Legal challenge looming as First Nations fight for BC’s herring stocks – Indigenous Watchdog
November 20, 2025
Canada’s National Observer: First Nations and conservation groups in British Columbia are rallying for an immediate ban to herring fishing, warning the fish is vanishing from the Salish Sea — but the fisheries department insists the numbers tell a different story.
Eric Pelkey, hereditary chief of the Tsawout of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation, said his great-grandfather and family lived close to the fishery each season, catching and smoking herring in their longhouse for food and trade. “It was a real trade item for our people. … We always had the smell of smoked herring and smoked salmon in our house,” he said.
But now, those traditions are fading as herring spawning sites have largely disappeared from the southern Strait of Georgia, and the fish no longer return in the numbers his community once relied on. “We don’t see the herring. Around our own communities, we used to see a spawn every year. Now it has been like 25 years,” he said.
