First Nations are essentially in a never-ending battle of trying to assert their indigenous rights to manage resources, says Burt. Though British Columbia was the first Canadian province to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law in 2019, it has yet to be endorsed at a national level.
Each time we want to have one of the things we did pre-history we have to go to court, and its dragged on for decades, says Wilson. Canada has enacted blanket laws like the Fisheries Act and Indian Act that generically undermines rights of indigenous peoples to resource sovereignty on traditional territories. Yet in regaining the recognition of resource rights and sovereignty, each nation has to go separately, says Wilson. Its like having a bully at school.
Swimming forward
Though a return to their once widespread global distribution is still not secured, in its ability to come back, the sea otter is a remarkable story of resilience, says Angela Doroff, scientist with the International Union for Conservation of Natures sea otter specialist group. Sea otters have some special traits that have made a comeback possible. These, she says, include its diversity of prey, its ability to learn and share learning.
Shared learning, it appears, benefits otters and humans alike. From the beginning of the project, we have all been willing to learn from each other and trust each other, says Salomon. That positive relationship fostered between First Nations and Western scientists around study design, focus, and implementation, is not typically done in science or resource management, argues Salomon. It ought to be. It needs to be, she says.
Towards more harmonious sea otter-First Nations coexistence, Wilson sees collaborations between scientists and indigenous communities as the kind of outside the box [solutions] that we have to do.
From a purely species-driven ecological perspective, the sea otter boom along the British Columbian coast might seem like a simple success story. Otters were locally extinct. Now they are thriving and recolonising. But setting aside that narrow, colonialist conservation lens, a more complex picture emerges. The story of rebounding otters, notes Burt, is a narrative where the costs and benefits differ depending on what perspective you come from.
With First Nations increasingly leading research efforts, the next chapter of the story could benefit from a new view: that the humans that have lived alongside otters for millennia are an important thread not separate from, but woven into the rich fabric of Pacific coast ecosystems.
--
The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.
--
Join one million Future fans by liking us onFacebook, or follow us onTwitterorInstagram.
If you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories fromBBC Future,Culture,Worklife, andTravel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
--
Lesley Evans Ogden is @ljevanso on Twitter.
Go here to read the rest:
The sea otter rescue plan that worked too well - BBC News
