How Indigenous Sea Gardens Produced Massive Amounts of Food for Millennia

On Calvert Island, British Columbia, the subtle rock line of an extant clam garden is a reminder of how Indigenous peoples turned the sea into a shellfish garden. Photo courtesy of the Hakai Institute

By focusing on reciprocity and the common good—both for the community and the environment—sea gardening created bountiful food without putting populations at risk of collapse.

by Ashley Braun
July 18, 2022 | 1,300 words, about 6 minutes

For those who know how to read them, the signs have long been there. Like the towering mound of 20 million oyster shells all but obscured by the lush greenery of central Florida’s Gulf Coast. Or the arcing lines of wave-weathered stone walls strung along British Columbia’s shores like a necklace. Such features, hidden in the landscape, tell a rich and varied story of Indigenous stewardship. They reveal how humans carefully transformed the world’s coasts into gardens of the sea—gardens that produced vibrant, varied communities of marine life that sustained Indigenous peoples for millennia. And in certain places, like on the west coast of North America in what is now Washington State and where the Swinomish are building a new sea garden, these ancient practices are poised to sustain them once again.

“I see it as a way for our people to be reconnected to our place, to be reconnected to each other, and to have a purpose, to have a responsibility that goes beyond us,” says Alana Quintasket (siwəlcəʔ of the Swinomish Tribal Senate.

Across the planet, Indigenous communities, from the Heiltsuk in British Columbia, to the Powhatan on the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ Atlantic Coast, to the Māori in New Zealand, have successfully stewarded the sea for thousands of years. These communities avoided diminishing their productive sea gardens despite, in some cases, seeing harvests that rival modern commercial fisheries.

The scale of historical Indigenous oyster gardening, for instance, cannot be overstated. On America’s southeastern Atlantic coast, in the modern states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Indigenous peoples whose descendants include the Muscogee built gargantuan monuments out of oyster shells. These structures could reach 30 meters high or more.

More:
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/how-indigenous-sea-gardens-produced-massive-amounts-of-food-for-millennia/