Praying for salmon to return

Jeffrey Mackie-Deernsted, Archdeacon of the Klondike, in the Yukon, says he hears the same song at almost every event he attends. Sung by the Hän singers, an intergenerational group from the Tr’ondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation, it is “a prayer song, hoping that the salmon will come back.”

“In the six years that I’ve been here, the salmon haven’t come back,” said Mackie-Deernsted. “The numbers are so amazingly low compared to what they were historically. There’s a definite, I would say, sadness with it.”

Chinook salmon travel one of the world’s longest freshwater migration routes of over 3,000 kilometres. 1,867 Chinook salmon were counted in the Stewart River, a tributary of the Yukon River, this summer, far below the threshold necessary for fishing. Thirty years ago, over 180,000 Chinook returned and First Nations elders talk about a time they could walk across the river on the backs of migrating salmon. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said last year that up to half of Chinook salmon are disappearing en route to their spawning grounds, but “the reasons remain unclear, with suspected causes ranging from disease to rising water temperatures due to climate change.”

In 2024, the Yukon and Alaska agreed to a 6-year moratorium on fishing the Yukon River. But for years before that, many First Nations people in the Yukon, including the Tr’ondëk Hwëchʼin, took a voluntary moratorium, sacrificing a stable food source – and much more.

Tr’ondëk Hwëchʼin youth still attend fish camp, where they learn harvest traditions, but with salmon shipped in from the Taku River – a watershed that still supports a healthy population.

In a 2024 video, Erika Sheffen, a Hän Language Teacher, said: “Even though we can’t have [salmon] anymore those traditions still need to be taught because what if they do come back one day, right? If that miracle ever happens.”

In every ceremony, Mackie-Deernsted said, the absence of salmon is keenly felt. “The caribou, fishing for salmon – it’s part of traditions, part of the culture. And so when these things are changed – when they’re not allowed because there’s not enough to fish – these losses touch you spiritually and psychologically.”

Common language

“I don’t think people who don’t live in B.C. quite understand how integral salmon are in this ecosystem,” said Cindy Verbeek, who grew up in Calgary and studied in Edmonton before moving to Houston, B.C. over 30 years ago. “Salmon are so important because they take nutrients from the ocean and bring them far inland. They lay their eggs way up here in central B.C. Those eggs and fry are food for the creatures in our river. As they go to the ocean they are food in the river and estuary. They then turn around and come back, and are food for all of the creatures that live on that river. And even when they die, they become food for the plants and the ecosystem. It’s God’s way of providing for literally most of B.C.”

Verbeek is the founder of Buck Creek Hatchery and Nature Centre, which operates on the Upper Bulkley River, an inland tributary of the 580-kilometre-long Skeena River which salmon take to the ocean. “When I go to Terrace (300 kilometres away) and speak in churches there,” Verbeek says, “I remind them that whatever goes past them is coming to us. We are connected through these riverways and through the nutrients that are brought back and forth by the salmon.”

In August, the federal government announced a 7.5 million dollar grant to help the Wilp’Ho Dix Hatchery in the Skeena River system in northwestern B.C.

“It’s fantastic news as far as I’m concerned,” Verbeek told CC. “They’re going to be a much bigger operation than we are, which is great because they’re going to be adding more fish into the system.”

Buck Creek Hatchery, run by A Rocha Canada on behalf of the DFO, is a stewardship hatchery that emphasizes community involvement and education. It opened in 2017. Salmon are the “common language” for Houston’s 2,500 residents, Verbeek said. “Everyone I talked to, no matter who they were, just started saying, ‘You start a hatchery, I’m on board. This is really important.’”

Every year, staff and volunteers walk the river and catch coho salmon ready to spawn. They harvest their eggs and milt and raise the fertilized eggs to fry. “People care about what they can be part of,” Verbeek said.

There’s debate over whether hatcheries are helpful to wild fish, Verbeek notes. “I think we’ve gotten to a point where we have manipulated the ecosystem so badly that we can’t do hands-off conservation anymore.” A hatchery should “re-boost the stocks. And once that happens hatcheries should, in my mind, quit.”

A hatchery only works in the context of restoring the habitat the fish live in. A Rocha organizes the Upper Bulkley River Roundtable, where federal, provincial and Wet’suwet’en governments, as well as local nonprofits and contractors, get together a few times a year and share their plans. Collaboration involves landowners, too, as most of the river runs through private land.

But even with these positive moves, Verbeek says increasing water temperatures make watershed restoration “not enough. We need to restore healthy habitat and pray that what we can’t restore, the salmon can adapt to . . . and that they adapt quickly.”

Pray for the salmon

Mackie-Deernsted serves three First Nations, all of which are connected to a river, and each community prays for the salmon to return. Referring to himself as “a Canadian southerner” from Ottawa, Mackie-Deernsted said he didn’t grow up thinking about what a changing climate meant. That changed when he moved to the Yukon: “being an Anglican priest up here, and being in solidarity with my communities, I learned that the environmental issues are right in your backyard, right in your face.”

Mackie-Deernsted urges the church to show solidarity: “I think it’s imperative that Christians, whether they’re Anglicans or not, be very conscious that this is going on in Canada – communities that we are worshipping with, that we’re connected to, are experiencing this kind of devastation.”