The tribe owns and manages the Kukutali Preserve uplands with the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission. Tribal staff also worked with the tribal community to select the best site on Kukutali Preserve to provide both ecological and sociocultural benefits to current and future generations. Over the past several years, the Swinomish Tribe’s fisheries and community environmental health programs organized visits to those sites where tribal members learned about clam garden construction, management and restoration. In British Columbia, the W̱SÁNEĆ and Hul’q’umi’num first nations have partnered with Parks Canada to restore clam gardens in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve. This traditional shellfish cultivation method dates back thousands of years, but there are no known clam gardens still functioning in the United States.
Photo: Kari NeumeyerĪs part of the tribe’s climate resilience strategy, the project received funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Competitive Grants Program, the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, Washington Sea Grant, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Swinomish community members, volunteers and staff place rocks along the beach on Kukutali Preserve to create a rock wall for a clam garden. Clam gardens also can adapt to sea level rise and their high concentration of shell fragments can counter some of the effects of ocean acidification. That increased biodiversity will increase climate resilience. “As sediment builds up behind the wall and we tend to our garden, it will increase the abundance of all different sorts of sea life, such as shellfish, sea cucumbers, urchins, kelp and seaweed.”īy naturally leveling off the slope of the beach and increasing intertidal biodiversity, the area eventually should support harvestable numbers of clams and oysters, but not for years or even a generation.
“The rock wall will form a terrace for our sea garden,” said Swinomish tribal member Joe Williams, the tribe’s shellfish community liaison. Over two days in August, community members and invited guests passed rocks from hand to hand to build a 2-foot-high, 200-foot-long rock wall on the shore of Kukutali Preserve. After many years of planning, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community has laid the foundation for the first known modern clam garden in the country.
0 kommentar(er)
