Over the past 6 months, Jenn has been busy presenting to many groups around Vancouver to teach them about kelp forests, sea otter recovery, and the cool work Coastal Voices has been doing to capture Indigenous perspectives on the changes that sea otters bring to their communities. She spoke at the Beatty Museum of Biodiversity in Nov, Nature Vancouver in Feb, at a Burnaby Naturalists meeting in March, and at a Chilliwack Naturalists meeting in April. Not surprisingly, people found the videos and stories from the Coastal Voices work to be very illuminating – they are looking at sea otters in ways they hadn’t considered before!
Read the Latest 2018 Community Update Newsletter
We’ve just sent out our latest Coastal Voices Community Update! It provides a quick overview of what the team has been up to over the last two years. Please have a read and feel free to share it!
Trip to Tofino to Present to the Nuu-chah-nulth Council of the Ha’wiih
We just got back from a great weekend in Tofino where the Coastal Voices Team – Kii’iljuus, Anne and Jenn – were invited to present at the Nuu-chah-nulth Council of the Ha’wiih Forum on Fisheries.
It was great to see many friends and familiar faces. We gave an hour presentation that covered the topics outlined below. In particular, Anne and Kii’iljuus requested permission to continue on with this work, as there is still much to do! There was some great discussion afterwards and some really good questions asked. And importantly, the room full of Nuu-chah-nulth Chiefs granted permission for ongoing work. Yay!
Although we were exhausted from a long day of travel, preparation and presentations…. we felt we should still enjoy some west coast waves before heading home – so the team went for a morning surf (after fresh snowfall)!
Coastal Voices Team go to Stockholm for the Resilience 2017 Conference
Kii’iljuus, Anne and Jenn just returned from Sweden after attending the Resilience 2017 conference hosted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. At this conference, we shared presentations featuring the research amassed via Coastal Voices. In a special session about ‘Weaving Social Justice into Resilience Theory & Practice’’ put together by Anne and colleagues, Kii’iljuus gave a talk on ‘Indigenous Rights, Food Security and Regime Shifts on Canada’s West Coast.’
In another session focused on ‘Adapting to Coastal Transformations’ hosted by Jenn and her colleague, Jenn gave a talk on “Navigating Transformation Linked to Predator Recovery and Regime Shifts in Temperate Human-Ocean Systems”.
Our presentations were well received and people asked a lot of good questions! Many people who work in coastal systems in other parts of the world are excited to know more about the work from Coastal Voices and see how our research and learning platforms continue to develop.
Processing New Video, Community Portraits, and Survey Data
Since our visits last summer we’ve been keeping busy behind the scenes! Ilja, Anne and Jenn have been going through all of the wonderful video interviews that we recorded in Kyuquot and Alaska. First we transcribed all of the interviews and then went back and edited all the video footage (thanks to the amazing Ilja Herb!) to generate new short videos to add to the Video Room. We’re just working on finishing these new video clips (some examples below) and will upload them onto the website soon!
Ilja is also an amazing photographer. He has taken beautiful photographs of many of the people we have spoken with on our travels, and these now feature on our homepage! Hover over the photos and you can read some of the amazing quotes of knowledge people shared with us.
Jenn has also been busy transcribing and starting to analyze all of the data from the survey that she did with community members in the summer. In total she did 77 survey interviews across three communities. These are two of the main questions she’ll be seeking to answer with this survey data. Stay tuned!
Read our First Community Update Newsletter!
We’ve just sent out our very first Coastal Voices Community Update! This update provides a short project background and covers all of the major milestones we’ve accomplished to date. It’s the perfect summary if you’ve never heard of Coastal Voices and you’re wondering what it’s all about.
Facebook Page Created!
This fall we’re making some extra efforts to open lines of communication with the communities we’ve visited! We’ve created a Coastal Voices Facebook Page as a platform to share project updates, photos and news.
Coastal Voices Team goes to Alaska
We just returned from an incredible journey to south-central Alaska to visit two amazing Sugpiaq communities – Port Graham and Nanwalek. We went to hear some different perspectives from people who have been living with sea otters in their territory for 60+ years and to share the stories and data Coastal Voices had amassed from our 2014 workshop, book chapter and field research.
Again we were fortunate to have great local people co-host the workshop with us! Tim Malchoff (below) from Port Graham is working on developing education content around traditional hunting practices, and he helped us develop the workshop content and arrange many of the local logistics. He was pleased that we were doing this in the community as it gave him an opportunity to acquire some information and content for the toolkits he is developing.
After talking and meeting with many people in the community, the days of our workshops arrived. Here is the great turn out we had in Port Graham. In the photo below, Chief Pat Norman welcomes the BC Chiefs and the Coastal Voices team to his community and thanks the community for coming.
After a wonderful workshop in Port Graham and conducting a bunch of surveys and interviews, we made our way over to the nearby community of Nanwalek. Here we hosted another workshop the following day, with an equally great turn out, wonderful stories, great discussion, DELICIOUS traditional food, and an amazing performance by the local youth dancers!
Following the workshop in Nanwalek, we did a bunch more survey interviews with community members and once again, were fortunate to be toured around and invited to many people’s homes to share tea, stories, knowledge and laughs! Time flew and it was soon time to go. We returned to Homer where we gave a public talk at the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.
The next day we made our way back to Vancouver, full of good stories and information. We look forward to sharing this information, along with photos and videos we documented, back with the community in the coming years! Thanks again!
