Photo: Will Husby
Shores
Oysters and People
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Kwilákm Translates as “Clam Bay.”
Clams must have been a significant source of food for First Nations people living along these shores. What do researchers know about the role oysters may have played shaping local First Nations’ diet and culture?
First Nations and Olympia Oysters
Anywhere clams and oysters were abundant, First Nations ate large numbers of them. Over thousands of years, great piles of discarded shells, called “middens,” built up by the shore where people harvested and processed large numbers of shellfish. Some BC coast shell middens can be 9 metres deep; run for over a kilometre; and span over 10,000 years of continuous occupation. Shell middens contain a detailed record of what food was eaten or processed. Was Kwilákm once heaped with piles of discarded shells and other debris that could open a window on First Nations life around Kwilákm? 150 years of industry and development may have erased any signs of First Nations’ middens or settlements.
Becky Wigen, retired curator of the bone lab, University of Victoria’s Department of Archeology, has devoted decades to analyzing bone and shell from BC archeological sites. She doubts oysters were abundant in Kwilákm: “I have a feeling the oyster population was just not big enough in most places to be worth collecting in large amounts. They are, after all, not a very big shellfish.”
How important were Kwilákm’s oysters to First Nations’ diet and culture? Given the absence of evidence, we may never know the full story.
“When I was a child in the 1950s, it was rare to find an oyster on the beach in Snug Cove or Kwilákm. There were a few, and when we found them, we sometimes opened them up to eat them raw. Through the 1970s, oysters were picked from the flats in the Bay by residents and others who came to haul away buckets of them. It’s my recollection that by the 1980s there were not a lot of oysters left. When we walked down to the deep tidal flats last year, I was surprised to see the large number of fairly young oysters on the beach. Obviously there has been oyster spawning in recent years. Our current population of oysters may be higher than any time in the last 50 years.”