Stories of before and after

Sandra Bartlett’s new podcast, The Salmon People, is a story about many things.

“It’s a story of a woman who had one plan for her life,” Sandra tells me, but then got pulled in an entirely different direction. It’s a story about wild salmon and accountability and the influence of a massive global industry over the people in power. It’s a story about how fragile the natural world can be and what happens when humans ignore that balance. It’s a story about the fight to save a fish whose fate is intertwined with so many others — including our own.

Even though the narrative at the heart of The Salmon People has been playing out for decades, Sandra didn’t stumble across the inspiration behind the podcast until last year, when she picked up a book by Alexandra Morton, the unlikely detective at the centre of The Salmon People’s first episode. A whale biologist who has made protecting wild salmon her life’s work, Alex recounts the twists and turns of that battle in her book, Not on My Watch. The more Sandra read, the more she saw an opportunity.

“I could see that there was a story there, and not just one story but many stories over the years,” Sandra tells me. She reached out to Alex and asked to talk. The more Sandra learned, the more invested she became. Alex didn’t just take on government and industry in the name of wild salmon (and her first love, whales), she kept a trove of audio recordings and archival material documenting the saga.

“I thought I could take this story and go right back in history, in time, to the beginning when she first started doing this work, and I could bring it to life because of all this historical material,” Sandra says.

She crafted a narrative that pulled in Alex’s years of scientific research as well as her personal story. Sandra spoke to people in the Broughton Archipelago, where Alex made her stand against government and the fish farm industry whose arrival threatened wild salmon in the surrounding waters, and nearby First Nations whose cultural identities were — and still are — inextricably connected to those wild salmon. When Sandra finally made a trip to the area herself, it all became clear.

“Going up there in that fishing boat, it was kind of like going into another world,” she tells me. “We left the towns on the more populated islands and went out, and the farther we went, the more empty it was and the more magnificent it was. There was just water and mountains and trees.

“And by the time we arrived at Echo Bay, I understood what a special place this was… And it just hit me that I could understand why people were fighting to preserve it. The beauty that I was seeing above the surface, I understood that it was connected to what was going on below.”

Sandra was also impressed by the modest building Alex had turned into a lab, recruiting young scientists to help study the problems she found in Echo Bay’s waters as more and more industrial fish farms came into the area.

“That sort of struck me, the contrast between the simplicity of the location, the simplicity of the lab, and yet it was doing this really kind of cutting-edge modern science.”

So did the stories from nearby First Nations, whose members spoke of “their world and their life before the salmon disappeared,” Sandra says. “They all had stories of before and after. And those stories really stayed with me.”

All of these experiences are part of The Salmon People, whose episodes weave together the stories of individuals and communities pushing back against a powerful industry to protect the wild salmon so vital to their home.

For years, Canada’s National Observer has followed the story of West Coast fish farms in our reporting, too, namely thanks to my colleagues Rochelle Baker and Marc Fawcett-Atkinson. Reporter Cloe Logan has also been keeping an eye on the East Coast. On both sides of the country, the story of wild salmon is an urgent one involving local communities, First Nations, industry players and government departments. So when our editor-in-chief, Linda Solomon Wood, heard about Sandra’s podcast, it was a no-brainer.

“It’s a crime that we haven’t protected wild salmon,” Linda said last week. “So, this is a true crime story. And a love story. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. What could be more amazing than that?”

You can listen to episodes 1 and 2 of The Salmon People on our website as well as on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google.

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