Our everyday diets provide insight into our ways of life and surroundings. For archaeologists in the Lower Mainland, reconstructing what the səl̓ilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) diet looked like prior to colonization is helping them understand the relationships between people and their territories.
UBC Institute of Oceans and Fisheries PhD student Meaghan Efford and collaborators conducted a study to construct an estimation of the Tsleil-Waututh ancestral diet, dating from 1000 CE until early European contact in approximately 1792 CE.
Tsleil-Waututh is a Coast Salish Nation whose traditional and unceded territory centres on Səl̓ilwət, also known as the Burrard Inlet, in BC.
“Land and water stewardship is really important to Tsleil-Waututh. It’s something that they're really active in, and they have a lot of people power in science, on the ground, [in] scientific monitoring, in restoring and conservation of Burrard Inlet,” said Efford.
Reconstructing information on the ecosystem and its relationship with its ancestral people can help inform the Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s plans for stewardship, conservation and restoration, as well as connecting with traditional eating habits.
“One of the big focuses of Tsleil-Waututh Nation going forward is to increase the amount of dietary protein the community gets out of the Inlet to feed their community using traditional food harvesting methods and traditional food ways.”
Drawing from archaeological data, ecological data, historical records and traditional ecological knowledge from Tsleil-Waututh knowledge holders, researchers started to draft the estimated pre-colonization diet.
“A challenge was taking all the different data sets and figuring out how they all fit together, partially because that's just an interesting puzzle, but also because each data set communicates data differently,” said Efford.
The study constructed the diet based on three components: local ecology and zooarchaeological evidence, the population’s nutritional needs and Tslelil-Waututh’s traditional dietary focus.
Throughout the research process, Efford met with Tsleil-Waututh knowledge holders to make adjustments to the diet drafts, working closely to achieve more accuracy and to expand on the information beyond what the data could provide.
“As an archaeologist, I have an archaeologist toolkit and I can do ecosystem modelling, but I haven't lived in this ecosystem my entire life. My family hasn't been here. I'm a settler scientist, so I don't have that connection to the place, whereas our Tsleil-Waututh co-authors do,” said Efford.
”They have the intergenerational knowledge ... that's been passed down through generations. And so they brought that toolkit and that perspective and expertise.”
The estimatation of the Tsleil-Waututh diet had variety but reflected a preference for four main food sources: salmon, forage fish, shellfish and marine birds. Efford hopes future iterations of the research will continue to characterize the diet by including the seasonality of foods, cooking and preservation methods as well as more plant foods.
“We focused the reconstruction on protein and the approach we took really emphasizes the protein contribution, which is great and it's really interesting, but it underemphasizes plants … Something that we want to do in the future is to really unpack the plant piece.”
While the data showed a preference for animal protein in the Tsleil-Waututh pre-colonization diet, Efford highlighted the variety and sustainability of the diet, which harvested, hunted and fished across the ecosystem.
“That is a really important sustainability approach to food, eating locally, making sure we're not overharvesting or overfocusing on any one resource in particular,” said Efford.
This is in contrast to the traditional commercial livestock industry, which plays a major role in greenhouse gas emissions, land change and degradation and water use.
With the rapid change and challenges the climate crisis poses, Efford emphasized the adaptability of the Tsleil-Waututh diet and hopes it can help some people find inspiration for their own food ways.
“It's a really great way of making sure that the pressure is spread out, and then you can adapt based on the seasons, based on the individual species [or] on things that happen that you can't predict, like environmental disasters or environmental change.”
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