Stand at the edge of the Nanaimo River on a still August morning — mist on the water, herons motionless in the shallows — and you are standing at the beginning of one of the oldest ceremonies on this coast.

Long before the city existed, before the coal mines and the sawmills, the Snuneymuxw people who lived along these banks understood something about the salmon that took Western science considerably longer to articulate. The fish were not a resource. They were relatives. And like any relationship worth keeping, this one required tending.

Each autumn, when the first salmon of the season entered the Nanaimo River, the Snuneymuxw welcomed it with ceremony. The fish was honoured, prepared, and shared among the community. Its bones were returned carefully to the water so that its spirit could carry word back to the other salmon — that these people remembered, that they were grateful, that the river was a worthy place to return to. An annual renewal of a promise between a people and a river. A promise the Snuneymuxw have never stopped keeping.

The chum salmon still come. Last season the Snuneymuxw fisheries guardians counted over 54,000 returning to the Nanaimo River — exceeding their own target. It is one bright thread in a fraying picture. The river runs warmer than it once did, arrives harder after rain and slower in drought, and the salmon that survive its gauntlet must still cross an ocean that is changing faster than any of us fully understand.

And yet the Snuneymuxw have not looked away. Their guardians monitor these runs with the same careful attention their ancestors brought to the riverbank — tracking the fish, studying the habitat, asking the same essential question the old ceremony always asked: are we holding up our side of the agreement?

That question now belongs to all of us who live beside this river.

With thanks to Snuneymuxw First Nation
Photography: Lynda Stevens