The Salish Sea Emerging Stewards kick off
Cowichan students join us for a full day of hands-on learning at UVic.
We’re very excited to be kicking off the Salish Sea Emerging Stewards Program this week with youth from the Indigenous Leadership program and other youth from the Cowichan School District. We’re in the first phase of our new three part Salish Sea Stewards program. This is the land-based preliminary learning phase where we’ll be introducing key themes and ideas that we focus on for the program.
As part of this phase, we’ve partnered with local scientists, knowledge holders and conservationists to deliver four hands-on interactive learning stations at the University of Victoria.
The Raincoast Applied Conservation Science Lab will be presenting their bear research that is currently being conducted on the central coast. The students will get the chance to become scientists and to try out some of the bear research tools and practices used.
Joe Akerman is a knowledge holder and youth educator and a leader with the Xwaaqw’um Project. He will be sharing stories and experiences with us to help us understand the land and wildlife from an Indigenous perspective.
Nicole Smith is a freelance archeologist who will help us understand the geological changes this land has gone through since the last ice age and helping us spot the clues around us in nature that help us understand the past.
Nancy Turner’s graduate students, Fiona Hamersley Chambers and Pamela Spalding, will be helping us identify local native plants and introduce us to ethnobotany.
The program will close tomorrow in the First People’s ceremonial hall with Robbie Louis, a local knowledge holder, who will be sharing some stories with us.
It takes a village to make a program like this happen. We would like to thank all our partners and supporters for helping make this possible.
You can help
Raincoast’s in-house scientists, collaborating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors make us unique among conservation groups. We work with First Nations, academic institutions, government, and other NGOs to build support and inform decisions that protect aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the wildlife that depend on them. We conduct ethically applied, process-oriented, and hypothesis-driven research that has immediate and relevant utility for conservation deliberations and the collective body of scientific knowledge.
We investigate to understand coastal species and processes. We inform by bringing science to decision-makers and communities. We inspire action to protect wildlife and wildlife habitats.
