Since Time Immemorial is a recurring series featuring community members whose families have been here since time immemorial. The ancestral knowledge carried by Lhaq’temish, Nooksack, and other Coast Salish peoples is knowledge about how to live in our shared home in a good, life-sustaining way. We live in a time when we need to restore our relationship with Mother Earth and with one another. We are grateful for these stories, told in the words of each featured individual.
Pictured here is part of the “Nilh-le xwenang alhe tí’le Xw’otqwem” (“This is how it was here in Whatcom”) mural by Raven Borsey, Free Borsey, and Roy Nicol, located on the alleyway wall of the new Children of the Setting Sun Productions building (previously Mindport Exhibits) at 210 West Holly Street in downtown Bellingham.
Late summer, off the island now called Lummi, you’ll see reef net gear out on the water. Each gear is a pair of anchored platforms between which a net is strung. Kelp-like ribbons make the net seem like a plankton-rich reef to salmon. The reef net sites are strategically placed in the shallows, along the salmon’s ancient migration routes. It is fishing as seduction, not chase.
There were once hundreds of active reef nets sites throughout the straits, though now there are only about a dozen in use. Originally, canoes—not metal platforms—went out with the nets, and the fishing technology was interwoven with social, cultural, and spiritual systems. The reef net is unique to the Northern Straits Salish peoples, and is one of the oldest, most advanced, and most sustainable net fishing systems in the world.
Artist and scholar Xwesultun Raven Borsey is in the process of working on “Reefnetters of the Salish Sea,” bringing fuller context and the voices of reef net families and their culture keepers to noted anthropologist Wayne Suttle’s unfinished manuscript. This is our excerpted conversation about reef netting.
Raven, to start, I’m wondering if you might give us an overview of reef netting?
Well, sxwole fishing is our traditional way of fishing, and reef netting is a modern, appropriated form of it. Both are valuable in their own right. But there’s a rocky history to be acknowledged. Settler fish traps in the late 1800s cut off all the reef net sites and just wreaked havoc. And then when fish traps were banned in the 1930s, reef netting in its contemporary, appropriated form resurges, but now you have to go buy permits. It was a tactic that cut out Indigenous people because we couldn’t afford the permits. Nearly all commercial reef netting gear was owned by non-tribals up until about 10years ago, when Larry and Ellie Kinley launched their gear.
Modern commercial reef net fishing is super sustainable because there’s no by-catch, fossil fuels aren’t burned like crazy, and it doesn’t churn up ecosystems. But I get the sense that there’s much more to sxwole?
Archeology shows that there was an increase in salmon biomass during the time of traditional fishing. That increase wasn’t by mistake, it was the result of intentional stewardship over thousands of years. Sxwole is the net itself, and there’s a ring made of bent willow branch on the back. So whenever you’re pulling in the net, salmon are always escaping through this ring, this hole, and that ensures that you never catch the first or the last salmon, you never take it all. Then, there was the practice of sxwole—the year’s first catch of prime run salmon would halt all fishing across the straits and begin the First Salmon ceremony. All the families would stop fishing for this. It was a time of giving thanks, of marriages, alliances, the passing on of reef net sites. These ceremonies would last approximately 10 days, long enough to let the salmon pass through, ensuring runs for the next year.
You just mentioned the passing on of reef net sites.
Traditional sxwole fishing is a technology that has been gifted to us from the Creator. Those technologies can’t be given away, they can only be passed down by familial lineage. It’s all about kinship ties. Reef nets, since the beginning of time, have been retained within the same family groups. Upon (settler) contact, these familial tribes and tribal groups become Lummi, Samish, Semiahmah, Sooke, Saanich, Songhee, and the one band of Beecher Bay Klallam. The majority of the reef net families were assumed into these nation states, into Lummi Nation, but not everyone in these modern nations actually come from reef nets. It’s complex.
So sxwole not only reflected a reciprocal, caretaking relationship with salmon—it organized society. Anything else?
Well, she’s a female. Sxwole is a female in our culture; she provides life. She fed our families. And she didn’t only give us life. The net resembles a woman’s uterus, so the salmon swimming into the net and then out through the ring are given a second chance at life, and then they continue their journey upriver and spawn and keep the species going.
Everything is in balance. Sxwole has a relationship with Sockeye, which our people called the brother. Brother Sockeye. The male and female balance is there, is everywhere. The men are all on the crew fishing, and the technology is female. The kids up on the beach are packing the salmon up to the women and elders who are preparing the salmon, whether it’s wind dried or smoked or cooked and eaten right there on the spot. Hundreds of people were involved in this practice, everyone had a role. It was just a very beautiful and advanced social economic system.
Sxwole provided us a culture of wealth, and because of this wealth, we have a culture of giving. Even today, our people are always just giving and sharing, giving more than they receive. It’s a direct reflection of sxwole.
Hy’shqe, Raven, for sharing your words and knowledge!
