Aboriginal Co-operatives in Canada - Centre for the Study of Co ...

A P P E N D I X I ~Wilp Sa Maa’y Harvesting Co-operativeNorthwestern British ColumbiaCase Study Analysis Prepared by Carla Burton and Phil BurtonSymbios Research and RestorationIntroductionThe Wilp Sa Maa’y Harvesting Co-operative is a community-based co-operative located innorthwestern British Columbia. This enterprise is designed to support sustainable harvesting,processing, and marketing of wild berries and other forest products indigenous to the region,while providing supplemental income (especially to First Nations people) in an area of highunemployment. The business of the co-op is conducted in Hazelton, with space provided bythe Gitxsan Treaty Office for meetings of the board and the general membership. Berries arecurrently picked by members of the co-op mainly on the traditional lands of the Gitxsan,Gitanyow, and Wet’suwet’en peoples. Most of our pickers are First Nations people and someof them are picking on their traditional house territories.Origins as a Research Project Spin-OffIn late 1995, Richard Overstall (of the Gitxsan Treaty Office) and David Coates (from theResearch Section of the Prince Rupert Forest Region, BC Forest Service) approached Phil andCarla Burton of Symbios Research and Restoration (Smithers, BC) to prepare a proposal tostudy the biology of berry-producing shrubs. The response of berry bushes to clearcut logginghas long been a concern to First Peoples, foresters, and biologists. So Forest Renewal BCeventually funded this two-year study entitled “Inferring the Response of Berry-ProducingShrubs to Different Light Environments in the ICHmc.” This research project investigated thegrowth and/or berry production of five shrub species (important to the Gitxsan for food, medicinaluse, as browse for ungulates, and as competition for conifer seedlings) under a range offorest shade conditions. Its results have implications to silvicultural planning and the layout ofcutblocks, as all species exhibited optimal productivity with some degree of shading. Two ofthe species studied are important food sources for First Nations people: black huckleberry andsoapberry.This research project was conducted in partnership with the Strategic Watershed AnalysisTeam (SWAT), a technical branch of the Gitxsan Treaty Office (GTO). SWAT staff membersdid much of the fieldwork and arranged for teams of assistants to help locate suitable patches,describe their local ecology, and take biomass samples for quantitative analysis. Throughoutthe summers of 1996 and 1997, it was clear how important the work was to all participants,most of whom were First Nations people. Many of them had no other jobs or were seasonally378 ~