Bill Green Interview – Salmon Negotiations

Bill Green, director of the Canadian Columbia River Inter-tribal Fisheries Commission, discusses the process of fighting to bring the salmon back.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Bill Green – a bald white man with short grey beard. Wearing a red plaid shirt. He is sitting in a chair in front of the corner of a room. There are black and white photos on the wall.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:
In uh 1956 the Columbia Lake Indian band, now at Akisq’nuk, wrote to the government and said: ‘Hey, we’ve lost our salmon.

It used to be profoundly important to Ktunaxa people and to our community and we would like you to work to bring those salmon back.’

That was the first effort and the efforts have continued.

The Indigenous nations created the Canadian Columbia River Intertribal Fisheries Commission in 1993 and um and began the work to fight to restore salmon.

For the last 25 years where the Indigenous nations have been saying: ‘Canada and B.C. we need you to work with us to bring the salmon back, we can’t do it ourselves.

You’ve got the laws and the regulations and you have the financial capacity to-to work with us to make this happen.’

And we really didn’t make much progress on that front until a couple of years ago.

And what changed was we had uh, both at the federal and provincial level, we had uh governments that had committed to the U.N – to, and first of all endorsed the U.N Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they endorsed the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and-and embraced the concept of reconciliation.

That led to, ultimately, to a letter of agreement between the five governments about how we’re going to-to work together to restore the salmon, that was signed on July 29th of 2019, and might think I’m crazy just to get really excited about a piece of paper, but it’s a piece of paper we’ve been working on for 25 years.

Main thing is the Indigenous nations are working really hard on this and they are saying it’s vital to get the salmon back.

Yes there are huge challenges, um, but they’re also saying look, we, three generations of Indigenous people have not had access to salmon and have not had, you know, meaningful amounts of salmon in their diet and so it’s time to change that.