After decades of discord, Canada and First Nations are working together to build a network of marine protected areas stretching from Vancouver Island to Alaska.
Story by Serena Renner
Photographs and video by Bennett Whitnell
The ocean bumps beneath our boat, and a cold mist obscures the way forward. I peer over the driver’s shoulder to consult the GPS screen behind the steering wheel. The map reveals a labyrinth of islands, as well as dozens of inlets and fjords cutting up the western fringe of British Columbia’s Central Coast. Most bear colonial names: Jackson Passage, Laredo Inlet, Princess Royal Channel. But looking closer, I can make out other, older names: Nowish, Khutze, Kynoch.
When the mist lifts, the topography pops up all around me. Sheer granite peaks plunge into a Magic Eye mirage of cedar, fir, and spruce trees rooted to rocky shores. Some islands have stories and names that match their shapes—navigational aids before nautical charts, teachings before written language. Our boat, Ksm Wüts’iin (Mouse Woman) passes Qweeqweea’dzee (Upside-Down Canoe), which gets its name from a legend about animals working together from their shared canoe to fight a sea monster. It’s a story that holds particular resonance today.
Finally, we reach Kynoch Inlet, the site of today’s crab survey. According to oral history, Kynoch is the birthplace of the Xai’xais Nation. The story goes that Raven searched for the perfect place for the people to be born and settled on Kynoch for its bounty and biodiversity. It had just the right mix of plants and trees; snow-fed rivers; and bays rich in marine life, from salmon and rockfish to clams, cockles, and crabs. The Xai’xais amalgamated with the Kitasoo Nation about 150 years ago, and Kynoch Inlet is now one of six areas in Kitasoo Xai’xais territory where recreational and commercial crabbing is off limits to protect Indigenous access.
Ken Cripps cuts the boat’s engine and flips on a winch. With a rumbling whir, the machine hauls a length of rope from the water until the first trap appears. Two small Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister) click their claws inside. Cripps—the exuberant marine advisor to the Kitasoo Xai’xais Stewardship Authority, who some call Ken Crabs—cocks his head, surprised by the low catch. In these bountiful waters, the survey team can usually count on reaching the nation’s measure of a successful catch: roughly seven adult male crabs per trap. (Any trapped females are released.) Three colleagues record the sex, shell size, and shell condition of the two females before flinging them into the sea.
A few dozen meters away, the stewardship crew repeats the process for a second trap. When it surfaces, it’s empty save for two sea stars. Cripps holds them over his chest as if he’s a mermaid, and everyone laughs. Then the boat driver puts on the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic,” as if to emphasize the unexpectedly low catch in an area known for its productivity.
Brayden Hopkins, foreground, and Ken Cripps, background, work crab traps on Ksm Wüts’iin as part of a survey for the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation.
It’s true that the ocean off the Central Coast is some of the richest in the world. Shifting currents of cold, nutrient-filled water bring copious plankton and fish. In turn, those smaller life forms fuel more than 20 species of marine mammals, including humpback whales that corral prey inside nets of bubbles before inhaling them in a single baleen-gummed gulp. In the deeper waters, rare coral and glass sponge reefs support such species as shortraker rockfish and ruby octopus, while shallower kelp forests and eelgrass meadows shelter culturally important herring, crab, and all five species of Pacific salmon.
Yet here, as in so many other places, stressors like overfishing and climate change are threatening this productivity and the ways of life that depend on it. Around the Central Coast, marine species including Dungeness crab, coho salmon, and northern abalone have sharply declined, while those like eulachon have all but vanished. In response, the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation—like many other Indigenous peoples here and around the world—have been working to take ocean management back into their own hands.
Over the past two decades, British Columbia has made strides in recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous-colonial relationships that had long been antagonistic have become more cooperative. Yet most of the progress has occurred in terrestrial environments. Now, a new network of marine protected areas (MPAs) in a region known as the Great Bear Sea is trying to bring strategies that have worked on land into the ocean. The plan is to connect ecological hotspots that will act like underwater stepping stones between B.C.’s northern Vancouver Island and Alaska.
While many of the protected areas are still in the works, one that’s well underway is the Central Coast National Marine Conservation Area Reserve (the Central Coast MPA), which includes Kynoch Inlet. Set to be established around 2027, it will be the largest of the Great Bear Sea’s conservation areas, which together will cover a footprint nearly the size of Belgium.
Humpback whales are among more than 20 species of marine mammals that live in British Columbia’s Central Coast.
Beyond its biodiversity and size, the governance structure will set the Great Bear Sea apart. It’s the first marine area in Canada—and one of few places, land or sea, in the world—designed to be collaboratively managed by three levels of government: federal, provincial, and Indigenous, as represented by 17 coastal First Nations. “It’s a laudable, progressive project for the recognition of Indigenous rights and title,” says Michael Bissonnette, a lawyer on the marine team at West Coast Environmental Law, a firm based in Vancouver, B.C. If done right, the network “could be a real, meaningful model for reconciliation elsewhere.”
The changes have been a long time coming, and the way forward isn’t fully clear. But the mist is lifting, revealing not just the lay of the land (and sea), but the benefits of working together to protect the whole ecosystem.
Read the full feature, “Welcome to the Great Bear Sea,” which was published in bioGraphic magazine in July 2025. The story was also republished by The Tyee, Canada’s National Observer, Earth Island Journal, Magic Canoe, and Resilience.org.