Indigenous people once roamed Island mountains on foot—and marmots were key to their survival

On a sunny day in the summer of 2023, Jessie Everson was sitting in an alpine meadow, sketching marmots.

He wasn’t relaxing though. He was working as a field technician for the Marmot Recovery Foundation, and the little rodents he was observing were Canada’s most endangered mammal, the Vancouver Island Marmot.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation was founded in 1999 in response to growing calls from scientists and community members for more action to stop the creatures from going extinct. Its mission is to help the population of Vancouver Island marmots recover.

The large rodent — also known as marmota vancouverensis — are threatened by habitat loss from climate change, logging, and predation, according to the federal government. In 2003, researchers could only find 22 Vancouver Island marmots in the wild.

But in recent decades, they’ve been making a comeback.

That’s thanks to conservationists’ efforts, particularly the foundation’s work which Everson was part of in 2023 — “ensuring that there were more marmots than the previous season and the season before that,” he said.

This work has paid off. Last year’s wild marmot count climbed to 381.

While the endangered species’ future remains the biggest concern, however, its past is coming increasingly into focus too.

Recently, K’ómoks First Nation and the Marmot Recovery Foundation have been studying archeological remains that suggest marmot populations used to be much, much higher.

Working with the Vancouver Island marmot

Everson is a member of K’ómoks First Nation, whose territory overlaps many areas the marmots call home.

Descended from the Pentlatch and Satluxw peoples, his traditional name is Kwa’kwaxolas — which means “to be nimble.”

His name is particularly fitting. During his work as a field technician with the foundation, he spent a lot of time scrambling over rocks and hiking through the alpine meadows of Strathcona Park and its surrounding areas.

“Scrambling up rocks was something I had to learn how to do when I was working on the field team,” he said.

After the nimble scrambling, there can be a lot of waiting. Being an artist in his spare time, Everson chose to pass the time drawing marmots as he watched them.

“I draw a lot in my spare time, practice the shapes and forms of our ancestors,” he said.

The sketches from his field notebook turned into a bigger art piece of a marmot in Kwakwaka’wakw style, finished with bold lines and colour.

'The circle of life’

Marmot technicians use radio telemetry to track the marmots. The technology involves implanting trackers into the animals, and using a receiver to track them. The implants are done as safely and respectfully as possible, Everson said.

Once installed, the device can find where marmots are, even if they’re on a different mountain from the researchers.

It’s even possible to identify each individual marmot, Everson said, because each animal has been named.

“As far as the circle of life goes out in the wild, it can be a bit intense,” Everson said. “It can be sad, because when a marmot dies that you’ve been tracking for a while, it sucks.”

The chances of seeing a marmot can range, Everson said. Sometimes it requires walking many kilometres and waiting; sometimes they’re found right outside camp.

Watching them is special for Everson.

“You get this really amazing sense of community,” he explained. “And just how sustainable a marmot ‘society’ — if you could call it that — really is.

“They’re really cute. The characteristics that come out of each marmot are so funny.”

How much the furry ground squirrels are bothered by nearby humans — or even other marmots — varies widely, he said.

“They’re very similar to humans, and the way that they act and the way that they survive is in a similar manner that our Pentlatch or Satluxw or E’iksan or Sasitla survive even today,” Everson said.

“Even though we might go to the grocery store today to buy food, our ancestors were going up into the mountains, hunting elk, hunting deer — and in some cases, hunting marmots.”

He knows that because marmots have a long archeological history. Studying that history is a family activity for Everson. His partner, Raini Bevilacqua, is an archeologist with K’ómoks First Nation.

Bevilacqua is former president of the Archaeological Society of B.C.; they are currently a project co-ordinator with the nation — part of a research team documenting the robust presence of marmot bones scattered throughout the mountain peaks of Vancouver Island.

Researchers, they explained, are also finding evidence of the people who ate them.

Indigenous history of the Vancouver Island marmot

The Marmot Recovery Foundation’s executive director, Adam Taylor, explained that prior to colonization, there were many more marmots.

In a previous interview with The Discourse, Taylor said the most recent population count of 381 marmots is the highest it’s been since settler researchers began collecting data 45 years ago.

But collaborative research between K’ómoks First Nation and the Marmot Recovery Foundation is giving historic insight into a time when marmots were plentiful throughout the mountains of Vancouver Island.

The mammals aren’t just on K’omoks territories.

Their habitat extends across the lands of multiple First Nations. They’ve even been enshrined in ancient place names — for instance Papikatan, which roughly translates as “place of the marmot,” in ‘Namgis traditional territories, which settlers renamed Schoen Lake Provincial Park.

“There are lots of stories of trade routes and warring parties that went from the east to the west side of the island and back, so between Nuu-chah-nulth people on the west coast and Coast Salish or Kwakwaka’wakw people on the east coast of the island,” Bevilacqua said

Bevilacqua began working for K’ómoks First Nation two years ago. They are currently a part of the nation’s collaboration with the Marmot Recovery Foundation, working to identify high-elevation archeological sites in Strathcona Provincial Park, many of which are in caves and rock shelters.

Rock shelters may not sound very interesting, but in fact they offer a peek into ancient history.

“Rock shelters are usually overhangs, so you kind of have rock shelters or caves,” they explained. “And we’ve had archeological marmot remains identified in both.”

The rock shelters are often made when a harder rock is on top of a softer rock, and then wind and water erode the lower stone. It results in an overhang.

Around the world, rock shelters are often closely associated with archeological material, Bevilacqua explained.

“They are the easiest form of shelter when you’re in these places where you have extreme weather patterns,” they said.

Because of this, the natural overhangs often host signs of human use.

Around the world, ancient people — whether centuries ago, or further back to our evolutionary ancestors such as Neanderthals — used the natural formations as cover.

“They build fires in them,” Bevilacqua explained, “and they stay there for anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days.”

And for larger rock shelters and caves, those were even sometimes places to live.

Shelter from the storm — and a surprising finding

But rock shelters weren’t just used in centuries past. Just three years ago, marmot researchers needed one to hide from a sudden rainstorm.

Inside, they stumbled upon an ancient archeological site.

At the time, the Marmot Recovery Foundation technicians were doing fly-in alpine work in Strathcona Park, when the weather abruptly changed. So they ran under a rock shelter.

“They found it just exactly the reason why someone would have probably been there in the first place,” Bevilacqua recalled.

It was then the researchers noticed marmot bones and charcoal — and were particularly interested in the distinct cut marks on the bones.

After confirming the shelter was indeed what they thought it was with the B.C. Archaeology Branch, the technicians recorded their finding — and reached out to K’ómoks First Nation to discuss it.

By the end of last year’s field season, the Marmot Recovery Foundation had identified four more rock shelters in Strathcona Park.

Bevilacqua said the dates on the archeological material they found ranged from between 700 to 2,400 years ago.

Though K’ómoks and the foundation haven’t yet reached the “nitty-gritty” phase of their research, Bevilacqua said they’re currently collaborating to revisit the sites with archeologists” — and hopefully find more evidence.

What can ancient marmots teach us?

Bevilacqua explained that there’s been a bias of finding archeological sites near coastlines, because that’s historically where many settlements have formed.

For example, the majority of people have concentrated on either the east or west sides of Vancouver Island, they said, with very few living in the mountainous zones. But that same pattern today also means archeological finds tend to happen through urban development — while others remain undisturbed but unknown.

“Unfortunately, the majority of archeology is driven by development,” they added, “and so if you don’t have development, you don’t have identification — which means sites are protected but nobody knows about them.”

“It creates this kind of bias that Indigenous people in the past were just along the coastline,” they said.

But rock shelters can also offer evidence of stories and oral histories — for instance about historic warfare or trade routes between the east to west sides of the island.

Marmot remains with tool marks on them show people were coming over the mountain tops to trade.

“So we know that people were traveling in these areas, and they obviously weren’t living full-time or occupying village sites in these areas,” Bevilacqua said, citing analysis of people’s diets at the time. “They were going up and down and back and forth.

“I don’t think you could do that walk in a day, so there’s gotta be places along those routes where people are stopping for short-term habitation.”

The rock overhangs were the most likely shelter available in the area — and marmots the most probable fresh food source.

Bevilacqua said travellers would not carry much food on such long mountainous journeys, usually just dried meat and berries.

“You’re going to try to pack as light as you can to do these trips, you’re going to get food along the way,” Bevilacqua explained.

‘How marmots and our ancestors would have interacted’

First Nations throughout the island already know their ancestors travelled throughout the landscape everywhere on the island, not just in one small area. But marmot remains can help share information about this history more widely, Bevilacqua said.

“Isn’t it amazing that in a place that’s now a fly-in, fly-out via helicopter,” they said, “people were walking and gathering resources along the way.”

Both Bevilacqua and Everson emphasized that it’s uncertain whether these sites are from ancestors of the K’ómoks, Pentlatch, or Nuu-chah-nulth peoples.

But just knowing that humans were there — harvesting marmots and bringing them back — is what is particularly interesting.

For Everson, regardless of who left the scratched marmot bones under a rock, learning about the endangered mammals has helped him learn more about his ancestors.

He said he asked his family members once, the boundary of his traditional Pentlatch territory.

“So if we’re to draw a line on a map, where is that? And the theorized answer I was given from one of our own people was probably the tops of the mountains, and that’s where the marmots live,” he said.

“So it gives us a really cool story of how marmots and our ancestors would have interacted.”

Humans caused marmots’ decline — but some are helping reverse it

One of the most popular places for marmots to hang out, known as Red Pillar, is also a very significant site for K’ómoks.

Red Pillar is believed to be the home of the supernatural Thunderbird, which creates lightning “with the blink of its eyes,” Everson said, and thunder “with the flap of its wings.”

For the K’ómoks and Pentlatch people, Thunderbirds “are not just a mythological creature,” he said.

He sees a link to the Vancouver Island marmot because of how close they came to becoming a being from the distant past — until the Marmot Recovery Foundation’s conservation efforts brought them back from the brink.

“If we were to do the same with marmots, then all of a sudden the work that the great people at MRF are doing isn’t acknowledged properly,” he said, “and they’re doing amazing work each and every day.”

Although people are to blame for the decline of wild marmots on Vancouver Island, he said the foundation’s research and recovery work offers hope for the species.

“Humans are also the reason that the Vancouver Island marmot is making a resurgence in population numbers,” he said.

Bevilacqua hopes that marmot research can help shift inaccurate views that Indigenous people historically only used the Island’s coastline.

“People were everywhere, and people were doing amazing things everywhere with technology,” they said.

“We can’t always often fathom 10,000 years of history, right? A lot of people can’t fathom that people would walk all the way up to Mount Washington … and yet we have all this evidence that says people did and could and people can today.”

Bevilacqua and Everson both encourage anyone hiking or recreating in Vancouver Island’s alpine areas to keep their eyes open for marmots.

People who spot one of the elusive and rare mammals can now record their sighting online, something Everson called “a really cool tool” that lets people share photos and locations with the Marmot Recovery Foundation.

“Then they’re able to go and verify if there is still a marmot around that area,” he said.

K’ómoks First Nation’s work with the Marmot Recovery Foundation is a great example of a community science collaboration, Bevilacqua added.

“This is just one instance of how different communities can come together,” they said, “and different factions of science can come together.”

And for Everson, he said he’s grateful for his work with the marmots.

“Something that was understood when we were younger is that our ancestral way of thinking is rooted in belonging and purpose,” he said. “And everyone in the village had a job.”

One such traditional role was to watch out for threats and alert the community. Much like the Vancouver Island marmots’ high-pitched whistle to alert its community of danger.

Amidst colonization’s threats to Indigenous cultures and natural habitats alike, the slow rebuilding of the wild marmot population offers lessons, and inspiration.

“Our K’ómoks people nowadays I’m sure can relate to that,” Everson said. “Going through the motions of the history of Canada — the power and control of things — the marmots have been impacted in a very similar way.

“They’re really clever little rodents.”