Christi Belcourt on Sturgeon

As part of our blog series on water, we share here an amazing excerpt from this awesome podcast with Metis artist Christi Belcourt, where she speaks on How to Make Things Right in Canada.

Christi: 

“Every Dot a Prayer for the Saskatchewan Rivers is divided horizontally between landscape and then waterscape, I suppose, with a big sturgeon painted in the middle and then all these frogs and fish around on the bottom half. And I did have a dream of a sturgeon, and that dream really was different than most of the other dreams I've had in that I was standing in the water with my arm around a sturgeon and the sturgeon spoke to me and said, “I miss the frogs”. And I woke up and that was the strangest dream I think I have ever had. Because first of all, I didn't even know what a sturgeon was. I didn't have any connection to a sturgeon. And it made me curious, why is she telling me that? 

And so I started to Google because it was early in the morning and I thought, well, what is the connection between sturgeon and frogs? I came across a Menominee website that said that they had started doing their sturgeon ceremonies again. They had a sturgeon hatchery. They had been helping to restore sturgeon into certain rivers and that led me into more research. 

Their belief is the sturgeon will wait for the frogs to sing before they will come home to spawn. And I thought, oh wow, isn't that interesting that the sturgeon's telling me that she misses the frogs? And what does that mean? And I thought, okay, well, let's see where sturgeon live, let's see what's happening. The Lake Sturgeon on the Saskatchewan River are endangered. Some sturgeon have been completely extirpated from the rivers where they swam back to spawn. Some sturgeon will have to be 25 years old before they can lay eggs. And many times a lot of the sturgeon were being caught for their eggs, for their caviar, which was selling for $150 an ounce. And so there's this attack on the sturgeon. 

Sturgeon have to lay eggs in clean rivers, not rivers that have been polluted or disturbed by building and destruction. We dam the rivers for hydro and the fish ladders are not big enough to accommodate sturgeon. So the sturgeon that are trying to swim upriver that their ancestors have done for maybe since the beginning of time, they can no longer make it up that river. We're seeing a huge decline in sturgeon. 

We don't realize that they have to be very, very big before that they can spawn. They're not just little fish. And what we're seeing is people are even catching smaller sturgeon that are not yet even able to reproduce. This is a really critical thing. And I think the frogs also by human activity. When you look at all of the endangered species on the endangered species lists that exist in every state and province and federally, you'll find that when you go read, why are they in decline? I have not yet found any that have said they're in decline for natural causes. They're in decline and threatened because of human activity.”