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Pacific salmon populations have been declining over the last four decades. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new tools and approaches to better inform fisheries conservation and management practices. Powerful insights can be gained by braiding genomic information with Traditional Knowledge to further understand historical changes in salmon population levels and ancient conservation methods. 

This project will illuminate how ancestral Tsleil-Waututh people developed innovative and sustainable fishing strategies to cope with salmon abundance declines. By analyzing Pacific salmon bone samples of the past 3000 years in Burrard Inlet, investigators will examine salmon abundance changes over time along with the species and sex of harvested salmon by the ancestral Tsleil-Waututh people. The selective harvesting of salmon may indicate the availability of salmon species in the region as well as a conservation strategy in action for harvesting more male salmon without jeopardizing the reproduction of salmon populations. This project will examine if male selective harvesting was a common practice through different time periods, or if it was a response to salmon abundance decline that could be caused by climatic changes. New genetic information from archaeological fish bones will generate a baseline critical for restoring culturally and ritually important salmon species in the traditional territory of Tsleil-Waututh Coast Salish people and for restoring Pacific salmon stocks on the West Coast of Canada.