Indoors. Extreme close-up of Joe Wilmot.
Interviewer
What you think your people should do?
Joe Wilmot
Oh! See, you getting political on me now. [laughs] Oh, well like everybody else, I have an opinion, sure. I would, instead of logging, I would like to see people up in, up in our forced areas planting trees. Maybe, maybe tree farm, of some sorts, if it was possible, you know what I mean? Replenishing instead of cutting every, everything down. Same with our fisherman. We could possibly be up river, uh, fish hatcheries for salmon, help the salmon out and stuff like this. Trout, trout need to be, you know. That don’t mean fish farms, I mean, uh, hatchery where, where they would grow them to a certain size, release them and, and they become part of the, uh, product, they become the product. I guess you would say, “Once, once they go out to sea and everybody has...” That’s what I would see happening.
There has been some efforts in that. Uh, we have, we have a boat sitting over here by the bridge who was used, uh, used to, uh to, to grow a mussel farm a few years back. So, there’s some equipment. I’m not sure that anybody still manning the mussel farm, if it still exist. I don’t know, I couldn’t say. Uh, but that was a good example of what could be happening, at least, at least they were producing, they were, they were producing a product that we could all use, uh, and not just take in what was there, you know what I mean?
Because that’s what happening with our salmon. People are just, you know, we’re not, we’re not replacing anything, you know? We’re, we’re just taking. And our trees, our, our forest are good example of this. Just take a drive up, just take a drive up the reserve, go up in the woods up there and you’ll see there’s nothing left, you know? There’s no trees. No, no big trees, like, uh, like there used to be. Uh, it would be nice to have maybe that kind of economic development, long, long range economic development. Maybe more selective cutting then what has been done in, in, in the past few decades, I mean, there’s no trees up there.
I remember, maybe because I was young or something but, there used to be stands of trees, humongous trees. But, uh, because I used to work, my father worked me in the woods when I was young, and I remember we, you know, there was not enough, there was not enough of us to cut down all the trees. But now, there’s more lumberjacks up there than there are, there are, uh, you know, trees! Yeah, they have to go a long way to find trees. It’s the same with salmon. The salmon, the salmon I think, in my opinion anyway, to me, the salmon are not as plentiful as they used to be. Even just going back twenty years. You know?
Is it possible that a fish hatchery would have made that difference for sal, for the salmon? I don’t know, but there’s a perfect place up river, there’re natural places for them to be where just they’ve gone for millennia, the salmon. And to manage these places and make sure that the salmon get up there, and even if we have to do it artificially, but get them up there, you know? It would, uh, one, one ,one, one, one female salmon could lay quite a few eggs you know? And so, if one third of those makes it back, you know, you’ve done something. So I, that’s just me again, I was, a kind of, there is a political ring to that because everything goes into the economic development now instead of, instead of replenishing, you know?