Where the Savior Fish Still Swims

On the Nass River, in the lands of the Nisg̱a’a Nation along British Columbia’s northern coast, the ropes holding two aluminum skiffs strain as the ocean yanks back its tidal waters. Hidden beneath the turbulent surface, thousands of smelts known as eulachon, each about the size of the blade of a chef’s knife, jostle in the rushing water.

If the night ahead goes as one local fishing crew hopes, the racing water will sweep some of those fish right into the gaping steel-frame mouth of their submerged net. At times, when the run is strong, the crew needs only to sink and unfurl their net. Then “bam,” as one fisherman puts it, “the net’s full.” Hundreds of eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) will flash silver as they tumble into the holds of the skiff, filling it within a few hours. The crew from Walter’s Camp, one of a handful of Nisg̱a’a fishing camps along the stretch of river known as Fishery Bay, can then putter back to shore. There, they’ll shovel their catch into a bin or burlap sacks, then warm up in their cabin, with its wood-burning stove and impressive supply of packaged cookies, to wait for the next excursion.

The annual return of spawning eulachon to the Nass River from the sea, where they spend most of their lives, often coincides with winter’s last blast. Some years fishers have to drill boreholes in a thick cap of ice; other years they dodge icebergs as big as bears that can capsize a boat or destroy a net. Traditionally, Nisg̱a’a and other Indigenous peoples relied on the eulachon spawn to deliver them from hunger at winter’s end, earning the fish the heady titles of “savior” or “salvation fish.”

Though Nisg̱a’a don’t depend on eulachon for basic survival anymore, excitement still ripples through Gitlaxt’aamiks, Gitwinksihlkw, Laxgalts’ap, and Gingolx—the nation’s four villages, spread out along the Nass—when the spawning forerunners appear. Someone might catch the first few fish with a dip net and share them with elders, everyone eager for the first taste. Then camp bosses, who have spent the preceding weeks assembling crews and stockpiling supplies, prepare to harvest in earnest.

As the fishers gather, so do hundreds of gulls and eagles. So many gulls can appear at once that the flock shivers across the sky like an apparition. “My grandmother would say, ‘When you see the white ghost coming up the valley, you know the eulachon are coming,’” says fisherman Ian Morven. There are so many birds in Fishery Bay some seasons, locals insist, that you cannot see the sky. One observer in the mid-1800s compared the spectacle to a heavy snowfall. The birds feast and squabble and take river-rafting adventures on driftwood as it surfs toward the river’s terminus, roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the west, where the water spills into Portland Inlet, north of Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

I flew in, too, on wings made of metal, to witness the eulachon fishing tradition at the invitation of Nicole Morven, harvest monitoring coordinator with the Nisg̱a’a government’s fisheries and wildlife department. (She is related through marriage to fisherman Ian Morven.) At a time when global fish stock collapses have become too commonplace, the opportunity to witness abundance was alluring. Eulachon once visited an estimated 100 glacial-fed mainland rivers between southwestern Alaska and northern California, and many Indigenous communities throughout the region have their own deep relationships with the oily fish. But beginning in the 1990s, the species suffered a drastic decline throughout much of its range, disappearing from some rivers altogether. The Nass River, which has always had one of the largest eulachon runs within the artificial boundaries of Canada, managed to remain relatively stable. In a good year, it still receives millions of the fish.

Why eulachon still manage strong returns here, and in most eulachon-bearing rivers farther north in Alaska, but not to others is largely a mystery. It’s also a source of dismay for those communities whose own deep connection to the fish has been interrupted. Eulachon are both nutritional wonders—nuggets of health-sustaining fatty acids, protein, iron, and vitamins—and a deeply storied animal, with cultural and historical significance that links Indigenous peoples to one another and to their traditional homelands. Every year, a small but dedicated group of Nisg̱a’a fishers seizes the opportunity to greet oolies, as they’re affectionately called, in the Nass once more. At the same time, their government does what it can in these quickly changing, climatically unstable, economically complicated times to ensure that the fish will keep coming home over the long run—and that the harvest will be able to continue without interference.

Home for the Nisg̱a’a is a dramatic place, crisscrossed by icy rivers and punctuated by jagged mountain ridges overhead and the crunchy remains of an old lava flow underfoot. The landmark Nisg̱a’a Final Agreement of 2000, the first treaty signed in British Columbia in 100 years, solidified Nisg̱a’a ownership of roughly 2,000 square kilometers (800 square miles) of land that the Nisg̱a’a people have inhabited for many thousands of years. The agreement also guaranteed the right to fish and hunt in a much larger area.

In this sparsely populated expanse—roughly an hour’s drive from grocery stores in the nearest city of Terrace, British Columbia—people can still turn to the ecosystem outside their front doors as a source of nourishment.

Many Nisg̱a’a mark the beginning of their harvesting year by feeding on the fat-rich eulachon—fried, smoked, sun-dried, or rendered into a beloved oil called “grease.” Some eat grease every day, often slathered on toast or as a condiment. One fisherman tells me he consumes as much as 53 liters (more than 11 gallons) a year and keeps a collection of vintages to sample from, like cellared wine. Traditionally, grease was paired with seaweed, roe, and berries; it has also been used to preserve fruits, as medicine and ointment, and to lubricate tools. Nicole Morven, my host, says she once enlisted it to revive a cat dying from antifreeze poisoning. She dribbled some into the animal’s mouth with a syringe as it lay motionless. “A few hours later, it was back to normal.”

Following the eulachon catch, the harvest cycle continues, as locals hunt sea lions that chase the smelts up river. Soon after, salmon start to arrive. The Nisg̱a’a especially covet the sockeye, which comes early in the season and which they smoke, can, or freeze. Into the fall, community members harvest mushrooms and hunt moose. Represented on paper, the sustenance cycle is a circle. Or, a bowl. The Nisg̱a’a “have one bowl to eat from in this valley,” says an unnamed source in the book Nisg̱a’a People of the Nass River. It is “known as Ts’ak’hl Nisg̱a’a, Nisg̱a’a Bowl.”

The Nass River lies at the heart of that cycle. The Nisg̱a’a traditionally called it “Lisims,” a word in their language for murky. It’s said that when English captain George Vancouver visited in 1793, the neighboring Tlingit nation, whose traditional lands are concentrated in southeast Alaska, told him that the river’s name was “Ewen Nass”—the great or powerful food basket—and Nass is what landed on the maps. Tlingit oral history positions the river as the origin of eulachon stocks farther north: It’s said that, long ago, a Tlingit visitor intercepted a single eulachon as it approached the Nass, tied a string to it, and towed it home to the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers in Alaska.

Out on the water, the sky has turned inky and the bite in the air has grown fangs. “Are your hands cold?” one man asks his son, a high schooler who has come eulachon harvesting for the first time. “If so, just put them in the ocean.” The other fishers nod. “It’s an old trick,” another chimes in. “A few minutes later they’ll be steaming.”

I consider my own numb fingers and toes, but can’t bring myself to extract them from their wool cocoons long enough to dunk them into the ice-rimmed tidal river. Another warming technique some locals swear by is to plunge hands into a pailful of maggots—alas, no wriggling larvae have accompanied us onboard tonight.

The half dozen seasoned fishermen out this evening seem unaffected by the nostril-lancing cold. Grease—and adrenaline—keeps their blood running warm, they claim. Simon Haldane*, the camp’s boss, a burly man with a quietly rumbling voice, seems perfectly comfortable in a thin hoodie and overalls, while I’m still shivering despite wearing so many layers that my elbows no longer work. He incorporated grease into his diet with a teaspoon a day, advanced to a shot glass, and then worked up to a coffee-mug portion. (Too much too soon can, ahem, “clean your system out,” he explains.) “Now I swear I’m impervious to cold,” he says.

Tonight, the cold is the least of it. The river is hurling obstacles like a video-game villain chucks flaming discs. Earlier, before the Walter’s Camp fishers even managed to position their two skiffs side by side and drop their net, two logs careened into the hull of one boat and tangled in the anchor lines. A couple of crewmembers managed to shove one away. Fisherman Peter Smith struggled with the other, a tree trunk that matched his own size. He grunted and swore and sweated until he finally dislodged it and collapsed into the bow.

Now, another canoe-sized log, turned sideways, is barreling toward us, fast. With a grappling hook in hand, fisherman Lonny Stewart vaults out of the skiff and into a small speedboat used to support the fishing operation, and the driver guns the motor to intercept the log. As the rest of us gape, Stewart manages to plant his hook into one end of the log and laboriously swing it around. It swerves back and forth, like a trailer threatening to come off its hitch on the highway, and barely misses us. But both boat and log are now on a collision course with another fishing crew set up about 100 meters (330 feet) downriver; as the boat gets whisked along, Stewart ducks under the other crew’s anchor lines and manages to just thread the log past their net and boat. Haldane, who was quietly narrating impending disaster beside me throughout the operation, lets out a breath and hoots. “You the man, Lonny! I didn’t doubt you for a second!”

He turns back to the rest of us in the boat. “That’s enough excitement for one night.”

Long ago, well before modern commitments got in the way, Fishery Bay was a major eulachon processing center. Thousands of locals and visitors would gather along the river’s banks for the harvest. Families would spend months here, and the shoreline was busy with homes, at least one church, and sky-high drying racks. In the 1800s, the Nisg̱a’a pulled up and processed an estimated 2,000 metric tons (4.4 million pounds) of eulachon each year. With an average eulachon weighing around 40 grams (1.4 ounces), that equates to a staggering 50 million fish or more.

As the drumbeat of assimilation, industrialization, and globalization picked up pace, activity at Fishery Bay began to wane. The two world wars marked significant periods of decline, as young, capable members signed up for military efforts, says Sim’oogit Hleek (also known as Harry Nyce Sr.), who serves as the director of fisheries and wildlife for the Nisg̱a’a government. “After that, industry came into the valley.” Employment in commercial fishing and logging operations and the canning industry kept people busy, while the new influx of money tended to shift attention away from traditional activities and toward Western goods, he says. Canada’s shameful residential school system also robbed many young people of knowledge—Sim’oogit Hleek among them. He was sent away as a child. When he returned to the Nass valley, Sim’oogit Hleek says, “I did not have the traditional experience to partake [in the eulachon harvest]. So, that was unfortunate for me.”

Though the number of Nisg̱a’a members harvesting eulachon has diminished over time, as have their catches, the fish’s significance to Nisg̱a’a culture remains strong. Today, fishers sign on as their work schedules and other responsibilities permit. In the early 2000s, a road was carved into the river’s forested edge, connecting Fishery Bay to the four year-round villages and making it easier for fishers to come and go. The Nisg̱a’a operate as many as six camps each year, spread along the north bank of Fishery Bay. Members of one of the Tsimshian nations, whose traditional territory spans the northwest coast of B.C., run an additional camp a little farther downstream.

The first priority during the harvest is for any members in the community who want eulachon to have “a feed”—a loosely defined quantity roughly equivalent to a mixing bowl’s worth of fresh eulachon per family. Then the crews fill wooden bins big enough to pen a small farm animal. Those fish “ripen” for days until they’re ready to be rendered into grease. Their smell goes from barely detectable to noticeably fishy to downright nauseating. (Nicole Morven affectionally calls it a “repugnant stench.”) Once the bin is full, the rest of the harvest goes to community members, to compensate the crew, and for trade.

When it’s time to make grease, each camp has its own proprietary process, just as each has its own fishing strategies. The details are not mine to share. As I chat with the Walter’s Camp crew in their cabin—a rustic one-room hut with notes scribbled on the plywood walls from past visitors, sleeping bunks in a loft, a compact kitchen, and a TV lounge tucked behind the stairs—Lonny Stewart worries I’ve learned too many details. “Don’t write that down!” he pleads when another fisherman describes an aspect of the crew’s setup. Eulachon harvesting and grease making are age-old art forms. The magic is in the details, and some prefer those details be shared on a need-to-know basis. Stewart does, however, open a Mason jar of grease from the shelf for me to sample. He holds it up so the solidified oil inside gleams gold in the window light before offering a taste. It has a roasted, almost-nutty flavor. Fishy, but much more subtle than the smell implied by the fermenting fish outside.

Past generations often traded their grease or allowed others the right to fish in exchange for furs, blankets, or other goods. Grease was such a commodity that the routes Indigenous peoples traveled from the interior to acquire it are known as “grease trails.” Today’s eulachon harvesters are more likely to sell grease or trade fish for camp necessities like boat fuel, building supplies, and rope, or for seafood such as herring eggs. As I chat with Haldane at Walter’s Camp one afternoon, a pale, curly-haired man knocks on the door. “I’m hoping to get some oolies. I’ve got 50 liters of gas to trade. What’ll that get me?” Haldane thinks for a moment. “Six sacks.” Roughly 68 kilograms (150 pounds) of fish for 11 gallons of gas. The customer nods and goes off with one of the other fishers to do the trade. Visitors stop by to trade for eulachon every day the camp is running, Haldane tells me.

Mostly, eulachon stays within the Nisg̱a’a community. While the harvest is underway, locals throughout the villages are busily processing tubs of fresh fish. After marinating the eulachon in brine long enough for the eyes to turn white, some “stick” the fish for smoking, puncturing them under the jaw to thread a long rod through their mouths, or pushing one eulachon’s head through the lower jaw bone of another so the two form the shape of an arrowhead, and then hanging them in a smokehouse. Personal smokehouses are as common in the Nass valley as backyard sheds might be in suburbia. At a community smokehouse center in Gitlaxt’aamiks, students use another preservation method—stringing eulachon up on a triangular structure called a ganet to dry in the wind. When the fish are ready, the students distribute them throughout the village. Sharing is engrained in the culture of the harvest and extends beyond the four villages. Every year, the community sends a truckload of eulachon to “urban locals”—Nisg̱a’a members who live in Vancouver, Terrace, and Prince Rupert. Some camps also supply the fish to other nations, such as the Nuxalk in Bella Coola. Modern-day grease trails are paved and plied with cars and trucks, but they’re still an important pathway in the eulachon economy.

Driving the winding road that connects Fishery Bay to the villages, Morven slows so she doesn’t miss the hand-hewn wooden sign marking the trailhead to Walter’s Camp. She nudges the government pickup onto the gravel shoulder, slips on her mittens and shoulders a backpack, then heads down the forested trail, shuffling so as not to fall on the hard-packed ice. She’s in pursuit of eulachon today, too—but she’s fishing for information, rather than sustenance.

When she reaches the camp’s grease bin, she kneels in her snowpants, pulls out a freezer bag, and counts 50 freshly caught fish to bring back to her office, where she and her colleagues will record their length, weight, sex, and whether they appear to have spawned or not. They’ll also check for parasites—they find them very infrequently, perhaps once a year. Morven visits the fishing camps periodically to take samples, gathering 300 to 500 each season, and record harvesting stats from each crew. Her work is part of a larger effort by the Nisg̱a’a Nation to monitor the health of the run. Her department watches trends and patterns, seeing if catch numbers are consistent with effort year over year—one indicator that the population is holding steady—and if the eulachon are relatively consistent in size and apparent health. “I think about the generation behind us. We’re trying to keep the tradition going so we have resources for future generations,” Morven says.

No one can say exactly how abundant eulachon were in the past, or how many there are today. Eulachon is what fisheries folk call a “data poor species,” with few in-depth, long-term monitoring projects throughout its range. Like other small forage fish, it is highly variable by nature and heavily influenced by oceanic conditions, notes marine biologist Robert Anderson of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Historical accounts indicate that eulachon numbers have crashed and rebuilt more than once, though a 2017 NOAA report notes that eulachon were abundant enough to sustain more than a century of “unrestrained harvest opportunities throughout the range of the species.”

In addition to subsistence and recreational harvesting, eulachon have fueled a number of commercial fisheries. South of the U.S.-Canada border, for example, on the Columbia River, which straddles Washington and Oregon and has historically hosted the world’s largest eulachon run, commercial fishers regularly scooped 1,000 metric tons (2.2 million pounds) or more per year up until the 1990s. The Nass supported one of the most lucrative fisheries in British Columbia, peaking at about 900 metric tons (2 million pounds) a year before it closed in the 1940s. (After closing it for a few years, authorities have recently allowed a small commercial fishery to resume on the Columbia, with fishers taking an annual average of 5.6 metric tons. And in Cook Inlet, Alaska, commercial fishers are allowed to take as much as 181 metric tons (400,000 pounds) a year with hand-operated dip nets, though have yet to exceed 90 metric tons.)

After whatever ecological switch was tripped in the 1990s that caused eulachon to disappear en masse, nearly every run between the northern coast of British Columbia and California showed some level of decline. Experts calculated that the average drop in abundance was around 83 percent, says Anderson. “It wasn’t something that was just following typical cycles of boom and bust,” he adds, “but a range-wide crash that was year after year after year.” (Though there have been stronger returns in some recent years and the outlook no longer seems quite as dire, numbers remain depressed compared to what they were historically.)

In 2007, the Cowlitz Tribe of Washington state, concerned about declines they were witnessing along the Cowlitz River, petitioned NOAA to list eulachon under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. In response, the agency drew a line on the map below the Nass River, defining everything from the Skeena River in British Columbia (immediately south of the Nass) to the Mad River in Northern California as the southern distinct population segment (DPS), and in 2010 designated that population as threatened. The line, Anderson explains, was based both on where the declines were most pronounced and a suite of ecological and biological characteristics—everything from genetics and body size to spawning locations and timing. It also roughly coincides with the transition zone between two distinct drivers of oceanic conditions: the southern California Current and northern Alaska Current.

While researchers have identified other threats to eulachon—such as offshore shrimp trawling, industrial pollution, marine mammal predation, and dams and other water diversions—the biggest driver seems to be shifting ocean conditions. “It’s like, what do you do about that?” Anderson says. NOAA’s eulachon recovery program, led by Anderson, carries out activities such as stock biomass surveys, river sampling, and genetic analysis to better understand the dynamics of the species, and works with the shrimp-fishing industry to reduce bycatch. But, of course, they can’t do anything about the changing oceans.

Within British Columbian waters, eulachon are treated as three distinct groups. In 2011, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assessed the Fraser River and Central Coast populations as endangered. The independent advisory panel identified the third group, from the Nass, Skeena, and Bear rivers, as threatened. The Nisg̱a’a community balked. A threatened classification could interfere with their ability to harvest and was incongruous with their own observations that the Nass run remained reliable. Since 1997, when the Nisg̱a’a began keeping catch data, they have taken an average of 181 metric tons (400,000 pounds) per year, equating to roughly 4.5 million fish (roughly 11 percent of historical harvests). But catch figures don’t always reflect actual abundance on the river. Some years, fishers catch few eulachon, but the reasons vary. The community may not require as many fish during certain years, for instance; the crews harvest until needs are met and then stop. Other times, ice may prevent access to the fish. Low-harvest years “happen now and again,” says veteran fisherman Gerald Robinson. “It’s Mother Nature’s way of saying to let the fish come back.”

After the threatened designation, the community campaigned for a reassessment. COSEWIC scientists reviewed the catch data in relation to fishing effort numbers, and in 2013 updated the designation to “special concern,” acknowledging that the run remained strong on the Nass compared with other rivers.

Soon after COSEWIC’s original report, the Nisg̱a’a began carrying out larval tows on the Nass each spawning season. Twice a week throughout the spring, workers collect a series of samples from the river. Then technicians painstakingly count the eggs and larvae—there can be a few thousand in a single sample. By factoring in the volume of river discharge and the fecundity of an average female eulachon, it’s possible to extrapolate how many spawning fish came through in a season. There aren’t enough data points to show clear trends yet, says biologist Cam Noble of LGL, an environmental research and consulting firm that collaborates with the Nisg̱a’a on the monitoring work. The team found that in 2014, the first year of monitoring, 4.5 million eulachon had arrived in spawning waters. The next year spiked to 38 million, and then rose to 70 million in 2016. Thirty million arrived in 2017, and 37 million in 2019, the most recent year available.

The Nisg̱a’a anticipate that the data will help make the case that the Nass River eulachon remain harvestable, in the event that COSEWIC or other outside organizations turn their attention to Nass eulachon again in the future.

This doesn’t mean, however, that some Nisg̱a’a aren’t worried about eulachon. While Sim’oogit Hleek, the fisheries director, agrees that the Nass eulachon run is vibrant enough to support continued fishing, there’s little doubt in his mind that the quantity of fish coming into the river is diminishing over time. “We notice, of course, depletion of everything,” he says. “Everything’s depleting now based on how the environment is changing.” Salmon don’t surge into the rivers as they used to, either; moose and mountain goats are harder to come by as well. Yet even in the ecosystem’s compromised state, traditional food is still available for those who want it, he says, and the eulachon run remains strong enough to supply anyone in the community who chooses to pursue it.

Leaning over the side of a skiff, one of the fishers uses a hook to tug on the net and finds it heavy. “There’s something in the net, there’s something in the net,” the fishers chant in chorus as they pull the mesh to the river’s swirling surface. Haldane lifts the sodden mass and releases the narrow mouth of the net; a few hundred eulachon spill into the boat, mouths fluttering in the shock of air that heralds a departure from their own life cycle and the beginning of their post-mortem service up the food chain.

There remains much to learn about the savior fish, which spends a mere five percent of its life in the river. The rest of the time, eulachon dwell in obscurity somewhere along an oceanic shelf, 50 to 200 meters (160 to 650 feet) below the surface. Do they die after spawning, for example? Biologists are uncertain. As many as 94 percent of eulachon caught by the Nisg̱a’a have already spawned to “some degree,” says Noble, of LGL. If eulachon do expire after spawning, as most experts believe, the fish swept into Nisg̱a’a nets were at the end of their lives anyway, and the impact of the fishery on the eulachon population “is a lot smaller than what the numbers might imply.” Researchers with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, however, conducted a survey in Chatham Sound, where the Nass River eventually empties into the sea, and found females that appeared to be recovering after spawning.

There’s also, of course, the uncertainty around why eulachon keep showing up in sizable quantities in some rivers but not others. Why in 2005 did eulachon in Alaska’s Unuk River crash, while rivers on either side of it held up? Why has the Columbia River continued to be a stronghold for the species overall, despite major losses elsewhere in the southern DPS? Anderson suspects that, unlike salmon, which have precise homing instincts to natal rivers, eulachon may shift between rivers within the region from year to year. Strongholds such as the Columbia—and presumably the Nass—may also act as “anchors,” with populations spilling into other rivers during good years. “Every time we think we have it down, they do something that challenges that understanding,” Anderson says.

Plus, new variables find their way into the eulachon equation. The Nisg̱a’a government, which like most governments has economic ambitions alongside environmental ones, is pursuing the construction of a floating LNG platform roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the Nass River’s mouth. During the public consultation process, environmental organizations, Nisg̱a’a citizens, and others voiced concerns about potential harm to the surrounding ecosystem and marine life, including eulachon.

The majority of fishers I meet in the Nisg̱a’a territory don’t seem to spend much time worrying about disappearing eulachons. They focus on what they know: that when a certain moon aligns with a certain tide, the eulachon will appear; that if the wind is going to snarl, it’ll be when the tide turns; that the females arrive in the early spawning waves; that the best fishing happens at night; that when the fish become scattered and sparse, the run is almost finished. Some Nisg̱a’a, I’m told, believe the Nass is blessed and will continue to provide. They leave monitoring to others and focus on the demanding tasks at hand.

A couple of weeks into the harvest, the task at hand is to stir boiling vats of fish to separate fat and flesh from bone. Nicole Morven brings me to a camp to watch some of the process. Cooking a batch of eulachon can take 18 hours. The workers stir with a large ladle, sometimes deep into the night under a shelter assembled from plywood, corrugated metal, and tarps. Pungent plumes of steam rise off the vats, permeating everything and everyone with the yeasty stench of boiled fish.

Peering into one of the vats after the cook is done, I can see a thick, fuzzy gray layer of detritus lining the bottom and the occasional bone sticking up, left behind as the golden-hued oil rose to the top. The eulachon has been separated first from the river, and now from its constituent parts. It has taken on a new form, just as the river water rushing past the hut will rise as vapor when the warmer days of spring arrive, to fall again later as rain. Though nature’s cycles are increasingly uncertain, the Nisg̱a’a relationship with the beloved oily oolie is steadfast. Once the grease is ready, the workers will siphon it off and strain it into jars—preserving a taste that links hundreds of generations of human and fish for another season.

*Simon Haldane passed away after my visit to the Nass Valley for this story. His father, Bruce, ran an eulachon camp and introduced Simon to the fishery as a young child. “We worked side by side all those years,” Bruce says. He was proud when his son was eventually offered the opportunity to run Walter’s Camp: “It took him a while to decide, but I told him, I’ll be with you.” At the camp, Simon created a legacy by training young Nisg̱a’a, Bruce adds. As a reporter, I only knew Simon superficially and briefly, but I was charmed by his quiet sense of humor, patience with my never-ending questions, and reserved warmth. Thank you, Simon, and rest well.

Reporting for this article was made possible by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.