Ahistorical ecologist and her team at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial discovery about B.C.’s ancient forest ecosystems — one that could strengthen the systems of today and tomorrow and equip us to understand our own environment even as it changes with the climate.

Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the leader of the Historical and Ethnoecological Research Lab recently published a study in the journal Ecology and Society. In it, she documents four sites that are ecologically more diverse than the conifer forests surrounding them. And for good reason: each is on an Indigenous reserve and marks the site of an ancient community of master horticulturalists.

It’s an old settler myth that North America was “undeveloped” by Indigenous peoples, who subsisted as hunter-gatherers and therefore didn’t deserve to claim stakes in any particular land. Never mind that agricultural civilizations flourished all the way from Mexico to the Great Lakes, or that white explorers traversed the continent by following long-established Indigenous trade routes.

Here in B.C., this self-serving cultural ignorance operated even with relatively advanced anthropologists like Franz Boas, who assumed he was studying dying peoples and only wanted to record their folkways before they vanished. In Boas’ case, he additionally focused on Indigenous men and ignored women, so he missed a key element of coastal Indigenous culture — the clam gardens designed and maintained by women, which could sustain a population well over 100,000 in the centuries before contact.

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