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What started as a propagation program to help rehabilitate its industrialized portion of səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard Inlet), the Wild Bird Trust’s Coast Salish Plant Nursery has won a heritage award from the District of North Vancouver.
Awarded by staff on Monday night (April 4), the nursery located at Squaw-uck (Maplewood Flats Conservation Area) is a partnership with səl̓ilw̓ətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh First Nation) and aims to promote the cultural connections of Coast Salish plants and their importance for improving local wildlife and habitat.
Irwin Oostindie, president of the trust, said the nursery originally opened about 25 years ago and turned into a social enterprise around 5 years ago, after growing from a practical need to cultivate plants for restoration purposes to what it is today – a public-facing education platform on reconciliation and conservation.
“We employ Indigenous ethnobotanists as our staff, and provide really active education and community service opportunities for the public to learn about pre-contact history of the North Shore,” Oostindie “We really recognize that native plants are an entry point to really concretely put reconciliation in the hands of local residents, so they can actually materially participate in restoring damaged landscapes and colonized landscapes, through our relationship to these lands, through the plants that have historically grown on them and have often been displaced through our manicured lawns and our Victorian gardens.”
The nursery only sells native plants local to the region. Sales from the nursery allow the trust to propagate and plant more plants in the area.
“[It’s] a circular economic model, where the social enterprise can grow, and we can do more impact with our own restoration work,” he said.
This award from the district comes as the trust received $100,000 from Heritage BC and the First People's Cultural Council last month for its ongoing work to repair the ecological and cultural relations at Squaw-uck.
For the next eight weeks, the Nature House at Maplewoods Flats is holding an exhibition which profiles 50 plants and their traditional Coast Salish uses, including food, medicine, dying and weaving uses. T'uy't'tanat-Cease Wyss and Senaqwila Wyss have been informing the ethnobotany work, Oostindie said.
On March 31, the Wild Bird Trust held its annual general meeting, where Oostindie said members elected the first majority Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nation members to its board of directors.
“It's probably the first time in British Columbia that a formerly white conservation group has decolonized to the point where governance is now controlled by local First Nations.
“What we're trying to do is, we're actually trying to do structural redress with the Nations, and trying to show other groups across the North Shore that reconciliation can only get us so far, but until we look at governance, our policies and our programs, [and ground those] in Indigenous knowledge, we're actually only doing superficial work.”
