Ecological legacy of Indigenous dispossession: disruption of ancestral sea gardens by commercial clam fisheries in British Columbia, 1882–1985
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ancestral sea gardens in British Columbia (BC) were managed to provide high long-term yields for millennia before European contact. While the ubiquity and productivity of sea gardens are well known, the ecological and cultural impact of the transition from ancestral to settler-colonial fisheries has not been investigated in a historical ecology context. Here, we examine that transition in the BC clam fishery, documenting the social and legal mechanisms used to dispossess Indigenous clam harvesters and identifying the ecological impacts of settler-colonial fisheries. Our results document a rapid change in clam tending, harvesting and processing that relied on Indigenous land, knowledge, labour and skill being directed away from traditional harvesting and towards unsustainable catches for commercial gain. We identify evidence of serial depletions and declines in relative abundance as measured by spatial shifts in harvesting, declines in catch per unit of effort, and a transition from native to non-native clam species. Finally, we identify additional evidence of the legacy of Indigenous tending 50 years after the start of the commercial fishery, demonstrating sustained productivity on beaches that continued to undergo Indigenous harvesting. Ongoing efforts in BC aim to restore ancestral clam beaches and tending practices. Historical insights can play a crucial role in restoration efforts by identifying ecological baselines and helping support the Indigenous reclamation of ocean spaces and the responsibility to tend them.This article is part of the theme issue 'Shifting seas: understanding deep-time human impacts on marine ecosystems'.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".