Salmon Bone Study Reveals First Nation Fishing Practice

TORONTO, CANADA—The Guardian reports that a new study of salmon bones recovered from four archaeological sites around western Canada’s Burrard Inlet suggests that the Tsleil-Waututh people, who fished with large weirs, released female salmon preparing to spawn in order to keep the population healthy. The ancient salmon bones, dated to between 400 B.C. and A.D. 1200, were overwhelmingly male, explained Jesse Morin, archaeologist for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and the University of British Columbia. “If you take a good number of the males out of the system,” Morin said, “the remaining males can still mate with the females to no detriment to the population.” The weirs were torn down by European colonizers, he added. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Scientific Reports. To read about salmon consumption among Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, go to "Around the World: Washington."