If you know Wuikinuxv Territory well and your memory serves, you may recall an old cannery right at the head of the river, called Rivers Inlet Cannery. In a little float house right behind that old cannery is where Fred Anderson lived until he was about 10 years old.
“Low tide, we'd be sitting on the mud flats and at high tide, we'd be floating,” recalls Fred, a member of the Wuikinuxv Nation and one of the original Board members for Coastal Nations Fisheries. “So, that's how we grew up—just right on the water.”
Fred was actually born in Bella Bella in 1944, but arrived in Rivers Inlet soon after with his family. They didn’t live in the village itself, which was a few miles up the river. In those days there was no road, no gravel even, and Fred had to walk by trail to get to the village.
Fred’s mother was from Wuikinuxv but his father was born in Stockholm, Sweden. “My dad used to teach us how to hunt for ducks and geese and trap for marten and mink,” says Fred, adding that his dad also taught him how to do hand logging, which led to his first job at a logging camp with his brother. He’d log through the winter, then fish all summer.
Before Fred started fishing more regularly, he worked as a boundary line patrol person, where he skippered his dad’s boat at night, then worked a couple years for BC Packers. When Fred decided he wanted to be a full-time fisherman, his boss at the time was skeptical: “He says, ‘oh, you'll never make it fishing.’ But I guess I proved him wrong.”
Fred started life as a fisher in the early 60s with just a rental boat. In those days, the salmon run in Rivers Inlet was still healthy and boats would come from all over the coast. “I did fairly well; some good years, some not so good,” he recalls. “We went all over the coast, from Rupert down to the Fraser River. My big income was salmon, but we had some good herring and halibut catches too.”
One of Fred’s best memories was fishing the boundary line, that hot spot all good fishers know, when the tide goes out. “We'd go up to that boundary and set our net as fast as we could, and the tide would just push us out,” he says. “We'd run back to the line and do the same thing over and over until the tide fizzled out on you... I really liked that.”
When asked his favourite fish to harvest, Fred doesn’t hesitate: it was always salmon. “We started young, my brother and I, and we learned all on our own,” he says. “Salmon has been very dear to us all of our lives, and still today, my brother and I go food fishing for salmon.”
After so many years in the fishing business, Fred says the best advice he can give aspiring fishers is to talk with a mentor or Elder—someone who can coach them on everything from setting halibut gear to mending and patching their nets. “You need a little bit of coaching these days,” he says. “That’s always a challenge for young fishers. There’s just a lot to know. Like learning how to run a fishing vessel—you have to know how to maintain your boat, or it’s going to fall apart on you.”
There are many other challenges for young fishers, and one of the first is securing the financing to start things up. “That's always been a challenge, but it's way harder today,” he says. Weather and navigation are big challenges too, he adds, as well as learning how to take care of your net. “I remember one year I got so many dogfish that they just tore my net to pieces. I had no net left; it was just rags.”
In the face of all those challenges, Fred says, “we tackled them all and came out smiling, most of the time.”
What advice does Fred have for future CNF Board members? It’s much the same as his advice for young fishers. “You have to be a good listener, and ask lots of questions,” he says. “Always ask our people and our Elders what they think. Don’t be afraid to ask them, ‘where should we go from here?’”
Although Fred misses the good old days when salmon and other fish were more plentiful across the coast, he still hopes they'll bounce back with better management. “I’d like to see First Nations have more control of quotas and licences,” he says. “They need more say and more control over how fish is caught in their territories… Not just the business part of it, but managing it as well. Protecting the resource has to be a big part.”
He also thinks there will be some excellent opportunities in coastal fisheries, in prawns and halibut, for example. “I know there are always challenges to overcome,” he says, “but I hope the younger generation will get into it and really pursue it.”
Check out the short video below, with Fred providing a sneak peek into the process for spawn-on-kelp...
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