Indigenous food harvesting as social–ecological monitoring: A case study with the Gitga'at First Nation

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society 1School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada 2Hartley Bay School, Hartley Bay, BC, Canada 3Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB), Universidad de Magallanes, Punta Arenas, Chile 4Gitga'at Oceans and Lands Department, Gitga'at First Nation, Hartley Bay, BC, Canada

. Resilience can be defined as the capacity for a social-ecological system to respond and adapt to change while maintain its core identity (Folke, 2006;Ostrom, 2009). In recent decades, partnerships between scientists and Indigenous peoples have also embraced opportunities to refer to both Indigenous and scientific knowledges to better understand and manage ecological systems (Eckert, Ban, Frid, & Mcgreer, 2017;Housty et al., 2014;Moller, Berkes, Lyver, & Kislalioglu, 2004).
An increasing number of environmental monitoring programmes have also begun to solicit the knowledge of Indigenous peoples to better manage natural resources, conserve biodiversity and adapt to climate change (Thompson, Lantz, & Ban, 2020). These initiatives have involved varying degrees of partnerships, ranging from externally driven initiatives with local Indigenous data collectors employed to administer a specific methodology, to autonomous Indigenous place-based activities as methods of monitoring (Danielsen et al., 2009;Wilson, Mutter, Inkster, & Satterfield, 2018).
These different levels of partnership are often reflected in the monitoring indicators that are used. Monitoring initiatives driven by external agencies tend to focus primarily on ecological indicators (e.g. Bellfield, Sabogal, Goodman, & Leggett, 2015), while those led by Indigenous peoples tend to include a more holistic suite of indicators including social, ecological, social-ecological and spiritual angles (e.g. Lyver et al., 2017;Parlee, Manseau, Dene, & Nation, 2005;Thompson et al., 2020).
Whether externally or locally driven, monitoring initiatives that involve Indigenous peoples and their knowledge are occurring in a time of unprecedented rates of social and ecological change, and imperial and colonial policies continue to politically, economically and socially marginalize Indigenous peoples throughout the world (e.g. Dhillon, 2015). Colonial pressures are often compounded by the effects of climate change, making Indigenous lifeways among the most threatened (Ford et al., 2016;Savo et al., 2016). Indeed, much work has been dedicated to exposing the multiple ecological changes experienced by Indigenous communities due to rapid climate change (Krupnik & Jolly, 2002;Shaffer, 2014;Turner & Clifton, 2009). In spite of these challenges, Indigenous peoples are actively reclaiming and asserting their languages, cultures and rights to manage their lands and waters (Corntassel, 2012;Simpson, 2017). Several communities have decided to partner with academic researchers to seek ways of documenting environmental changes to inform adaptation on their own terms (e.g. Bennett & Lantz, 2014;Gearheard, Aporta, Aipellee, & Keefe, 2011).
The purpose of this paper is to showcase an example of autonomous Indigenous monitoring in northern British Columbia, Canada. Based on the conversations and interviews conducted as part of developing a monitoring programme based in Indigenous knowledge in collaboration with researchers from the University of Victoria (Thompson et al., 2019), we outline a conceptual framework-a set of interrelated concepts and their relationships (Jabareen, 2009)-which illustrates how Gitga'at people monitor their territory through continued use and occupancy. As with other Indigenous peoples (e.g. Lyver et al., 2017), a large portion of Gitga'at relationship with the land and sea is centred around food harvesting activities, including travelling, harvesting, preparation and preservation (Cuerrier, Turner, Gomes, Garibaldi, & Downing, 2015;Garibaldi & Turner, 2004). Thus, the analysis and resulting framework described in this paper focus on food species that play an important role in the cultural identity of Gitga'at people. The framework describes the interconnected social and ecological elements and indicators that Gitga'at people use to monitor while participating in harvesting activities and is illustrated by changes observed by Gitga'at harvesters over the course of two harvest seasons.
Our case study adds to a growing body of literature describing Indigenous systems of caring for nature and people (e.g. Gould, Pai, Muraca, & Chan, 2019;Whyte, Brewer, & Johnson, 2016), and contributes to broader conversations about diverse ways of knowing in sustainability processes. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently articulated a conceptual framework emphasizing the concept of nature's contributions to people (NCP), defined as 'all the positive contributions, losses or detriments that people obtain from nature', and recognizing the critical role of culture in mediating all relationships between people and nature (Diaz et al., 2018;Pascual et al., 2017). One of the motivations behind such a shift from the dominant ecosystem services concept was the intent of being more inclusive of diverse value systems and worldviews (Kadykalo et al., 2019). This shift has also included an emphasis on relational thinking among sustainability scholars which derived from increasingly nuanced discussions of the relationships between humans and nature (e.g. Chan, Gould, & Pascual, 2018;Fish, Church, & Winter, 2016). Intrinsic and instrumental values have been relevant in the understanding the material and intangible benefits of nature. However, the role of relational values (the 'preferences, principles, and virtues associated with relationships, both interpersonal and as articulated by policies and social norms'; Chan et al., 2018), which are often shaped by cultural heritage, had been generally overlooked or mis-valued in ecosystem assessments (Satz et al., 2013). Following the presentation of our framework, we draw parallels to the NCP framework, focusing on the NCP concepts of 'maintenance of options' and our concept 'cultural continuity' and encourage relational thinkers to embrace reciprocal loops between the actions of people and the many benefits of nature. By demonstrating examples of the ways in which the Gitga'at practice of harvesting as monitoring encapsulates relationships and responsibilities with and between the human and non-human world, we hope to inform future dialogues around sustainability and resource management in land-and sea-scapes subject to diverse value systems.

| Context
The Gitga'at are a Tsimshian (Ts'msyen) tribal group whose people have occupied and cared for their lands and waters on the Northwest coast of North America for several thousand years. The traditional territory of the Gitga'at extends over approximately 14,000 km 2 of Coastal Western Hemlock forest and glacial fjord systems ( Figure 1).
Despite colonial policies of cultural assimilation and land dispossession, many Gitga'at people continue to harvest and consume traditional foods on a daily basis (Fediuk & Reid, 2014 Gitga'at people have governed themselves following a hereditary leadership system for millennia. Matrilineal clans (pteex), which link the Gitga'at to other Tsimshian tribes through political and kin responsibilities, contain house groups (wuwaap) each with leaders (sm'ooygit (sing.), smgyigyet (plur.)) who are responsible for looking after their people and managing resources within their territories (see Greening, 2017 for a more thorough discussion of Tsimshian governance and matrilineal structures). Smgyigyet oversee the stewardship, allocation and management of resources based on an intimate knowledge of their territories, adaawx (oral histories) and ayaawx (laws derived from those histories). Since the colonial Indian Act of 1876 and the imposition of the Band Council system by the Government of Canada, elected councils have gained political responsibility, but decisions related to territorial management continue to require the consultation and approval of the Smgyigyet. Gitga'at territorial management activities now also largely embrace the methods and technology offered by science (e.g. Keen et al., 2017;Ritts, Gage, Picard, Dundas, & Dundas, 2016), with advice and technical administration provided by the Gitga'at Oceans and Lands Department and Gitga'at Guardians (Gitga'at First Nation, 2011).
The idea of initiating a programme to document Gitga'at harvesters' observations of change was spurred by the director of the Gitga'at Oceans and Lands Department (CP) in early 2016 when he and several harvesters witnessed abnormalities in Gitga'at territory including sea star wasting syndrome, increasing red tides and high levels of biotoxins in clams. The idea had also been previously suggested by ethnoecologists and climate scientists who had documented some of the longer-term changes experienced by Gitga'at people (Turner et al., 2013). To assist with designing a Gitga'at monitoring programme, a partnership was formed with researchers at the University of Victoria. To ensure Gitga'at knowledge was reflected in the design, Gitga'at co-researchers were an integral component, and the project was designed to be highly participatory (Thompson et al., 2019). The principles of this reciprocal relationship were built into a protocol agreement that was signed between researchers at the University of Victoria and the Gitga'at First Nation prior to the beginning of any research activities.

| ME THODS
We iteratively developed a conceptual framework of how Gitga'at people monitor through harvesting traditional foods with Gitga'at harvesters and knowledge holders, and we focused primarily on marine foods species. First, we conducted informal interviews (as described in Bernard, 2006) with 36 participants, including harvesters and Elders about whether a monitoring programme based in their knowledge and observations was of interest, and if so what the objectives of the programme should be. We held interviews in October and December of 2016 in the participants' preferred location and notes were taken following these conversations to summarize the F I G U R E 1 Red shading indicates Gitga'at traditional territory and harvest areas ideas that had been discussed. We then organized community meetings in the Gitga'at communities of Hartley Bay and Prince Rupert in March 2017. Informal interviews and community meetings were followed by workshops where harvesters were invited to help design tools to document their observations of change. These tools included a harvesters' logbook and a post-harvest season interview guide that would be used to guide semi-structured interviews. For a more detailed discussion of the steps taken to initiate, design, and test the Gitga'at monitoring programme see Thompson et al. (2019).
We conducted semi-structured interviews with harvesters and knowledge holders following the spring and fall/winter harvest seasons of 2017-2018. Spring harvesting typically occurs in the southern waters of Gitga'at territory and centres around Ky'el, a seasonal village. At Ky'el, harvesters travel out during the day to fish for halibut (txaw, Hippoglossus stenolepis) and spring salmon (yee, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), and to pick seaweed (ła'ask, Pyropia abbottiae) and other intertidal resources. Fall and winter harvesting is mostly spread throughout the central and northern parts of the territory and is focused on bivalves such as Nuttals cockles (gaboox, Clinocardium nuttallii) and butter clams (t'sa'ax, Saxidomus giganteus), and seasonally available salmon species. Interviews included individuals who, though they may not have participated in the harvest, have lifetimes of experience preparing, preserving and cooking traditional foods. Participants were selected based on our personal knowledge of active harvesters and based on recommendations made by participants. The interview guide, developed collaboratively with Gitga'at harvesters, included questions to prompt participants to speak about harvest intensity, whether their needs for traditional foods were met, changes in the abundance and quality of traditional foods, trading and sharing activities, as well as changes in weather patterns, in the landscape and/or water (Thompson et al., 2019).
Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed with permission from participants.
We analysed informal interviews, community workshop and meeting discussions, and the post-harvest interviews using a conceptual framework analysis approach (Jabareen, 2009). This qualitative method involves categorizing and connecting concepts from different sources of data to create a conceptual framework. The method requires researchers to familiarize themselves with the data, identify concepts and themes within them, then organizing them in relation to one another to synthesize a framework. The framework is then validated and revised as new inputs are added. In our case, the data sources included notes and transcripts from informal interviews, community meetings and workshops, and post-harvest season interviews. We reviewed notes and transcripts to code overarching concepts and themes (e.g. access to resources, cultural continuity, habitat quality) and specific monitoring indicators that were described by participants using NVivo software. We listed all monitoring concepts, then connected these to specific indicators that harvesters had spoken about. We then connected concepts based on how participants described their feedbacks and visualized the emerging pattern using Visual Understanding Environment software (Tufts University, 2015). Our validation process included review and revisions to the framework made by knowledgeable harvesters and community leaders.
All interview and workshop participants gave their informed written consent to participate in this study, and in accordance to the University of Victoria's Human Research Ethics Board (protocol number 16-379), and the protocol agreement signed between the University of Victoria and the Gitga'at First Nation. Only participants who consented to have their responses attributed to them have been named in this study. In accordance to the protocol agreement, all data have been archived within the servers of the Gitga'at First Nation.
To illustrate the kind of information that can be provided from a Gitga'at harvesters' observations-based monitoring programme, we analysed the content of interviews for observations of change in the quantity and quality of traditional foods by coding these themes, then organizing the data using Microsoft Excel. We focused this analysis on observations made by Gitga'at harvesters and Elders during systematic post-harvest season interviews about the species most commonly harvested (i.e. with the highest number of interviewees having harvested that species in the two focal harvest seasons). We used these data to calculate the proportion of participants who had observed positive or negative trends in quality and quantity of each food species, and whether they were meeting their needs for that species. We then convened community meetings to discuss this synthesis. 71% of participants were men and 29% were women. Active harvesters who were interviewed had anywhere between 1 and 68 years of harvest experience with any given species, with an average of 29 years of experience, and 67% of harvesters had at least 20 years of experience harvesting focal species (Table 1). Not all participants answered all questions; thus, sample sizes vary for each question.

| Conceptual framework of Gitga'at monitoring by harvesting
Our conceptual framework analysis of participants' observations of change revealed 10 elements that are monitored through Gitga'at harvesting activities: food species abundance; food species quality; habitat quality; harvest intensity; cultural continuity; sharing and trading institutions; external factors; and abnormal species and landscape features. Participants described using several indicators to assess change within each of these elements (Table 2). These elements are ecological, social and social-ecological in nature, and many participants described feedbacks between different elements, which are represented by the arrows in Figure 2. Indicators used to monitor each element and feedbacks between elements, as described by participants, are further detailed in the next sections. We emphasize that the framework presented here, including its concepts and indicators, is not comprehensive as we only interviewed a subset of Gitga'at people, with a focus on harvesters, and that it is a simplified representation of a complex and nuanced system of human-nature relationships.

| Abundance
Harvesters described changes in the abundance of food species by noting changes in the quantity harvested relative to the effort invested.
For example, cockles are deemed to be decreasing in abundance ( Figure 4) since harvesters must dig for longer periods of time relative to the past before finding cockles at their preferred beaches. As one harvester, who preferred to remain anonymous, put it, 'It used to be that with one rake 4 or 5 cockles would come out. Now one rake and it's just dirt, sand and a rock. You gotta go hunt and find them' (Anonymous 1, 9 April 2018). The abundance of food species can also be estimated and monitored based on the abundance of other species that may have an ecological or phenological relationships with the focal species, and there is an understanding that 'nothing acts on its own'. For example, some knowledge holders recall their elders stating that years with plentiful salmonberries coinciding with plentiful sockeye salmon. Many participants also said that, since they know what some food species' spatial distribution is normally like during different seasons, they are able to evaluate whether food species abundance has changed. For example, TA B L E 1 Common seasonal food species, number of participants and years of harvest experience. 'NA' indicates where the years of harvest experience were not disclosed by the participant

| Quality
Participants indicated that the quality of food species is monitored via several traditional indicators at different phases of the harvesting process. For example, when harvesting seaweed, the length, texture and colour of fronds are used to judge quality. In addition, the ease of harvest of seaweed is used to judge quality; the harder the seaweed is to pull off the rocks, the higher its quality. Quality is judged during the drying phase based on its colour and texture.
The taste of fresh and dried seaweed is also used to judge its qual-

| Habitat quality
The

| Accessibility
Participants often brought up issues of access when discussing observations of change and requested that post-harvest season interviews include a question to prompt harvesters to reflect on the reasons why they may not have harvested certain species. Many interviewees did not feel that their needs for harvested foods had been met, or would have preferred to harvest more to share and/or trade with friends and family. Given that we interviewed people we knew to be involved in food harvesting activities, we estimate that these are conservative figures.
Several participants described how their involvement in the wage economy reduced the amount of time available to participate in harvesting activities. A reduction of available time has resulted in the reliance on travel by speedboats to reach harvest sites quickly, as opposed to slower gillnetters or small rowboats.
The cost of fuel to power speedboats requires harvesters to have a cash income, reinforcing the need to be involved in the wage economy. Other participants spoke of physical barriers to harvesting, such as the tubeworms impeding cockle harvesting (C. Hill, 12 July 2017).

| Weather
Many participants said that they pay close attention to the relative air temperature and amount of precipitation since these factors influence the growth, quality and abundance of several cultural keystone species including salmon and seaweed. Weather also plays a crucial role in the ability access to coastal and marine resources. Thus, many harvesters said they pay particularly close attention to weather conditions such as the strength and direction of winds. In an interview after the spring harvest season, Cameron Hill said: The wind's been pretty bad. Not storm-wise, but just windy enough to make it, I'd say treacherous to get your stuff… As a kid I always remember the outflow winds happening in the morning, and then it calms and it stays calm, and hot, and that's how our late spring and early summer was. But for the last few years that southerly wind that happens down in Ky'el has been making its way further this way.

| External factors
Many participants stressed the importance of monitoring external factors that exert pressure on key elements

| D ISCUSS I ON
In this case study, we analysed Gitga'at harvesters' observations of change in their territory to outline the elements and indicators they monitor through harvesting. Our analysis revealed that interlinked social and ecological elements are monitored by Gitga'at land and sea people. It is important to note that the distinction between social and ecological elements of the monitoring framework was not made by Gitga'at participants, as occurrences in the spiritual and social-political world and the natural world are understood as inseparable. In fact, when we first designed the framework, we did not find it necessary to delineate social from ecological or social-ecological components. We have since chosen to make this distinction to demonstrate its relevance to the broader body of social-ecological systems and related literature (e.g. Anderies, Janssen, & Ostrom, 2004;Folke, 2006;Ostrom, 2009 Lyver et al., 2017;Parlee et al., 2005). Together, these examples can further the discussion on the development of appropriate regional and global indicators of social-ecological resilience and can help to situate the appropriate inclusion of scientific methodologies within Indigenous approaches to monitoring. Furthermore, our framework highlights the connections between cultural continuity and sustainable management of resources, thus encouraging efforts to revitalize Indigenous knowledge. We discuss these points further in the paragraphs that follow.
Our findings that Gitga'at harvesters monitor social and ecological indicators through land-and sea-based practices are similar to reports from other Indigenous communities. For example, Māori in New Zealand monitor forest health and community well-being using indicators that include prevalence of certain species, sounds associated with the forest, intensity of weather and the strength of people's connection to the forest (Lyver et al., 2017). In northern Canada, Denésôłiné hunters monitor barren ground caribou migrations using physical indicators such as body condition and population size as well as spiritual indicators to explain variability in migration patterns (Parlee et al., 2005).
Such culturally grounded indicators are well suited to trace the effects of human processes on ecological outcomes and vice versa (see Bliege Bird & Nimmo, 2018;Crabtree, Bird, & Bird, 2019).
While the culturally specific nature of Indigenous indicators can present challenges of comparability across scales, starting with local cultural perspectives and recognizing feedbacks between ecological and human well-being can help link regional, national and global decision-making to local realities .
The Tracking Change project conducted with communities across the Mackenzie, Mekong and Amazon River basins, as well as community-based observation networks across coastal Arctic communities, are demonstrating this potential by building local monitoring indicators, and networking knowledge gained (Alessa et al., 2016;Michell, Tsannie, & Adam, 2018;Parlee & Mahoney, 2017). Given the scale and rate of global environmental change, complex systems and resilience scholars have been stressing the need for such social-ecological monitoring (Anderies et al., 2004;Caillon, Cullman, Verschuuren, & Sterling, 2017), and examples exist of how such community-based efforts are informing autonomous local adaptation (Huntington et al., 2017). These examples, including ours, illustrate that relational values are crucially important in Indigenous monitoring.
There are some key differences between the approaches taken by Indigenous monitoring-through-resource-use and other types of monitoring that are prevalent in Indigenous territories (e.g. scientific monitoring for wildlife conservation). First, the objectives set by Gitga'at participants for a monitoring programme based on their knowledge and observations of change are ultimately about community well-being and survival. Furthermore, monitoring through harvesting activities is anchored within longstanding place-based knowledge which includes social and ecological elements. On the other hand, the objectives of scientific monitoring for conservation or climate change are set at larger scales, often across regional, national or international scales (e.g. Bellfield et al., 2015). In as much, conservation indicators are generally quantifiable and standardized across scales. However, they rarely take social or linked socialecological indicators into account (Thompson et al., 2020), thus potentially missing important connections and feedback loops.
There is, however, some overlap between indicators monitored by Gitga'at harvesters and scientific conservation efforts, such as species abundance and distribution. This can create opportunities for Indigenous groups to seeks out scientific methods to enrich ecological understanding by complementing the place-based nature and longer historical baselines of Indigenous monitoring methods (e.g. Gitga'at harvesters' knowledge of places in their territory where food species are typically abundant) with the larger spatial scales and quantitative nature of scientific ones Moller et al., 2004).
As has been highlighted elsewhere, the findings of scientific and Indigenous monitoring methods can sometimes be at odds with each other (e.g. Fernandez-Gimenez, 2000; Fernandez-Gimenez, Huntington, & Frost, 2006;Riseth et al., 2011). In Gitga'at territory, programme indicated that levels were lower than those deemed 'of concern' by toxicologists 4 months later (Thompson, Picard, & Chan, 2017), many harvesters and Elders have deemed that clams from the affected beach remain unpalatable and discourage harvests there to this day. This particular divergence, among others, is a potent site to deliberate on the legacies of industrial contaminants on local communities (e.g. Sandlos & Keeling, 2016) and how best to leverage the technologies of science to assess these in the context of resurgent Indigenous food sovereignty and governance (Grey & Patel, 2015;Settee & Shukla, 2020;Simpson, 2014  . Using this approach, several Indigenous communities have leveraged scientific approaches to meet their needs.
Notably, the Heiltsuk, Kitsaoo/Xais Xais, Nuxalk and Wuikinuxv Nations have joined to create the Central Coast Resource Alliance (CCIRA) which partners with ecologists to conduct marine monitoring and research projects based on local needs (Eckert et al., 2017;Frid, McGreer, & Stevenson, 2016). These Nations and the Gitga'at Nation have also partnered with scientists to monitor bear populations on the central coast by anchoring their objectives in local needs and using Indigenous knowledge and scientific methods to conduct their projects (Housty et al., 2014;Service et al., 2014). The Haida Nation pioneered a Guardian Watchmen programme to employ their own people to monitor important cultural resources and sites in their territories. This monitoring has since expanded to other Coastal First Nations and now includes standardized scientific methods applied through the Coastal First Nations Regional Monitoring System (Coastal First Nations, 2018). These examples are most familiar to us thanks their geographical proximity to our own work, though we recognize that such equitable and enriching partnerships which anchor scientific methods in Indigenous values likely exist in other communities as well, notably Arctic communities (e.g. Adams, Frost, & Harwood, 1993).
There are some limitations to our study. We interviewed a sub- food become more readily accessible and diets shift (Kuhnlein & Receveur, 1996). Parsing and comparing observations by age group can identify opportunities for Elders to share their knowledge of ecological (i.e. abundance of food species) and social-ecological (i.e. how often traditional foods were consumed) baselines with younger generations. However, intragenerational differences in observations of change may point to the fact that some participants may be more knowledgeable in some areas than others. This difference in specific knowledge can be attributed to gendered roles or expertise in harvesting and preparing specific food species (Butler, 2004). The identification of experts by Gitga'at peers and community members for each indicator and element of the monitoring framework is an important next step for the proposed monitoring programme (Davis & Wagner, 2003). Participants' emphasis on harvesting as an act of cultural continuity and the role of traditional harvesting protocols in ensuring sustainability highlights the importance revitalizing and promoting Indigenous ways of knowing as an avenue for the restoration and resilience of ecological systems (Corntassel & Bryce, 2012;Kimmerer, 2000). For Tsimshian people, this continuity is conceptualized as 'gugwilx'ya'ansk', which translates literally as 'for all time walking/distribute', and is an everyday occurrence through hunting, gathering or spending time with Elders and is practiced more formally through feasts during which specific teachings and laws are shared (Greening, 2017). Longstanding experience and monitoring of human-nature interactions can lead to incremental learning of how to best live sustainably, and lessons are often perpetuated and strengthened though worldview, oral histories and social institutions (Turner & Berkes, 2006). This is the case in Tsimshian society where traditional harvesting practices and governance has built in checks and balances to guide sustainable resource use, including harvest protocols and management rights and responsibilities of clan and house leaders (Gitga'at First Nation, 2011). These protocols and teachings, which have developed over thousands of years of occupancy, are alive in the Tsimshian adaawx (true-tellings or oral histories) and the ayaawx (law; Greening, 2017 The Gitga'at monitoring framework also offers insights for national and global sustainability processes to improve policies and practices, and better include Indigenous perspectives. In particular, we would like to discuss parallels that exist between the Gitga'at monitoring framework and the NCP conceptual framework. The NCP is promoted by the United Nations and emphasizes the existence and importance of context-specific perspectives such as the one we have presented in this paper (Diaz et al., 2018;IPBES, 2019). Though there are many avenues to discuss the similarities and differences between our framework and the NCP framework, we would like to focus on the NCP concept of 'maintenance of options' and the Gitga'at concept of 'gugwilx'ya'ansk' ('cultural continuity'). 'Maintenance of options' is an NCP reporting category described as the 'capacity of ecosystems, habitats, species or genotypes to keep options open in order to support a good quality of life', and is the only category which spans material, non-material and regulating benefits according to the IPBES framework (Diaz et al., 2018, supplementary materials). This description is unidirectional, with nature conferring these benefits to people. The concept of cultural continuity is also about the quality of life of future generations of Gitga'at people but is anchored in the social and cultural systems which inform how to care for nature so that it may continue to take care of future generations in turn. This reciprocal loop is a salient example of how material and non-material contributions of nature arise from human practices anchored in relational values. Our example echoes Whyte et al. (2016) in demonstrating the multiple ways in which human and non-human entities uphold their responsibilities to each other and reflects how the acts of caring for the natural world-in this case through monitoring and harvesting-contribute to human well-being (Jax et al., 2018). We believe that NCP could be strengthened by emphasizing the bidirectional nature of reciprocal relationships between people and nature, particularly in respect to maintaining the options of material, non-material and regulating benefits for future generations.
Finally, these parallels prompt reflection on how western societies can restore, or develop, value-based ecosystem management systems (Artelle et al., 2018;Gould et al., 2019), and can inform the economic, political and social transformations that are necessary to curb the alarming decline of the natural systems we collectively depend on (Diaz et al., 2019). We are not suggesting that the framework presented here is suitable for all contexts, but rather point to the need for nation-state governing bodies to uplift pre-existing context-specific stewardship systems. In Canada, for example,  [Lee et al., 2019], and the decline of herring fishery ), or dismissed the risk of such impacts (e.g. approval of Enbridge Northern Gateway project; Gunton & Broadbent, 2012;Hotte & Sumaila, 2014). We suggest that, by recognizing, learning from, and ultimately supporting pre-existing relational processes of Indigenous monitoring and management, Canadian institutions stand to make true on their responsibilities of reconciliation and sustainability.

ACK N OWLED G EM ENTS
T'oyaxsut 'nüün (thank you) to all harvesters and knowledge holders who participated in this study for their time and insights, Gitga'at elected and hereditary leadership for supporting this work, and to those who came before for taking care of the territory and passing on knowledge to allow present and future generations to continue their upholding their responsibilities. Thanks to Trevor Lantz, Jana Kotaska and Spencer Greening for their helpful commentary on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and to Kai Chan for his constructive recommendations. We are grateful to SSHRC,