VANCOUVER ISLAND, B.C., Canada — Three young men follow a winding trail through a lush spruce, hemlock and western cedar forest. Their destination is a clam garden they look after on Meares Island in Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation territory in British Columbia, Canada. The journey starts with a cultural lesson at the trailhead to the clam garden. “This is Wanačas — it represents a whale breaching out of the water and the rain from the mountain to the clam garden,” Hayden Seitcher, one of the men, says about the trailhead. Arriving at a clearing, they gaze over the garden at low tide, a serene interaction of land and sea. The shoreline, covered in a mosaic of green, red and brown seaweed, holds an expansive, semicircular wall of different-sized rocks, deliberately placed in May 2023 to revive an ancient maricultural technique. The wall retains a flat, stable terrace of mud and rocks: the clam garden. The group shifts a few rocks in the garden, uncovering large butter clams (Saxidomus gigantea), a clear sign of the garden’s early success. The three young men — Seitcher, 22, along with KC Hale, 15, and Bryson George, 20, are youth leaders with the nonprofit Nuu-chah-nulth Youth Warrior Family (Warrior Program). Building, restoring and monitoring clam gardens is just one of the program’s many initiatives to foster leadership skills in youth across several Nuu-chah-nulth communities. Hayden Seitcher, KC Hale and Bryson George, youth leaders with the nonprofit Nuu-chah-nulth Youth Warrior Family, also called the Warrior Program, check…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post On Canada’s West Coast, clam gardening builds resilience among Indigenous youth first appeared on EnviroLink Network.