Here in the Great Bear Rainforest-a vast region of old-growth forest and icy fjords that harbor iconic animals including wolves, whales, and ghostly spirit bears-hands-on stewardship has always been a way of life for the Indigenous people who call it home. When endangered humpback whales get entangled in fishing gear, whole days sometimes pass before experts at Fisheries and Oceans Canada arrive. When a ferry sank in 2006, members of the Gitga’at Nation rescued 99 stranded passengers in the middle of the night, well before the Coast Guard got there. During a major oil spill in 2016, it took emergency response crews 34 hours to begin mitigation. It’s not unusual for provincial or federal officials to be late to a crisis along the central coast of British Columbia, where roads are scarce and the weather fickle. By the time provincial officers showed up three days later, 90 percent of the spill area had already been contained. The next day, fellow guardians from the neighboring Heiltsuk Nation came with supplies and additional manpower. On February 15, 2021, within an hour of being notified about the impending disaster, members of the Wuikinuxv Coastal Guardian Watchmen program arrived on the scene, assessing and containing the spill. By the time somebody noticed, more than 2,000 gallons of fuel had leaked onto shore and into a waterway teeming with crab, salmon, and spawning candlefish. No one knows how long diesel had been seeping from a crack in the tanker truck, parked at an old cannery on the bank of Rivers Inlet, a fjord about 300 miles north of Vancouver in the heart of Wuikinuxv First Nations Territory.
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