Oweekeno: Life On The Brink

by Eric Hancsak
July 15, 2005

What would you do if one day everything in your life changed? The food you ate was no longer plentiful... Your livelihood disappeared... The life you and your ancestors knew for generations suddenly was overturned...

This very thing happened to the Oweekeno people of British Columbia.

The Oweekeno are a group of native people who have lived in the rugged and densely wooded terrain on the Wanook River for over 9000 years. During the summer of 1999 their small town became the feeding ground of numerous grizzly bears. The bears scavenged the trash, and even entered homes in search if food, disrupting daily life in the community while putting themselves and the Oweekeno people at risk. While the ravaging continued, the towns-people noticed something strange about the bears. They were all emaciated and well under their normal weight.

As the days passed the bears became more aggressive and desperate in their search for food, ignoring gun shots and hunting dogs. The bears became weak with starvation and many died. The ones that survived starvation had to be put down for the safety of the community. All told 14 bears and their cubs were destroyed.

These bears that had spent their entire existence feeding out of the Wanook River, never bothering the Oweekeno people, suddenly had nothing to eat. What had caused this change? Knowing that the grizzlies feed off sockeye salmon, the Oweekeno evaluated the Wanook River. To their shock, the fish were all but gone. What was once bustling with millions of sockeye salmon, was now just a barren waterway. At one time the locals estimated that nearly 3 million sockeyes made their way up the river every summer to spawn. In 1999, they counted 3500.

Along with the bears, and salmon, the bald eagles, who had once populated the area so densely the locals described the trees as looking like decorated Christmas trees, disappeared too. They either died or were forced to move on to other habitat.

All this because of one species.

Sockeye salmon are sensitive creatures. Even slight changes to their habitat, like a mere 1 degree of water temperature change, can alter their feeding and migration habits. After a thorough investigation by locals and environmental authorities, they were able to determine that it was, in fact, a combination of environmental problems that caused the fish to stop migrating:

- Overfishing by commercial fishermen reduced the salmon's numbers quicker than they could reproduce.

- Deforestation allowed for accelerated erosion to occur in the area thus clouding the river with sediment.

- Climate change caused the average water temperature to rise several degrees making it too warm for the salmon to live and spawn.

Since 1999, the salmon's numbers have risen slightly due to the continuing efforts of some outside authorities. But those numbers are nowhere close to what they once were. Because of this, a town that over 3000 people once called home is now a town of less than 300. With the salmon went many of the jobs. This community with 9000 years of history is forced to start over.

While the salmon population of western Canada is something that may not directly affect you or me in the near term, it very likely can down the road. We as humans are not immune to the abuses of natural resources that occur thousands of miles away. What we do at home can and will impact our neighbors. Some way. Some time.

A story like that of the Oweekeno people is all too common. It demonstrates how fragile an ecosystem can be while illustrating the vulnerability of its human residents.