Crabs and Community:

Establishing marine protected areas can be critical to meeting both sustainability targets and social ethical imperatives. Convened in 2007 to advise Canada on meeting international commitments to establishing environmental protected areas, the Indigenous Circle of Experts (hereafter, the Circle) made explicit calls for Canada to divest itself from unjust practices of displacing Indigenous Peoples to create protected conservation areas. Instead, the Circle stressed contemporary frameworks that enable “Indigenous governments to have the primary role in protecting and conserving ecosystems” must be enacted. Coining the term Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) to describe this framework, the Circle’s report and calls to action have sparked a new era of land and water protection in Canada, as Indigenous Nations re/assert their rights to self-determination and re/build environmental stewardship practices that flow from Nation Laws, Knowledge Systems, and governance structures. 

On June 21, 2023, SȾÁUTW̱ First Nation joined the growing number of Nations establishing IPCAs, self-declaring the QEN,T IPCA situated within SȾÁUTW̱’s waters and the broader bioregion of the Salish Sea. Through this project, we are working to support SȾÁUTW̱ in beginning the hard work of developing robust, ecologically- and culturally-grounded stewardship protocols for the QEN,T IPCA, with specific attention paid to Á,ĆEX (Dungeness Crab) stewardship.