CLAM GARDENS

We’ve just read Judith Williams CLAM GARDENS, ABORIGINAL MARICULTURE ON CANADA’S WEST COAST. We found it at Billy Proctor’s Museum in Echo Bay. It’s changed the whole feel of the Coast for me.

Early in my sailing days I read about an amazing light-keeper’s family at the Scarlett Point lighthouse. William Hunt of Fort Rupert, his native wife Vivian and 2 sons, went to Scarlett Point in 1908. They had 7 more sons and a daughter. William, Vivian and family kept the lighthouse for 30 years and the family thrived. The keeper who came after them ate only canned food and complained that Scarlett Point was “impregnated with the odour of smoked fish and clams.” He almost starved when the supply ship couldn’t come in. After only one winter he was taken to hospital with “gastric disturbances.”

Dried clams have been a major food source on this coast. Dipped in oolichan grease they provided a spectacular balance of protein, carbohydrates and Omega 3 oil. They were easy to store and trade. In 1792 the explorer Valdes described a gift from Chief Tetacus’s people as “dried floury fruits.” They must have been smoked clams! When I lived in Boiler Bay in Egmont, clams and oysters were our basic staples, alive and available depending only on the tide and our own efforts.

In past years, as we’ve traveled up and down the Coast, I have sometimes felt lonely, longing for human community, saddened to think of years gone by at a crumbling cannery or mill town, or watching a sunset in a long ago picturesque homestead imagining the people resting at the end of a hard-working day. The clam gardens are much older than that. And they are still here, still providing sustainable protein to people who are in touch with this coast. As we gather food, in the company of all our animal neighbours, we are also surrounded by the special places of the people who came before.

This clam garden is in Monday Anchorage in the Broughton Archipelago.

The "wuxwuthin"--clam gardens--are butter clam terraces that have been enhanced and maintained by First Nations people since before memory. Described as “making things better for the next time, removing stones,” the wuxwuthin, over time, became raised beds fronted by rock walls. Creating the rock walls not only enhanced the productivity of the clam beds, it raised the level of beds otherwise only accessible at the lowest tides.

Clam Garden rock wall

Judith Williams first became aware of the wuxwuthin while she was researching a project for the UBC Museum of Anthropology. She talked with Elizabeth Harry (Keekus) of Sliammon Village, and decided to visit Waiatt Bay on Quadra Island where Keekus’s family still harvest “the best clams on the coast.” This visit was the beginning of her enthusiam for clam gardens. But she found a strange silence in the whole body of research about them. “It was perplexing to think that many theories about West Coast Native culture had been formulated by observers who had taken little note of Native husbandry and who were, apparently, unaware of the clam gardens that produced one of the dietary staples.” Why has the evidence of clam gardens been ignored? Perhaps because clams were dug by women and children. Male anthropologists were more interested in hunting, fishing and masculine ritual lore.

Note one delightful detail from an elder: We didn’t harvest the beds closest to the village in the winter. We left those for the grandmas and the aunties who stayed behind when we went fishing and food-gathering in the summer. We would even stock them with clams, cockles and sea urchins for them to gather.

Clam garden with canoe access,

By paying attention to native oral history, knowledge about clam gardens has grown. There are now 365 clam garden sites recognized. This awareness opens our eyes to who these people were and are on the land. As we travel the Coast we see or are reminded of silverweed patches, camas and chocolate lily fields, carefully tended berry patches, culturally modified trees. Historically, coastal First Nations people were not simply hunter-gatherers; they were people who sustainably cared for the land and gently enhanced its ability to produce food.

field of chocolate lilies

Culturally modified tree

Grace Harbour

We have often anchored in Grace Harbour in Okeover Inlet. When Thomas first heard about clam gardens he felt sure this was one. It turns out that this was a winter village, and the upper and lower clam beaches are still harvested. There was a Big House; winter ceremonials included the lovely islet that was used as a podium

Grace Islet

Learning to walk in a clam garden

Codville Lagoon Pictograph.

Another favourite spot turns out to have pictographs and a clam garden!

Billy Proctor directed us to our first clam garden in the Broughton Islands, and from there we have discovered more clam gardens, just by looking closely at low tide. From Judith’s book we learned that Billy has been creating his own clam garden for over 40 years, harvesting it carefully each winter.

Billy Proctor on his dock

Thomas remembers being in Strasbourg, France, one summer. The people there were celebrating their 2000th anniversary. Our family property in Crippen Cove, originally a First Nations site in Metlakatla Pass, goes back 5000 years. Human habitation at Namu goes back almost 10,000 years!

Often when we come into a First Nations’ site we are met by the “old ones”--the spirits who are still very much there. And the spirits are very often women; maybe because it was the women who cared for the land—the clam gardens, berry patches, silverweed and camas fields. And so, as we slip quietly into a cove with a terraced beach at low tide, somehow I’m not lonely anymore.
And we might just start a clam garden for our grandchildren at Crippen Cove.


Books:
CLAM GARDENS, Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast, Judith Williams, New Star Books, Vancouver, 2006.
LIGHTS OF THE INSIDE PASSAGE, Donald Graham, Harbour Publishing, 1986.
HEART OF THE RAINCOAST, A Life Story, Alexandra Morton and Billy Proctor, First TouchWood Edition, 1998.
FULL MOON, FLOOD TIDE, Bill Proctor’s Raincoast, Bill Proctor and Yvonne Maximchuk, Harbour Publishing, 2003. (Bill’s section on clam gardens pp. 33-35, expresses the same awe we are experiencing.)

Links:
http://vancouver.kijiji.ca/c-events-Archaeological-Society-of-BC-Dr-John-Harper-Clam-Gardens-W0QQAdIdZ53734826

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/02/08/ClamGardens/

Native Ingenuity, Christopher Arrnett
http://greatanotherone.googlepages.com/LRCArnettJan-Feb2007.pdf.

SFU research
http://www.sfu.ca/pamr/media_releases/media_releases_archive/media_release06020801.html