people could səl̓ilwət have sustained prior to European contact? In other words, what is the maximum carrying capacity of səl̓ilwət as it would have been prior to European contact and following the settlement of Vancouver? and 2) what are the cumulative ecological impacts of select settler-colonial environmental stressors impacting the səl̓ilwət ecosystem over 1750-1980 CE? We employed a historical ecological framework to develop a novel approach to answering these questions. We conducted an analysis of zooarchaeological material on Pacific salmon remains from təmtəmíxʷtən (DhRr-6, Belcarra Park), and the results show that chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) was the most commonly harvested over the over 2,000-year fishery tenure. We then reconstructed the pre-contact səl̓ilwətaɬ diet, combining archaeology, historical and archival records, ecology, and səl̓ilwətaɬ science. We used Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) to build a baseline ecosystem model of səl̓ilwət set in 1750 CE, several decades before First Contact is estimated in 1792 CE. We use this model and the reconstructed pre-contact diet to test the maximum carrying capacity of the 1750 CE səl̓ilwət ecosystem, which we estimated to be 10,000 people. Finally, we modelled the cumulative effects of smallpox, settler fisheries, the rising settler population, shoreline change and loss, and industrial and commercial pollution and development in the study area. Our results show an overall reduction in human carrying capacity of 88% and a loss of 2,331 tonnes of biomass in 12 modeled functional groups in the səl̓ilwət ecosystem over 1750-1980 CE.

Text

2024-10-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89446

Oceans and Fisheries

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/