Hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, hey, hey.
Where do we go?
Right there with all our trapping grounds.
My grandfather and my grandmother, they had a 40 or 50 foot canoe.
It was a big long boat, but what is my boat here?
And they were able to put a mast on it.
The west wind was so strong that it would push their canoe all the way up to past Yale.
Okay, Frasier, you want to go out too?
Like this here, we call it candy when the fish is kind of too thick to dry in the wind.
We take one fillet off the middle of it, off of the tummy here, and then call it fish candy.
And when it turns orange like this, we get to test it as it's drying, like you test your food when you're cooking.
Here you go, Robert.
Oh, thank you.
That's beautiful stuff there.
Frasier, try this wind-dried salmon.
Hey, thank you, buddy.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, this one here.
These ones here, we cut them.
See, this is how we prepare the fish for drying.
You can see some, it's still dripping here, so a lot of that oil comes out of it, and then it dries.
And again, this will turn a different color.
This sockeye here is small.
They go from anywhere from four to seven pounds, and this is the early steward.
At one time, this was in so abundance that, you know, we didn't have to regulate our times to go out and dry these.
We'd get about 10, 12, 14 dozen canned in early June, so that we'd have those for winter.
And then when it got hot like this, then we started hanging the early stewards.
And sometimes we get the early summer sockeye, and it's still hot enough to dry.
And so, if you can look at those ones there, you see all these drippings coming off from here.
All this oil is coming out of the fish, eh?
Yeah.
But all your omega-3's go into the ground.
Yeah.
So this will supply all of my family.
It's made my wife and one, two, three, about eight of the children.
And a lot of them, they don't get to do this, and so we just share all of our fish.
This is like steak and lobster to the other people.
This here is one of our, it's not a luxury, it's one of the stuff that we've been doing for thousands of years to prepare for our winter.
The bears come right here and they take the fish right off of the net here and turn it around and they go back.
I don't know if they live down there, but they come and they eat whatever fish.
Then the birds, we throw all the excess stuff there.
Some of it lands on the beach and some of it goes into the water, but none of this is wasted
because when we throw it back into the water, the sturgeon eat it, and the minnows, the smaller fish like that,
they'll eat the meat right off of the fish in the water there.
This is the back bones here of the salmon.
We also dry these and in the winter time we make soup out of it because the bones have, the calcium is right in here.
These ones here, this is the tummy.
I'm told that this is the richest part of the fish because that carries all the nutrients that the fish needs inside their tummy
when they're going up the river and going to their spawning grounds.
This one here, these eggs are really small, and this is how the fish carry them.
The small eggs like this, when they're tiny like this here, they're going a long ways.
As they get close to their spawning grounds, these eggs get a little bit bigger to where they can reproduce the salmon.
As far as you can see, the other way there, that's all our traditional territory from here, and it goes back over to Mount Cheyam on that side there.
It goes over to Choloac Lakes over here, and it goes up into the Skagit, what they call the Skagit Valley there.
Silver Creek, it goes right down into the United States, and that was all our trading routes that go down through Skagit,
the Silver Creek there, and we come out by, like, Sidra Willie in Washington State,
and then up through the Coca-Cola, that was our trading routes, and then we go over to Pentikton.
And Pentikton is actually a Salish name.
In our language, it's Pentakhtin, which means where I want to spend the rest of my life.
And this here, where we're floating right now, is what we call Shohamel,
because we had the Cougar all up on the mountain there in our language as Shriwa.
And Ohamel actually means where the water becomes flat.
Our people used to come up and get the Fraser River salmon because it was so in abundance there.
When the Hudson Bay came through, and they were building that fort in Fort Langley,
and they count anywhere from 250 to 500 canoes coming up.
Coming up, and a lot of them were from Victoria, and Animo, and Duncan.
Native from Lummi, Nooksack, Swinomish, right down to what they call Sookseattle today, and down that far,
they'd come up and do their gathering of fish here in the summer.
With the railroads, with the hydro, with the pipeline, with the highways,
that has worked off all of our wildlife and all of our natural food,
because we had the blue grouse, we had the regular grouse, we had the pheasant,
we had bobcats, we had the cougar, we had the bear, we had the deer,
and the ducks, there's slews along here where the ducks would land in the fall time,
and we could go out and gather the ducks too.
And in my lifetime, with all this progress, it's killed our fish,
it's killed our snakes, from them spraying insecticide in the slews along our territory right here.
It's also killed bullfrogs, as well as the mosquitoes.
We have to live by rules and regulations, and we have to live by the clock,
because a lot of our people work today, and we have to work to survive today.
We used to never be that way, because we had all of the, like this whole valley would be our farm,
and the grouse, and pheasants, and ducks, and deer, and fish.
We had all our food, and whenever we needed food, we'd just go out fishing, or we'd go hunting,
and it didn't matter when, like all of our food was fresh.
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