Mysterious fi sh traps in Nootka Sound..................Pages 8

sh traps have been documented in the remote area, but the wear of the ages is raising the urgency to share their secrets

Photos by Eric Plummer sh trap can still be found by Cougar Creek in Nootka Sound. Archaeologist Yvonne Marshall speculated that “it may have been possible to Rugged, but extensively occupied

While growing up in Yuquot, Ray Williams heard about these traps from elders, and even remembers seeing the remains of the wooden weirs in some rivers. But even his intimate knowledge of the area was enriched when Yvonne Marshall began her archaeological studies of Nootka Sound in 1989, in partnership with the Mowachaht/ Muchalaht First Nation. The project was initiated to gain a better understanding of why a confederacy of local tribes was formed in Nootka Sound at the time of fi rst contact with Europeans in the late 18th century, and how this political structure was maintained. Much of Nootka Sound is a rugged collection of islands and remote coastal areas, but the project’s three years of surveys revealed that the region was extensively occupied by previous generations of Indigenous people. Marshall documented 25 burial sites, eight pictograph paintings on rock faces and 92 sites related to First Nations habitation. “Virtually any reasonably fl at, inhabitable location, and others of less inviting aspect, have evidence of occupation,” wrote Marshall in 1992. The project identifi ed 18 stone-walled fi sh traps, a relatively mysterious method of harvesting that Marshall speculated could have been used to collect bait fi sh. “The function of the stone walled fi sh

traps is poorly understood,” she admitted. “There is little ethnographic information to assist interpretation and Nuu-chah-nulth people today know little of their use.” But the location of the stone traps indicate a similar approach to the well-documented river methods, as the sites were used to conveniently catch a volume of fi sh where they naturally congregate. “Many of the traps are built in protected, nested bays so that the trap itself forms an enclosure within one or more larger enclosures,” wrote Marshall. “This placement is suggestive of an extended drivelane system, which culminates in the trap itself. Small schooling fi sh such as herring, pilchards or anchovy could possibly have been captured this way.” It’s also possible that the bays where these stone traps were placed were used to harvest another species. “Ray Williams informed us that these locations are popular with seals in winter,” explained Marshall, “the seals like to follow and possibly chase schooling herring and other small fi sh into the naturally enclosed areas within which many of the fi sh traps are built.” On the outer coast of Nootka Island near Beano Creek, Ray’s father once used a cave to hunt the pinnipeds. “The stories that my father told me too was that they used to enter a cave back here,” explains Ray. “They would sit on a shelf of rock waiting for the tide to go down so the seals could appear where they were laying…He said they left their harpoons in there for harpooning seal.” Within Nootka Sound Ray recalls a cave in Hannah Channel, near a spot where a pictograph of a bird is still visible high on the side of a rock cliff . Many years ago he found a harpoon attached to cedar rope in the cave, but this tool is now missing, he said.

Williams looks over a fi sh trap in Valdez Bay, which has stone walls that arc out of the tidal area. eight inches apart,” described the Englishman. “At the end of it tapers almost to a point, near which is a small wicker door for sh.” The practice yielded a considerable harvest, indicating why salmon-bearing rivers were often the territory of certain families and chiefs who oversaw the resources. Jewitt observed another method used by the Mowachaht for catching salmon. “This pot or weir is placed at the foot of a fall or rapid where the water is not very sh, driven from above with long poles, are intercepted and caught in , from whence they are taken in the canoes,” he wrote. “In this manner I have seen more than 700 salmon caught in the publishing a study in 1951 that has since been frequently referenced. He wrote little of tidewater stone traps, but observed a lattice composed of fi r poles and boughs which was placed in tidal fl ats by the mouth of a river. The weir was designed to be submerged as the water level rose, and was used in combination with a cone-shaped trap made of branches, held in the river by fi r poles. “Such a trap was set with the mouth upstream and well submerged, the closed end downstream and raised by shears just out of the water,” wrote Drucker. “A weir was built to turn the fi sh into the trap. The force of the water carried them high and dry into the raised end. As the salmon could neither go back down or turn around, they stayed in the end till they died. Now and then a fi sh might wriggle or fl op around and escape, but this did not happen often.”

You belong here

The Williams family still eats seal, but this practice has become a rare exception among their fellow Mowachaht/Muchalaht members. “The meat gets really soft and black when they smoke it,” describes Ray. “The fat is really oily.” His family is the only household to remain in Yuquot since the First Nation began relocating its members to Gold River in the late 1960s. Ray remained over the years, despite repeated off ers to move to the lessremote reserve, where a house could be built for his family. When asked what life would have been like if he left Yuquot, he immediately thinks of the place before himself. “It would have been walked over by tourists, campers, fi shermen,” says Ray. “That thought never came to my mind. I always thought that my family would continue living here after I’m gone. I already told them so.” He recalls the words of Terri Williams from years ago, his late wife of almost 60 years who passed in 2020. “She told me one day that I belong here. And then I spoke up and I said, ‘I agree with you, dear.’ She felt comfort when I said that, she smiled at me.”