Save What You Love with Mark Titus

00:00:00:08 - 00:00:22:23
Mark Titus
Welcome to Save What You Love. I'm Mark Titus. A little bit of housekeeping today. I am going on vacation, which means that we're going to have a brief hiatus in the Save What You Have podcast here. I won't be airing episodes on the 25th of July or August 1st, but we will be back with a brand new episode on August 8th.

00:00:23:03 - 00:00:48:18
Mark Titus
So thank you for sticking with us and I'll miss you and we will see you again soon. But for today, please enjoy this amazing conversation with Ian Gill. Ian is joining us from Clay Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Ian was a founder of Eco Trust Canada and now a founder of Salmon Nation, which is a network I'm a proud member of and one that is a partner in this podcast.

00:00:48:20 - 00:01:09:19
Mark Titus
Ian talks about a brand new initiative called Salmon Stories, where we're inviting you to send in your salmon stories. Tell us what your connection is to this absolutely sacred creature as a part of our bioregion. Also, if you are enjoying this podcast, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It really helps a ton. Leave a review in your own words, if you like.

00:01:09:19 - 00:01:32:13
Mark Titus
And also remember that we are still in prime salmon grilling season. If you want salmon ordered right to your door from the most regenerative fishery on earth, go ahead over to evaswild.com. That's the word save spelled backwards. Wild to com and Order Flash Frozen Wild. Bristol Bay Sockeye filets to your door. Thank you for listening. Can't wait to see you in a couple of weeks.

00:01:32:15 - 00:01:37:12
Mark Titus
Today, enjoy the episode with Ian Gill. Take care. See you soon.

00:01:37:14 - 00:02:14:05
Music
How do you save what you love?
When the world is burning down?
How do you save what you love?
When pushes come to shove.
How do you say what you love?
When things are upside down.
How do you say what you love?
When times are getting tough.

00:02:14:07 - 00:02:19:10
Mark Titus
Ian Gill, welcome. Where in the world are you right now?

00:02:19:12 - 00:02:41:10
Ian Gill
I'm on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Actually, I'm further west than that. I'm on the west coast of a small island off the west coast of Vancouver Island, in the traditional Nuu-chan-nulth territory of the new of people's of British Columbia.

00:02:41:12 - 00:03:09:01
Mark Titus
That sounds fantastic. I am I am on would be island and the traditional Lummi territory and the islands are good. You know the coast is a good place to be. And I think we're going to we're going to dive into why this place is so special. This place we have, we're happy and proud to live in called Salmon Nation.

00:03:09:03 - 00:03:35:03
Mark Titus
But I'm going to start off this morning here with a question for you, catalyzed by an article I read about you in a July 25 edition of B.C. Business, Larry Pine describes using as a 50 year old native Australian with boyish good looks and charm and something of a guiding light between the old and new economies, between the extremism of pillage and protection.

00:03:35:05 - 00:03:45:01
Mark Titus
So the question is, how do you keep up those boyish good looks? Man?

00:03:45:03 - 00:04:12:13
Ian Gill
Mostly just eating salmon and having thoroughly abstemious lifestyle. And you and I sleep the sleep of the innocent. So all of those things combined go towards my my saving myself and my looks from the edge of decrepitude.

00:04:12:15 - 00:04:34:16
Mark Titus
Perfect. All right, that's good. Now that we got that out of the way. You know, as just a former journalist, I won't bury the lead. So I really want to have you just give us a 100,000 foot view before we dig into the meat of the matter. But what is the Salmon Stories Fellowship that you are working on right now?

00:04:34:16 - 00:04:42:15
Mark Titus
And we are collectively working on as a as a cohort in Salmon Nation.

00:04:42:17 - 00:05:23:00
Ian Gill
Well, it's it's kind of a big and a small thing, I guess the big idea is that we are creatures of narratives, all of us, and the narratives we choose to share with each other. The narratives that govern how we behave internally sort of interior monologues, if you will, but also how we see the world, how we imagine the world sees us, and how we choose to live in the world is all more function.

00:05:23:02 - 00:06:00:18
Ian Gill
I think of narratives and the narratives we choose to hear and choose to believe and choose to share. And that's a good and a bad thing in some ways, because you can see there was some guy with weird colored hair who profess to be the leader of the free world for two years, and your country whose ascension to the White House was totally a just a flood of absurd narratives that got him there and kept him there and finally got him out.

00:06:00:20 - 00:06:44:02
Ian Gill
So he should. Narratives can be powerful propellers, if you will, of both good and evil. And you said it's probably you just cognitively, it's what makes the world go round for good and for bad. So we think that salmon stories and I'll get to the details of them in a minute, that the idea of creating a really powerful new narrative around how we live on the planet and how we survive on the planet.

00:06:44:04 - 00:07:11:13
Ian Gill
You there's this very sort of high level things about, you're we're in this climate crisis or we're in this pandemic that we're consuming resources more quickly than they can replenish, and we're sort of eating the world alive as we go. That's all very true in this part of the world. I think that can be pulled down to a level of specificity which is useful to people.

00:07:11:15 - 00:07:57:19
Ian Gill
So once you get beyond the sort of almost UN level rhetoric about, you know, what sustainable or not, when you get down to where we live and how we live in a particular place, we need narratives about things that we can touch and feel and have some connection to that are relevant in our daily lives and that give us some sort of something tangible to grab onto as we try and think about what are the markers, if you will, about how we're living and succeeding or failing in living well, where we live, the sort of keystone species of how we're doing in this part of the world.

00:07:57:21 - 00:08:28:02
Ian Gill
And we believe that we need a new and constant and expanded and vibrant narrative about the place of salmon in all of our lives. In Salmon Nation and Salmon Nation. This is areas we think of it. This bioregion from the north, northern California to the North Slope of Alaska. It's the home of wild Pacific salmon, also of good coastal temperate rainforests that support them and vice versa.

00:08:28:04 - 00:09:26:21
Ian Gill
So we think that's just absolute important that we elevate wild salmon in the minds of everybody in Salmon Nation. 35 million people live in this region. And we need to make very clear to people that past the generalities of what's going on with your climate and everything else is very specific things happening to a keystone species, wild salmon, and that if we don't pay attention to that, and if we don't force policymakers and legislators and decision makers and investors and everybody, frankly, to pay attention to what's happening with salmon, then that's a mistake on our part that's just willfully ignoring a great signal that's coming to us from our natural environment.

00:09:26:23 - 00:09:35:21
Ian Gill
And so for us, the story of salmon in the end becomes the story of everything. Insemination.

00:09:35:23 - 00:10:14:10
Mark Titus
That's huge. And obviously a lot to unpack. So clearly there is an initiative now inside of the work that you and we are all doing to hone in and identify and tell this story of salmon. And I think it has been approached in a very novel way that you've constructed. And can you tell us a little bit more about this idea of a salmon story fellowship for people inside of this by our region and specifically in in various parts of the Bioregion and what we're trying to pull off with that?

00:10:14:12 - 00:11:09:01
Ian Gill
Yeah, absolutely. And I realized that I did almost a politician's trick on you then and didn't answer your question because it's actually a question about the fellowship. And I get you probably remarkably incoherent speech about the salmon and the life and the cosmos. So coming down to where you are in terms of the fellowships. So one thing we want to do is to create a kind of a constant presence of salmon in the people, in the public imagination, and doing that through mostly social media and creating stories which just continue to sort of almost drip daily into people's lives that remind them about the importance of salmon on this coast.

00:11:09:03 - 00:11:35:14
Ian Gill
And there are all sorts of ways of doing journalism, going out and getting stories, interviewing the fisheries managers, biologists or fish, people who fish for a living or people who eat fish and everything else. But we want to actually find stories that have kind of almost everyday stories from people who are not the experts and not necessarily the people you go to.

00:11:35:16 - 00:12:10:20
Ian Gill
When you think about salmon, these could be truck drivers or loggers or teachers or bureaucrats. They can be anybody. You can be people you see in the street. They can be business people in suits. They can be people driving a bus. I mean, what we want to do, in a sense, is sort of democratized people's relationship building expression of people's relationship to salmon in a way that helps everybody realize that what happens to salmon happens to everybody.

00:12:10:22 - 00:12:35:21
Ian Gill
And this is not just the fight to protect wild salmon, is not just to fight about fish. You know, it's way bigger than just fish. So it doesn't matter if we're trying to get fish farms out of D.C. waters or if you're trying to create a marine protected area in some cases or not create a marine protected area.

00:12:35:21 - 00:13:10:23
Ian Gill
In other cases, whether you're trying to whatever it is that's going on, we want to make sure that people realize that the effects on salmon are effects on everybody. And everything in this region. So the idea of the fellowship is rather than have a bunch of professional storytellers go out and harvest stories and put them in your traditional media, we're interested in creating a way in which we can get fellows or people signing up for this fellowship to get those stories for.

00:13:10:23 - 00:13:41:15
Ian Gill
So the basic idea is and then to get these stories from what we call edge communities, because again, media such as it exists these days is usually fairly centralized and relies upon pretty old sort of story harvesting techniques and ignores people out in rural areas for the most part, and ignores the people who have great stories to tell because they are too hard to get to, just doesn't occur to people to ask them for their opinion.

00:13:41:17 - 00:14:12:06
Ian Gill
So we're really interested in getting stories from out on the edge rather than just the predictable stories. And to do that, we've set up a fellowship where we're asking people to apply and we'll pay them $1,000 per fellowship to go and get us ten stories from people. And that just short video stories as diverse as we can possibly find of people in different regions in the nation who have the story to tell.

00:14:12:10 - 00:14:35:16
Ian Gill
And it can be an epic story or can be a really ordinary sort of mundane story. We don't care. The point is, we do care about getting content from unusual people and unusual voices in sort of places that aren't usually visited by media. So the fellowship is just a way to basically say to someone, it's not we're not asking for some great technical ability or anything else.

00:14:35:16 - 00:15:09:11
Ian Gill
I mean, some of these stories will be shot on, nothing more sophisticated than a phone, but a phone camera. But we're basically saying find these stories, share them with us. And then once we've got a bank of stories, we've got a plan to start to distribute them over time and build this profile of this kind of fabric, if you will, of dissemination through the voices of people who have a salmon story and we don't really know where those salmon stories are going to be.

00:15:09:11 - 00:15:30:09
Ian Gill
We go to the whole point of doing this kind of form of journalism, if you will, as to not go in with a preconceived notion of what a salmon story is and sit back and watch the kind of wonder happen. And so we're really excited about that. In addition to the fellowships, we're just asking. And so we're paying people.

00:15:30:11 - 00:16:02:23
Ian Gill
We've already got some people who've applied and they just come to of Salmon Nation dot net and they can apply to be a fellow and we'll be sorting that out and launching these people into the world pretty soon. In addition to that, we're just saying to people as well, you send in the salmon story. So there's a mechanism where someone could just shoot something of themselves on the phone or their friend or their neighbor or their new family member and send in the salmon story.

00:16:03:01 - 00:16:30:14
Ian Gill
And we are going to pay people both to be fellows, but we're also going to pay people for just $50 for a story that we use and that we broadcast later on. And part of the idea of doing that is that we sort of want to recognize that stories have value. So we go out a lot as journalists and get people's stories.

00:16:30:16 - 00:17:02:05
Ian Gill
And really it's not a very good deal for people who have these amazing stories. We go out and get their stories. We write them and publish them under our name. They're the subject of the story and yet the subject of the story doesn't get anything for their time or trouble, frankly, for their knowledge. And so this is a small experiment that we hope to make a larger experiment in terms of starting to place an appropriate value on the wisdom of people who were speaking to and collecting these salmon stories.

00:17:02:08 - 00:17:22:08
Ian Gill
So so that's the basic idea. And then, I mean, you may know of Humans of New York, which was this sort of rather remarkable photography series that was done, then turned into books. And the guy who started it just started asking people, taking a picture of someone in New York and asked him who they were and what they did.

00:17:22:10 - 00:17:43:16
Ian Gill
And it became this sensation. He's got over 20 million followers now or something like that. I'm not sure if we're going to achieve the same thing here, but that's the basic idea is to sort of have a salmon story pop up everywhere all the time. You can't get away from these things. You want salmon stories everywhere, people from everywhere in Salmon Nation.

00:17:43:18 - 00:18:03:20
Ian Gill
And to basically build this really vivid, diverse tapestry fabric, if you will, of who people are, insemination and what their story is about, what they love. And one of the things that people love in this region is salmon.

00:18:03:22 - 00:18:32:03
Mark Titus
No doubt. And as a as a fellow who just sort of bumbled into salmon Nation through no intention of my own, my my folks moved out here from the Midwest of the US when I was six months old and you will find that pretty much anybody that spent any significant time in the Northwest B.C, Alaska, Northern California, Oregon has a salmon story.

00:18:32:03 - 00:19:02:07
Mark Titus
And in fact, if you want to get the heat gone rather quickly around the coffee table or in the diner, start bringing up salmon because everybody has a story and or an opinion and it's usually pretty passionate, shall we say. So I'm excited about this initiative. I think that we're going to find a lot of people that do define their lives and their memories and their intergenerational experiences through the lens of this iconic creature that that we have here.

00:19:02:07 - 00:19:42:08
Mark Titus
And obviously, I'm head over heels in love with them as well. Shifting gears here for a second, I want you to feel free to roam as well as much as you will. I would like to hear your story. You have an incredibly vibrant story as a communicator, as an entrepreneur, as a writer, and a creator and dear listener out there, you may be able to detect that Ian has a slightly regional dialect, and I think that we could all glean a ton from hearing about your story, how you ended up in this incredible place that you call home.

00:19:42:08 - 00:19:58:07
Mark Titus
Now, just as I ended up in this incredible place that I call home in Salmon Nation, What is your story and how did you come into this work that fills you and fires your passion every day?

00:19:58:09 - 00:20:43:14
Ian Gill
Well, my story is essentially a series of accidents that and there was never been a plan, but I, I grew up in my regional dialect that you refer to as I grew up in or attempted to grow up. I don't think you succeeded in doing that, but you always try on growing up that took place in Adelaide, Australia, and then I couldn't get out of there fast enough and so I kind of surfed my way around the world instead of going to university and ended up back in Australia about the time that most of my former colleagues at school were finishing university degrees and I talk my way into a journalism job.

00:20:43:15 - 00:21:25:22
Ian Gill
I'll spare you the details of that, but I am the one thing that could do well in school was right. And so I just found a journalism job in a tiny little paper in northern South Australia and started working as a cub reporter. Within a couple of years I was in Canberra covering federal politics and a couple of years after that I was in Canada because my girlfriend at the time got a Commonwealth scholarship to come here and study at the University of B.C. and I followed her up and and then fell in love with Canada and ultimately out of love with her and stayed.

00:21:26:00 - 00:21:47:19
Ian Gill
She went back and I stayed. My first work in Canada was with the Vancouver Sun, and so this was in the early to mid eighties and I was a reporter and editor there. And back in those days, the sun was a pretty decent newspaper. It had its problems, but as they all do, but it was, you know, was a serious paper.

00:21:47:19 - 00:22:22:23
Ian Gill
That's no longer the case, as is the sad story of most conventional media in the world. I switched to broadcasting with the CBC and spent seven years or so as a television, mostly documentary reporter and I going back to Australia. Sorry for a moment. I mean, most of what I covered down there was actually agricultural economics. I just sort of fell into covering rural issues.

00:22:23:01 - 00:22:57:21
Ian Gill
And so when I came to Canada, I was interested in land issues and in particular I was interested in the relationship between indigenous people and land because that's a very contested space in Australia. And it was very hard to ignore living in rural Australia. And when I came to Canada there didn't seem to be many people telling stories about land rights as they were mostly called back then, and this sort of relationship between indigenous people and resources.

00:22:57:23 - 00:23:22:00
Ian Gill
So especially at the CBC, there was an older man there who had been covering environment issues and he then got assigned to a different show. And in our newsroom, this kind of job was sitting there that no one was doing. So I just started doing that job. I just started covering environmental issues. And mostly it was said, Get me out of the office was the only job.

00:23:22:00 - 00:23:48:12
Ian Gill
No one wanted it, and it was the one job that I saw that I thought I could see a lot of British Columbia show at the government's expense, in the taxpayers expense, no less, by roaming around and starting to tell these environmental stories. And so that's what I did, and it was enormously good fun. I got to go to all sorts of places that I would otherwise have seen.

00:23:48:13 - 00:24:36:02
Ian Gill
And frankly, that's where I kind of recognized that there was something very, very unusual, unusually rich about the environment of Salmon Nation of Origin story, rich in resources, rich in mythology, just sort of so rich in so many ways. And so that was my beat. And then I started writing books and doing other things as well, and finally left the CBC in the mid-nineties because I'd done a documentary on a place called The Globe up in northern B.C. and efforts to protect the shipload load from industrial logging.

00:24:36:04 - 00:25:21:00
Ian Gill
And this group called Ecojustice out of Portland was working with the hotshot first Nation to help them protect the get low. And so I went up there with a cameraman, went into the camp for a week or so, and shot all these interviews and talk all these people and everything else. And Spencer Beebe, who was the founder of Eco Trust, sort of said to me, you know, after I interviewed him and talked to various people before my my broadcast had even happened, he said that said, well, we're looking to open an eco trust in Canada and you wouldn't be you know, you're pretty well known around B.C. and, you know, all the players and everything

00:25:21:00 - 00:25:49:18
Ian Gill
else. And so we're looking for somebody to be in a wetsuit one day of river rafting, one day with first nations people and in a business suit the next day down in Victoria lobbying the government or somebody who wrote proposals and raise money and somebody who knows where the bodies are buried and where all the potential is. And anyway, he went on and on about all of these attributes of somebody and he said, you know, who do you know around here who's like that?

00:25:49:18 - 00:26:28:17
Ian Gill
And I said, Well, the only person that fits that description is me. And we both kind of looked at each other and I didn't I wasn't applying for a job. But Spence is pretty tenacious. He decided that probably wasn't such a bad idea. And anyway, a year later I was the founding executive director of Eco Trust Canada. And so that was 1994, and I spent a good 20 more years then in the role of the founding director of Eco Trust Canada.

00:26:28:17 - 00:26:54:08
Ian Gill
For a while there I was actually president and CEO of Eco Trust in the US. At some point I actually took the eco trust model down to Australia when I sort of went back for three years experimenting on sort of returning home and realizing I'd left my home. And so and my home was here. And so the work that we did to decompress, we were a conservation organization.

00:26:54:08 - 00:27:28:05
Ian Gill
Yes. But we were also really interested in kind of what the business plan is for living well on this earth, we were sort of focus less on environmental activism and campaigning and more on working at the community level in economic development and do the land use planning and all those things that were things that especially First Nations communities were struggling to get control over and get their own voice into the mix and their own seat at the table.

00:27:28:05 - 00:28:13:00
Ian Gill
So fascinating work and was actually in our work at Eco Trust that we incubated the idea of Salmon Nation and produced a small book called Salmon Nation and never really did anything with the concept. We always thought it was an interesting concept, but we were always busy doing other things. So here I am at the end of that long road and we are working on Salmon Nation actively now, not just as a storyteller in vehicle, but basically as a an expression of what we see here as being a nature state as opposed to a nation state.

00:28:13:03 - 00:28:48:08
Ian Gill
And what, what what does it look like to live well and to act well and to invest well and to share innovations and share expressions of regenerative work that help us to to the name of your podcast, if you will, save what we love by saving where we live, if you will. So that's you know, that's a pretty twisted tale.

00:28:48:10 - 00:28:51:03
Ian Gill
That's how I got here.

00:28:51:05 - 00:29:20:07
Mark Titus
Not bad for a fellow that surfed his way through college. And I have a similar story and similar sentiment and I think you gave a really beautiful high level view of Salmon Nation. I was going to ask you about that. So you adroitly beat me to the punch. I get asked a fair amount when I'm trying to explain Salmon Nation and this network that I'm gratefully a part of.

00:29:20:09 - 00:29:58:12
Mark Titus
What is it? And I think you did a really good job of explaining the concept, but drilling down on a more practical level or on a more serviceable level for humans that want to get involved as people in grateful people inside of this, this bioregion, what does that look like? I mean, what you know, people ask me, what is it a company is it a movement, you know, on a little more granular level, What what is your take on being involved in this network, in this cohort of Salmon Nation?

00:29:58:14 - 00:30:21:17
Ian Gill
Yeah, it is a it's a good question. We're so wrestling with that almost daily. The first thing is that if you live in Salmon Nation, you are already part of it. So Salmon Nation, the place exists to some degree. We've just sort of maimed it, if you will, but we've named what's already here. So that's not so particular genius on our part.

00:30:21:17 - 00:30:44:18
Ian Gill
But Donella meadows, who some of your listeners will know is one of the great subsistence thinkers that has been whose work has been followed for many years by people who are interested in systems change. She once said that one of the things you need to do if you want to create a change in the system is to first to rename it.

00:30:44:20 - 00:31:11:17
Ian Gill
So if you actually want to change, if you want to move the dial, you really need to sort of move the narrative framework in which you're doing your work. And so we could call this place the Pacific Northwest or we could call it Cascadia. Some people have referred to eco topia as Kaelin Beck's landmark book of the Seventies and the Salmon Nation.

00:31:11:22 - 00:31:48:00
Ian Gill
Just you we we put a name on it. I think the most important thing is the place. It so happens that we formed an organization because we need to organize what we do. And the Salmon Nation, as we currently have it, consists of a trust which is a dozen trusted and revered elders in Salmon Nation who sort of oversee what we're doing, if you will, who with a sort of moral compass for us in terms of how we act.

00:31:48:00 - 00:32:14:23
Ian Gill
We we have this trust. It has partners. I'm one of the founding partners that just tried to operationalize what we're doing. We have in we have formed a network and people are invited into that network, the Salmon Nation Network, which is, as most people who are interested in change realized networks can be very, very powerful ways of harnessing energy and people.

00:32:15:01 - 00:32:57:01
Ian Gill
We've set up a nonprofit society called the Magic Canoe, and I can tell you about the provenance of that name if you'd like. But it's a beautiful story. But the Magic Canoe is actually the vehicle through which we're doing this storytelling fellowship. And that will be putting salmon stories out in the world. And the Magic Canoe is also the home to the Festival of What Works, which is a festival we forged for the first time last year and are doing again this fall, which turned out to be a really good way of sharing online innovations and stories from throughout the region.

00:32:57:02 - 00:33:30:05
Ian Gill
And then we are. One of the twinkles in our eye is a capital organization which will help start to mobilize investments into the kinds of regenerative activities that we see in food and energy and fisheries and forestry and other technologies that are necessary for us to kind of get better on the planet. The way that you're a citizen of a nation can participate.

00:33:30:05 - 00:33:58:10
Ian Gill
Sort of more explicitly. Insemination is centers of salmon story. Firstly, that also, you know, the magic canoe is conceived in the end as kind of a public facing way in which we can create a kind of a movement for change. So the most sort of public expression of dissemination is the magic canoe and people can sign up to be members of that.

00:33:58:12 - 00:34:44:02
Ian Gill
And at the moment we're not really asking the body to do anything except just to be insemination and to be that and to help us kind of actually conceive how this movement grows into something really powerful. So we're kind of we do have some organizational threads there. But the main thing I'd say is that we're hoping people will identify as being the people of Salmon Nation and begin to sort of both offer and take cues from us as to what it means to live well in this place and how we can really change our relationship to nature.

00:34:44:02 - 00:35:14:14
Ian Gill
Because the thing about the pandemic, I think in the end is that everything you read now talks about the fact that nature is and climate change is that nature is sending us some very, very, very strong signals that we would be just totally foolhardy to ignore. And there's an opportunity to change our relationship to nature before it's too late.

00:35:14:16 - 00:35:39:23
Ian Gill
And so we are just looking and promoting as diligently as we can to new ways which are often old ways of living and being and seeing and sharing and figuring out how to exist on the planet in a much more productive relationship with nature than we've managed to do so far.

00:35:40:01 - 00:36:07:02
Mark Titus
The Magic Canoe is an evocative and, you know, taken out of context, maybe kind of a lofty name. I love the provenance of it. I'm privileged to know a little bit more about the story of how it came to be. Could you give us a little bit of that story and why you were so taken enough to name this storytelling entity after the Magic Canoe?

00:36:07:02 - 00:36:09:21
Mark Titus
In your experience?

00:36:09:23 - 00:36:52:08
Ian Gill
Yeah, it's a beautiful story. I referred before to encountering and then becoming part of eco trust in the boat in Northern B.C. And that's I Iceland how actually territory. And one of the leaders in that community Cecil Paul he was an elder and he was recovered from alcoholism and a number of other predations that came via his journey through residential school as a young boy and what that did to his life and his families.

00:36:52:10 - 00:37:15:08
Ian Gill
And Cecil went back to the kid when he was recovering and realized that the shipload was going to be logged. There were no tapes on trees where they were going to the forest company was going to come and start to build the road. And then he went back to his community and he said, Well, this is our home and they're going to destroy it.

00:37:15:10 - 00:37:45:04
Ian Gill
So in a very quiet way, the high school, in a nutshell, began a quest to protect the pope, and that's where they met eco trust, who had mapped the coastal rainforest of North America and realized that the ship was the largest on the watershed left in all of termination. And they teamed up and Cecil had this vision of a canoe, which he called the magic canoe.

00:37:45:04 - 00:38:15:04
Ian Gill
And his idea was that anybody from any walk of life could join and become a Pablo in his sort of metaphorical magic canoe, and that no one necessarily knew where the canoe was going. But about if you joined and became part of this magic canoe, the Hyslop connection would achieve the goal of protecting their homelands. And that's what happened.

00:38:15:06 - 00:38:47:00
Ian Gill
And he was such a gentle and beautiful speaker and such an inspiration to so many people. And he passed away about 18 months ago. And we good we had remained very, very good friends for 30 years or so since I first encountered Cecil and and he said to us that he kind of gifted us the idea of the magic canoe.

00:38:47:00 - 00:39:23:21
Ian Gill
And he said, You use that in whatever way you can to promote the goals of Salmon Nation. And that was a pretty amazing gift. And it's it's a and it's actually a book out called The Magic Canoe. And I really urge people to read and the Magic Canoes story is one of the great the most beautiful stories, one of the great sort of powerful narrative waves that we have.

00:39:23:23 - 00:39:47:21
Ian Gill
And at the core of the magic canoe, I guess the idea of it was you. When we were work at Eco Trust and then the ship that was protected, if you will, I'd put that in inverted commas, you know, and the government wanted to call it a park and Iceland connection. I kept saying, Well, we don't know. We don't know what parks Why would you want to have a park?

00:39:47:22 - 00:40:17:08
Ian Gill
What's what's that concept? We don't get that concept. We use whitefellas to Boston people, as they referred to it. You have this idea of a protected area, but we don't want you think you're saving trees from logging. And of course you are. And we get that and we're grateful for that. But what Cecil and others said was, you know, the Globe is a contained for our stories and all the wisdom for living is in that container.

00:40:17:10 - 00:40:44:03
Ian Gill
And so you're not protecting the forest per say. You're actually protecting who you are. Stuani images is what they called it. Cousteau Ashton is the land of milk and blue waters. And who's to question me? And cheese is the land of milk and blue waters? Because this place you stop there, the land of milk, blue waters and all the stories it contains.

00:40:44:04 - 00:41:30:04
Ian Gill
So that's what we protected in the book. And I don't know about you, but that just sends shivers up my spine every time I think about that, because it's a concept that we need to hold dear. Now, in this time, especially, that's as close as I can, I think anybody can ever get to explaining both the potential for and the distance we've traveled from the relationship to nature, which is respected and articulated through our love and reverence for stories of how to live well and how to live with wisdom in this place.

00:41:30:06 - 00:42:01:17
Mark Titus
Wow. We are indeed riding the same wave. I got shivers the moment you mentioned that and thank you, Ian, for sharing that beautiful gift that has been given freely to you. And I'm truly sorry for the loss of your friend. I Know how close you were and what a what an incredible living gift that his living energy can be passed on through this vehicle of the magic canoe.

00:42:01:19 - 00:42:28:05
Mark Titus
Thank you. I wanted to pause and hover on that idea for a moment. A bit of a darker idea, but it's, I think, a really important part of what we're talking about here. A massive focus. Salmon Nation as a concept is to follow the lead of indigenous wisdom and leadership. I'm a white guy from Seattle. You're a white guy, originally from a collar, colonized land.

00:42:28:07 - 00:43:09:17
Mark Titus
This is in Australia. We have entered a painful and absolutely necessary time of reconciliation with Indigenous and First Nation peoples of North America. How do you get your mind around this In the light of the recent residential school atrocities in B.C.? You mentioned Cecil was a part of that and we are in this pain right now. Mostly it's pain that is intergenerational felt by the indigenous people of this land, and yet we are collectively looking to wisdom for them and from them I mean and and leadership from them.

00:43:09:19 - 00:43:19:02
Mark Titus
What is your thinking about the way forward in the light of where we currently are in this moment of attempted reconciliation?

00:43:19:04 - 00:43:53:19
Ian Gill
Yeah, that's that's a very big question. Firstly, the the very use of the word reconciliation I think is probably problematic because it's it's a little like the word sustainability or something. It just takes on this rhetorical kind of, you know, label that is meaningless, frankly, I think. Yeah. And I mean, who's doing the reconciling with whom for what reason and everything else.

00:43:53:21 - 00:44:47:23
Ian Gill
And of course, now reconciliation is some watchword in every government program and every corporate expression of whatever. And I just don't trust it. And I don't trust the idea of reconciliation. Not to say that the I mean, we need a lot of reconciliation on a number of levels with indigenous people, with the planet and with ourselves. But I kind of as soon as something becomes a program that gives me the heebie jeebies, I think that the the end to the residential school question and where you're in Salmon Nation.

00:44:47:23 - 00:45:25:22
Ian Gill
But just as people I think we're all struggling with how and where to place our hearts and our minds and actions in terms of how we grapple with this, you know, it's cool news about the atrocities in residential schools, not actually news at all. Much worse. It is. It's old news. It's certainly not news to indigenous people. And we had a truth and reconciliation commission up here which profoundly and publicly, widely shared a lot of these stories.

00:45:25:22 - 00:46:04:14
Ian Gill
And that was what we ended up with. Out of that was some programs about reconciliation and some government grants. This goes way, way deeper, and I'm actually not qualified to know what the right pathway is except to listen and be respectful and and recognize that we all have a role to play in creating healthier communities and also recognizing and being humbled by the history that got us to the point where so many of our communities are so unhealthy.

00:46:04:16 - 00:46:39:18
Ian Gill
You know, one of the few in our kind of journey through termination, one of the indigenous leaders I've had the privilege of meeting more recently don't stay, in fact, as a elected chief and hereditary chief up in the Bay in British Columbia, the name Namadgi Nation. And I was interviewing Don and a few weeks ago, a few months ago, about Alexandra Morton's book on getting trams out of British Columbia.

00:46:39:20 - 00:47:32:18
Ian Gill
And I asked on, you know, what people could do to help First Nations, because we still have a reserve system here and you have a reservation system in the US. And, you know, the governance systems in First nations have very much their own systems, except for the ones that the colonizers imposed upon them. The traditional leadership has its own way of leading and being and governing the affairs of Indigenous people, and there aren't many entry points for non-Indigenous people to engage with First Nations people, you you just sort of, you know, without sort of interfering, if you will, Adams said.

00:47:32:18 - 00:47:50:09
Ian Gill
You know, the thing that well, I interviewed him once and he actually said the greatest thing he said to me then was I said, Well, what do you want? And he said, Well, we just want our stuff back. Who's the first thing? He said, Who left the land and our fish and whatever. It was such a great colony.

00:47:50:09 - 00:48:12:05
Ian Gill
We just want our stuff back so that we can look after ourselves and make our communities healthy. So that's the that's the most some man in the street way of talking about indigenous rights and title that I've ever heard is we just want our stuff back. And I love that, you know, he could be an honorary Australian talking like that.

00:48:12:07 - 00:48:59:16
Ian Gill
But also more recently what he said was, you know, because of the role of salmon in the lives of Indigenous people, he said the best thing that people can do to help First Nations is help us maintain and keep and help flourish. The wild salmon ecosystem, the wild salmon, the the having wild salmon on this coast and making sure that wild salmon survive is the best thing that people can do to help First nations, because there's an absolutely causal link between the health of wild salmon and the health of Don's community and other people like Dawn.

00:48:59:18 - 00:49:52:23
Ian Gill
And so that sort of brings us a bit full circle, I guess. But it is this notion that you don't also said me, he didn't have the sockeye in his freezer. You know, that he you know, the fisheries had been so depleted that the basic idea of having your salmon preserved and frozen dried smoke never has the sort of base level food and source of nourishment, let alone culture and story and everything else, that the fishery was so bad that man, he lives in an area which used to be one of the greatest fisheries in the world, so able to keep the stock of fish in his freezer.

00:49:53:01 - 00:50:25:19
Ian Gill
So that needs to change. And I mean, some of your listeners will know that just, you know, two weeks or so ago, the federal government here in Canada, which is so massively mismanaged the fisheries on both the East Coast COD comes to mind, actually did a 60% closure of commercial salmon fishing in British Columbia because of the parlous state of our salmon stocks here.

00:50:25:21 - 00:51:07:03
Ian Gill
So this is not this is not sort of environmental rhetoric or something. I mean, our salmon stocks in this part of the coast have been in precipitous decline and are in danger of actually disappearing altogether. So that's the fight. And it's not an environmental fight. It is a profound social, cultural, economic and environmental fight. And it's not just a fight about fish.

00:51:07:03 - 00:51:59:22
Ian Gill
It's a fight for human dignity. It's a fight for healthy communities. It's a fight that affects everybody, whether they're in the 30th floor of an office building in Seattle or San Francisco. You know, whether they're out on a net somewhere, everybody, everybody's life and livelihood and prosperity and health is on the line. And if we don't get the salmon thing right, then we've not only ignored the wisdom of people like Cecil Paul, but we've actually ignored, you know, one of the great opportunities to actually start to live well on the planet.

00:52:00:00 - 00:52:27:09
Ian Gill
And then I don't know what comes next, but it's not a scenario that I want to contemplate. And we've got a lot of work to do to unwind and unravel what we've done already to enable that space to open up for us to read the signals and do what we can to protect the lifeblood of Salmon Nation, which is World Pacific Cinema.

00:52:27:11 - 00:53:02:06
Mark Titus
I love that answer that Don Sandwich gave, and I agree with you that it seems at times helpless and hopeless and unable to conceive or execute on a way to do something, do something of substance for the feelings that I have about what has happened here in the past and my role in it now and what it what it tangible, real and meaningful thing to say.

00:53:02:08 - 00:53:24:08
Mark Titus
Take action for preserving and regenerating these salmon stocks. That's the best thing you can do. I know the Elwha people said something similar when the contemplate it was a contemplated thing at the time of bringing the two illegal salmon blocking dams out of the Elwha River. They said, Give us our damn salmon back. That was the that was what they said.

00:53:24:10 - 00:54:09:22
Mark Titus
And you understand that because it was their very lifeblood. Everything about it, the culture, the spiritual aspect, the using every single part from the fish to sustain them. I just recently came back from Bristol Bay a month ago, and I'm about to head back up there again in a couple of weeks. And, you know, had the profound honor and privilege of being able to learn how to cut fish with a youlook in a traditional way from people that are still doing that work as part of their everyday culture, smoking fish, drying fish, using their heads, burying their heads, doing the things that Dawn was talking about is endures in B.C. waters right now.

00:54:09:22 - 00:54:53:05
Mark Titus
And that's why, you know, folks that know my work from this show and know what an incredible oil, you know, spotlight I've been trying to shine on Bristol Bay among so many other people because it is still intact. And that that is something that if we lose that line of defense, then we are in real trouble because it takes, as you know full well and as Don knows and as Alex Martin knows, it takes an incredible amount of energy and work to restore once the genie's been let out of the bottle in terms of colonization and and corporatization of salmon stocks.

00:54:53:07 - 00:55:37:10
Mark Titus
Also, I completely agree. You know, words are oftentimes useless and meaningless. I mean, a word like reconciliation is akin, I think, to the thoughts and prayers for that are always offered at a mass shooting or something in the United States. And so I'm with you I believe that, you know, this is a time for deep listening, for humility, compassion, and for taking if we're going to take action, for taking action this in a tangible way, for the wild salmon, that to sustain us all in various ways, but especially the indigenous people who have been here for millennia.

00:55:37:12 - 00:56:05:14
Mark Titus
All right. I wanted to go back for a second, and we're starting to wind it down here now. But in that original article I talked about the head of this show. You said something that stuck with me. You said in talking about a different and better and regenerative way about doing things in this part of the world. You said there's a third way, not just an industrial economy and not just calling it a park and throwing away the key.

00:56:05:16 - 00:56:36:04
Mark Titus
People want to live in a prosperous place, but not at the expense of nature or people or cultures. So my observation has been, I think, you know, you and I have talked about this. It seems there are factions of change makers who would like to see the whole thing burnt down to the ground, the whole system. And then there are other people who I think have an idea that's more akin to that quote that you had in 2005.

00:56:36:06 - 00:56:43:21
Mark Titus
It's been a minute since that article. Where do you sit on all of that now?

00:56:43:23 - 00:57:17:17
Ian Gill
I actually it sounds weirdly prescient and probably the only prescient thing I've ever said. So what was in my head then is what's in my head now? And it's why we're hoping so. A nation is part of just a part of the expression of that idea. But in as many practical ways as we can find, we need each other at a time now, in a way that we've never paid full attention to.

00:57:17:17 - 00:57:53:13
Ian Gill
We need solutions. They're not going to come from government. They're not going to come from large corporations, they're not going to come from the system that is basically built to defend itself. And systems change is happening. I mean, if you if if you can't see in the climate crisis and in the COVID pandemic, among other things, also some of the upwelling of real anger and and desire for change based on sort of racial injustice and economic injustice.

00:57:53:13 - 00:58:46:07
Ian Gill
And you can add the residential schools into that and everything else that systems change is occurring now in very profound ways. And our natural systems doing their thing. And it would be the height of sort of human hubris to imagine that some NGO or some government program or something or other is going to solve for any and all the complexities that are headed our way in ways that, you know, the ones that get headlines are the destructive ways you look at the droughts and the wildfires and floods and, you know, all the calamities.

00:58:46:10 - 00:59:21:21
Ian Gill
That's what gets the headlines. And so what we need to do, it seems to me, is actually harness this moment. There is an awareness that is unusual now. And I think that we need to look inside. We need to look back to indigenous wisdom not as some artifact, but actually you look at societies that have successfully listened thousands of years, not just you, a short period of time in this region of the world.

00:59:21:23 - 00:59:58:17
Ian Gill
And we just need to open up to each other and value knowledge and value experimentation and innovation and listen to the edges, to what's happening out on the edges, where people are confronting these things right now and coming up with their own solutions in their communities and their own ways of increasing their food security or their energy supplies and everything, whatever it is, in ways that don't rely upon the industrial system, which has failed, frankly, and which has produced the effects that we're living with today.

00:59:58:19 - 01:00:31:14
Ian Gill
So listen to the engines and listen to voices, people, voices of people who are mostly ignored by the media and who are solving things in practical ways and share like crazy because if we if everything needs to be proprietary or it has to have a sort of a value attached to it to be considered that your capital value should be considered worthwhile, you're if everything has to have a return on investment, the only return that matters right now is a return to nature.

01:00:31:16 - 01:00:59:22
Ian Gill
You nature is the source of our productivity in our prosperity. If there's a return, if we need to return, frankly, the assets of nature to the natural system, we need to stop thinking that we need an arrow eye on capital. We need to actually reformulate capital into producing a return on investment for nature. If we don't get that right.

01:01:00:00 - 01:01:25:21
Ian Gill
And that's not just impact investing or something, it's actually thinking profoundly differently about the role of capital in our world. If we don't get that right. Well, it's not for me to say the doomed youth. Yogi Berra probably said something about the future. And as broad as it used to be, I think that's what he said. And that's what worries all of us.

01:01:25:23 - 01:01:32:14
Ian Gill
And that's what should motivate all of us as we go about our lives. Insemination.

01:01:32:16 - 01:02:03:17
Mark Titus
Well said. And let's bring it back full circle here to a digestible and tangible thing to do. Right now, any one of us in this incredible part of the bioregion tell a salmon story. How have salmon affected us? Maybe you can give us a recap of why salmon stories. And and do you know, do I need to be I happen to be a filmmaker, but do I need to be a filmmaker or to qualify to tell these kind of stories?

01:02:03:19 - 01:02:29:22
Ian Gill
No, you don't. I was in a restaurant in Vancouver a few weeks ago and we had masks on and a young woman was serving us. And my partner went to the bathroom in this woman saying, What are you guys talking about? I overheard your conversation. I told her about the magic canoe and salmon story. She said, I've got a salmon story, and she just took off on me.

01:02:30:00 - 01:03:01:22
Ian Gill
I mean, everybody's got the same story and you don't need to have media capabilities or anything. You just basically know. And it's actually not necessarily that easy for people to pick up a phone and tell themselves the salmon story into the camera. So get someone to hold the camera for you. Just, you know, go talk to your uncle and ask him about salmon or your aunt or whatever, and point a phone at them and get them to share a salmon story.

01:03:01:22 - 01:03:46:05
Ian Gill
I mean, everybody's got one. We want to hear them and we want everybody to be able to have to participate in celebrating. You're, frankly, the most remarkable species that is the lifeblood of one of the most remarkable bioregion on earth. So we want people to celebrate. And you, one of our elders, one of our trustees, and Myles Richardson, who's a former president of the Council of Haida Nature, The nation, said nothing important in his world, in the world of the Haida people, happens without ceremony, nothing.

01:03:46:07 - 01:04:27:14
Ian Gill
And we don't recognize that in our society well enough. And so I think that these stories as being part of ceremony, you know, let's let's champion wild salmon, let's tell our story and contribute to the ceremony of creating this fabric of stories across the nation. What I hope we will see is this collection of stories will be just a beautiful, diverse, living embodiment of people expressing why salmon are important to them to the point that it makes it impossible for us to lose wild salmon.

01:04:27:16 - 01:05:20:05
Ian Gill
What I fear a little, I have to say is maybe this will one day be a remarkable archive of the sort of the sad way in which something that affected so many people in so many ways was allowed to slide away because we didn't act and we didn't pay attention in the ways we should. And so I don't want this to be an archive of would have been nice if I want this to be a ceremony and an expression and a celebration of the fact that we all care enough about salmon because we care enough about each other and we care enough about the place that sustains us, that we raise our voices and said

01:05:20:07 - 01:05:42:02
Ian Gill
there's no one right thing to say. We said the many, many, many things that we need to say and hear from each other that make it possible as possible for us to think about the fact we might just have wild salmon in the future in perpetuity. That would be a good thing.

01:05:42:04 - 01:06:01:17
Mark Titus
Wild salmon give their very lives so that life itself can continue. What a wonderful tribute to these creatures that are the bedrock of this bioregion. Thank you. And with that, no one gets out without the bonus round. So are you prepared?

01:06:01:19 - 01:06:03:18
Ian Gill
yeah.

01:06:03:20 - 01:06:26:09
Mark Titus
Okay. Okay, here we go. So this is a fantastical thing. This is not actually going to happen as a knock on wood, but just say just say your house were on fire and you could only get out other than your loved ones. And your animals qualify, but you could get out one physical thing. What would that physical thing be.

01:06:26:11 - 01:06:56:06
Ian Gill
And what would that physical thing be? I'm just looking around and thinking about that. I think it would be possibly a shell or a piece of wood. It would probably be something wooden because I love wood. That's one of the other great things in this region. I have just near the exit to my door a picture of Cecil Paul.

01:06:56:06 - 01:07:21:10
Ian Gill
I'd probably put that under my arm and run out with that as well, haven't. But you know, I would, I would probably take a wooden object, something that smells of the coast, probably a object and not quite sure which one. And I'd probably took that photo of Cecil on the map. I guess I probably should then run upstairs and get photos of the kids as well.

01:07:21:10 - 01:07:32:04
Ian Gill
And then the photo of Zoe and on and on and on. So the 50 quid. So I'm not leaving with only one thing that. Yeah, that would be all right.

01:07:32:06 - 01:07:53:20
Mark Titus
Well you're, you're a man of action so I have no doubt you could do it. All right, then. Two things then in a more metaphysical way. More kind of spiritual way. Two things that you could take out of the fire that make in. And what would you take.

01:07:53:21 - 01:08:07:04
Ian Gill
And love of place and love of a good story.

01:08:07:06 - 01:08:15:22
Mark Titus
Amen, brother. All right. Anything that you would leave in the fire to be purged or purified?

01:08:16:00 - 01:09:00:08
Ian Gill
I think, like all of us, we can look back and think that it spent sometimes that time unwisely in some it's at some junctures, you know, there is I think, where I've wasted time, I'd be happy to leave that behind. Were based in my and one of the talents I have where I've wasted them. I'd be happy to burn that up and have that time back.

01:09:00:10 - 01:09:10:10
Ian Gill
But I also qualify that by understanding that it's only by doing and making some poor choices as you even recognize what a good choice is.

01:09:10:12 - 01:09:44:20
Mark Titus
Through this experience. But I do share that sentiment about all the time that I have spent worrying about things, and I think that's probably what I would leave in the fire, too. Well, Ian Gill, I'm so glad to be connected together. And I should mention that Salmon Nation is a partner in this show, in this podcast, and we are planning on moving forward together on producing and maintaining and really getting more content from this bioregion out into the world.

01:09:44:20 - 01:10:13:19
Mark Titus
So I'm really looking forward to that and all of the incredible human beings that we're going to be able to encounter through this really cool way of, communicating with each other. So for today, I want to thank you and for folks that want to get involved as a Salmon nation member of this network, or also more importantly right now to tell your salmon story, how do folks do that?

01:10:13:21 - 01:10:42:03
Ian Gill
Salmon dot net is a website. And if you go in there, there's a little place you can click that said salmon stories. And if want to get out there and harvest some stories for us and get a fellowship to do so just as a form to fill out. And it's pretty easy to sort of express your interests. And if you have a salmon to share, there's a quick little primer on how to shoot when and where to send it, and we'd love to hear from people.

01:10:42:05 - 01:10:44:17
Mark Titus
Brilliant. Ian Gill, thank you so much.

01:10:44:17 - 01:11:02:20
Ian Gill
I want to say anything and thank you, Mark, for the work you do. I want to just make sure that we honor your role as a very powerful voice for salmon and for the nation. I want to thank you for that.

01:11:02:22 - 01:11:22:21
Mark Titus
Well, I truly love them. I'm truly mystified by them. And, you know, who knew salmon growing up, fishing for them and and just in love with the mystery of them, it's become a life's work. So I'm grateful. And Ian Gill, we will see you down the trail until next time.

01:11:22:23 - 01:11:27:00
Ian Gill
Thanks, man.

01:11:27:02 - 01:11:39:05
Music
How do you save what you love?
How do you save what you love?

01:11:39:06 - 01:12:05:06
Mark Titus
Thank you for listening to save what you love. If you like what you're hearing, you can help keep these conversations coming your way by giving us a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can check out photos and links from this episode at evaswild.com. While there, you can join our growing community by subscribing to our newsletter, you'll get exclusive offers on wild salmon shipped to your door and notifications about upcoming guests and more great content on the way.

01:12:05:08 - 01:12:44:07
Mark Titus
That's at evaswild.com. That's the word Save spelled backwards Wild dot com. This episode was produced by Tyler White and edited by Patrick Troll. Original music was created by Whiskey Class. This podcast is a collaboration between Ava's Wild Stories and Salmon Nation and was recorded on the homelands of the Duwamish. People. We'd like to recognize these lands and waters and their significance for the people who lived and continued to live in this region whose practices and spiritualities were and are tied to the land in the water, and whose lives continue to enrich and develop in relationship to the land waters and other inhabitants today.