From crab monitoring and bear patrols to rescue operations, the watchmen are the official eyes and ears of indigenous communities
Charles Saunders shows off a Dungeness crab, caught as part of a population survey by the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen. Photograph: All pictures by Jimmy Thomson/The Guardian
For Mack, being chosen to join the guardians was a godsend. “I had no idea what I was going to do with my life,” she says. Saunders and Mack are the same age, and went to school together. But while Mack took her time finding her way to the guardians, Saunders was quick to join up – though he maintains he was “tricked into this job” by his late mother, a skilled medicine woman who wanted him to have job security. She got what she hoped for: this year is his eighth as a guardian.
The depopulation of so much of the area, on top of its remoteness from government power centres, has made it vulnerable. Douglas Neasloss, the chief of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation, had to confront this while working as an ecotourism guide at the start of the 2000s. “There were so many illegal activities in our part of the world: illegal hunting, illegal fishing – we even caught one guy doing illegal forestry.
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