Grizzly mother and cub in front of the bighouse on the Koeye river.

A bright-spot for bear conservation

On this episode of the Future Ecologies podcast, Doug (Muq’vas Glaw) Neasloss and Kyle Artelle illustrate the issues with the NAM by telling the story of provincial management of grizzly bear hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest. However, they also illustrate an alternative to the NAM, a decolonial model rooted in Indigenous sovereignty that has made the Great Bear Rainforest a bright-spot for bear conservation .

Man on a boat throwing a net into the water on a cloudy day.

Reciprocity and Research – how Raincoast and the Wuikinuxv Nation collaborated on ecosystem-based fisheries management research

It became apparent quickly that any research we did with the Wuikinuxv Nation on grizzly bears would be premised in a deep respect for the well-being of bears. This meant asking questions about the bears’ population, habitat, and food sources. There is a cultural principle in Wuikinuxv of looking ahead over each other and the lands and waters. In the Wuikinuxv language, this practice of being a guardian or a protector is called n̓àn̓akila.