·¬ÇÑÉçÇø

July 20, 2022

(photo: Jaime Ojeda)

Marine environments across the world are under pressure from overfishing, climate change and poor environmental policies. By working with small-scale fisheries, Jaime Ojeda, UVic PhD candidate, School of Environmental Studies, hopes to rebuild fisheries across the Pacific Ocean.

“Old fishing traditions, customary management practices have been eroded,” says Ojeda.

“My goal is to contribute to the guidelines and protocols developed over thousands of years ago by local fishers, that promote reciprocity values between nature and people,” he adds.

Ojeda grew up with his grandmother Hilda Gallardo, a Mestizo-Chiloté Elder, hearing oral stories about traditional practices of the Chiloé archipelago in southern, Chile. These practices continued with Hilda building and stewarding an ancestral fish pond (Corral de Pesca in Spanish) for food, cultural, and social purposes, for herself, her neighbors, and the sea. Her story encouraged Ojeda to study and understand nature-people reciprocity.

“I work with Indigenous and artisanal fishers in Patagonia as a researcher at the Universidad de Magallanes (UMAG-CHIC),” says Ojeda.

“I wanted to learn more about other small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Ocean so I started to look for researchers and found Natalie Ban at UVic’s School of Environmental Studies,” says Ojeda.

Shortly after joining UVic and Ban’s marine lab, Ojeda also found support for his work from UVic political ecologist, James Rowe and SFU’s ecologist, Anne K. Salomon.

“Together, we transcend disciplinary boundaries and territories to examine people-nature reciprocity and bring a range of perspectives that span the global north and south, and Western scientific and Indigenous knowledges,” says Ojeda.

published today in BioScience," co-authors include, Anne K. Salomon, James K.Rowe and Natalie C.Ban.