November 23, 2023 — One after another, salmon leapt out of the water and hurtled themselves at the falls, propelled by instinct to move upriver. They, like all Pacific salmon, were born in freshwater, migrated to the ocean and were now returning as adults to their natal streams to spawn and die. But the Fraser River was running low after months of drought. At this stretch near the Bridge River Rapids in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, the water was so low in mid-October that the salmon couldn’t access their usual passage up the fish ladder. Instead, they were desperately trying to find another way over the rocks, but they couldn’t make it.
For these fish, help was at hand. For days, members and friends of the Xwísten, an Indigenous group that is part of the St’át’imc Nation and whose territory encompasses this traditional fishing spot, scooped up salmon with large dip nets, passed them hand to hand in a human chain up the rocks, and released them above the falls. In all, they moved more than 7,000 fish. Eventually machinery was brought in; an all-terrain excavator chiseled out rocks to ease the salmon’s transit over the falls, and a helicopter dropped sandbags to raise the water level near the fish ladder.
“The project to save the fish is important to not only our community but to the St’at’imc Nation and many other Nations along the Fraser River,” says Xwísten Chief Ina Williams via text. “There are many animals, four-legged and winged, that also rely on the fish.”