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'Bringing beaches back to life': the First Nations restoring ancient clam gardens

On winter nights for the past six years, a group of 20 people have rustled through dark, coniferous woods to emerge on a Canadian beach at the lowest possible tide, illuminated by a correspondingly full moon.

An elder offers a greeting to the place and a prayer, then the team of researchers, volunteers, and First Nations “knowledge holders” lights a warming fire and begins its work. At sites outlined by stones placed hundreds or even thousands of years ago, some begin raking, or “fluffing”, the top three inches of the beach, loosening rocks and mud - and a remarkable number of old clam shells.

When the tide comes back in, it will flush out any rotting organic matter, changing “some places that are compact and smelly into a good clam beach again”, says Skye Augustine, a member of the Stz’uminus First Nation.

This spot was once a clam garden, an ancient indigenous form of mariculture that coastal First Nations people have used for millennia. It is estimated that they once numbered in the thousands along the Pacific north-western coast, though ruins are all that’s left of most. In collaboration with the W̱SÁNEĆ and Hul’q’umi’num nations, Augustine has spearheaded the first formal clam garden rehabilitations at two sites in the Gulf Islands, in British Columbia, with dozens more to follow.

It forces us to rethink humans as only having negative impacts on our ecosystem and remember that for millennia we had really positive ones

“My elders articulated to me that if we want to bring our beaches back to life again, we need to bring people back on to them to care for them as they have been cared for in the past. That became my inspiration for my education and career,” she says. “How do we make this clam garden thing happen?”

For millennia pre-colonization, clam gardens epitomized sustainable food security for Pacific north-western coastal nations from northern Washington to south-eastern Alaska. Modern studies have found that clam gardens have historically been up to 300% more productive than unmodified beaches, that their clams grew larger and faster than average, and that the clams did not exhibit any signs of resource stress from over-harvesting.

To create the beaches, indigenous people built rock walls parallel to a beach’s low tide line, which would trap sediment and flatten the slope of the shore. With continuing tending, such as tilling to improve aeration and the removal of predators like sea stars, these gardens increase or create habitat for butter, littleneck, and horse clams, as well as crabs, chitons, seaweeds, and other useful species.

Recent carbon dating has revealed that the oldest clam garden known to science was built about 3,500 years ago. This runs counter to misconceptions that prevailed during colonial settlement of Canada – that First Nations peoples were foragers without established agricultural practices. Such ideas were used as justification for damaging policies that displaced communities from their ancestral lands and criminalized traditional practices.

“It has always been our duty to be the stewards of the land,” says group member Nicole Norris, a knowledge holder for the Hul’q’umi’num and an aquaculture specialist. “It is the exact same land my ancestors walked, and all we are doing is completing the work that they started.”

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One day, Norris anticipates bringing younger generations of her family to these beaches to harvest again. “From the work that we’ve done, we’ve seen the greater ecosystem return – some of the people who live in the local communities have talked about the return of certain birds and plants, and that’s been heartwarming,” she says.

In addition to providing food, clam gardens have historically provided the opportunity for “grandparents, aunties, and uncles to spend time at the beach with their grandchildren and younger generations, not only teaching about how to tend the environment … but sharing stories, language, spiritual ties to the place,” says Melissa Poe, who specializes in the social and cultural dimensions of ecosystems at the University of Washington.

As the British Columbia restoration effort is demonstrating, clam gardens also help to challenge the idea that the only relationship humans can have with nature is a rapacious one.

“I think that one of the most important things about restoring these places is that it requires that we restore people’s relationships with them,” says Augustine. “It forces us to rethink humans as only having negative impacts on our ecosystem, and remember that for millennia we have had really positive and reciprocal relationships with the places we belong to, and we can have those kinds of relationships once again.”