In British Columbia, Canada, a handful of Indigenous guardians are making a difference in protecting the natural environment, the Guardian reports.
In this area, nature is vast. Huge swathes of forest and waterways are out of sight to government administrators, leaving them vulnerable to illegal activity.
Douglas Neasloss, the chief of the Kitasoo/Xai'xais First Nation, told the Guardian about the situation facing his people in the '90s and early 2000s.
"There were so many illegal activities in our part of the world: illegal hunting, illegal fishing — we even caught one guy doing illegal forestry," he said. "In the '90s, anybody knew that there was no law enforcement agencies up in this part of the world. We're extremely remote, only accessible by boat or plane. … It was like the wild west."
In response, he started the Kitasoo/Xai'xais Guardian Watchmen program in 2010. Partly funded by the government and partly by private money, the organization's goal is to preserve nature and back up the laws protecting it in Canada.
For the Kitasoo/Xai'xais Guardian Watchmen and the sister program of the neighboring Nuxalk Nation, that means a range of assignments.
Sometimes, the job is emergency response, which would otherwise take hours if performed by federal authorities. At other times, guardians monitor the crab population in local waters, take samples of ocean water, monitor logging operations, or perform a night patrol looking for bears in backyards.
All these tasks are important to the community, which relies on the natural surroundings as a source of food and their livelihood. Monitoring nature and performing caretaking duties is a natural extension of what the Indigenous people in this area have always done.
"You know, as First Nations, we say we have it — we've always had it, a stewardship responsibility — we've never surrendered that," Neasloss told the Guardian. Other Indigenous caretakers have also been doing their part to protect the land from disaster.
Now, Canada's government is beginning to support that claim of stewardship. According to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, as cited by the Guardian, there are about 1,000 guardians across Canada, representing 200 Indigenous communities.
Last summer, a pilot program granted five of the Nuxalk guardians and six of the Kitasoo/Xai'xais guardians park ranger status, giving them the power to issue tickets for disruptive activities such as illegal fishing.
With that authority, Nuxalk guardian Charles Saunders hopes to preserve the natural world for the next generation. "I just want my daughter to enjoy all of this that I get to enjoy," he told the Guardian. "I want her to swim in the river [and] be able to harvest everything off the land."
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