“To learn all the gifts from nmé, you have to work with him in the water”

“All of our stories are tied to this river. Once, there was a big celebration that lasted for days. A group of girls who were becoming young women were too powerful to take part in the ceremony. But they were curious and wanted to see what was happening. When they got close, the Water People came out to tell the young women not to eat the pink-bellied sturgeon, because the pink-bellied sturgeon are the people who have drowned in the river. They’re our ancestors. Today, some families still won’t catch pink-bellied sturgeon. In my community, if we get one in a net, we put it back in the water.”

—Brent Niganobe, Elected Chief, Mississauga First Nation; member of the Sturgeon Clan. Story passed down from Elders Tom Daybutch and Doug Daybutch

If Chief Brent Niganobe were to lie down on the smooth rock beside Misissagi Falls, he’d be about as long as an adult lake sturgeon, not counting his braid, the visor on his trucker hat or the tassels on his loafers. But he stands tall as he shares about a time, not too long ago, when there were so many sturgeon you could walk dry-shod on their backs to the opposite shore of the Mississagi River.

The Mississauga First Nation have always gathered at these falls to fish and pass on stories and knowledge. They’ve lived along this river for as long as anyone can remember, canoeing down it to their traditional summer areas on the shore of Lake Huron’s North Channel, where the river fragments into a bird-foot delta. They have ancient knowledge of lake sturgeon, or nmé in Anishinaabemowin. Nmé is their oldest existing relative, a pillar of their sustenance for millennia.

A living fossil, sturgeon have been around for more than 200 million years, a time in which they’ve barely changed. They still sport a shark-like tail fin and body armour that keeps them safe from predators: five rows of diamond-shaped scutes. The younger (and more vulnerable) the fish, the sharper the scutes. They have four barbels, whiskers they use to sniff out food; when they find prey, they pout their protrusible mouth and suck, effectively giving their catch the kiss of death.

The lake sturgeon is the largest and longest-living freshwater fish in Canada, with a historical extent across central and eastern Canada and the United States, from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi. Females roam for up to 150 years (scientists think they might live even longer); males have a lifespan of about 50 years. The megafauna of the Great Lakes, nmé can grow up to two metres long, with record catches topping four metres. Their size combined with their scutes should have made them invincible. But so much has changed around them, and so much force — more than their armour could withstand — has been levelled against these gentle, bottom-dwelling giants.

Chief Brent Niganobe of Mississauga First Nation on the banks of the Mississagi River.

The bubbling currents of the Mississagi River near Blind River, Ont.

In the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed, starting in the early to mid-1800s, colonizers ripped Niganobe’s kin from their habitats and dumped them on the shore. Seen as pests that tore asunder fishing nets made to catch smaller lake trout, lake sturgeon were stacked like logs by the hundreds of thousands and set ablaze. Then came the logging boom, which destroyed spawning sites, burying them under silt and sawdust; and the caviar boom, when sturgeon eggs became a hot commodity. Hydroelectric power dams stopped sturgeon from swimming upstream to their spawning grounds; downstream, they killed eggs and larvae by flushing them away or drying them out as floodgates opened and closed. In all, lake sturgeon populations have plummeted to a mere one per cent of their pre-Confederation and pre-Civil War numbers. In not much longer than the lifespan for a female lake sturgeon, the Anishinaabeg’s ancient relative was reduced to a shadow.

Thankfully, efforts on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border over the past several decades are finally making strides. Conservation measures — such as strict fishing regulations, rehabilitating cobble reefs for spawning, reducing pollution, creating natural run-of-the-river flows through dams and restocking baby fish — do work. And now that scientists and government agencies working around the Great Lakes are starting to recognize the value of First Nations and Tribal ecological knowledge, two-eyed seeing and data collection has the potential to rewrite the lake sturgeon conservation story.

For the Mississauga First Nation, this approach is fairly recent. Back in the 1990s, the nation, along with the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, started their own sturgeon studies. They felt the Ontario government was doing a less-than-stellar job managing the fisheries. “They weren’t on the land, they didn’t do any field work and had no true data [from here], only data from elsewhere,” says Keith Sayers, director of Mississauga First Nation’s lands and resources department. So, to fill in the scientific knowledge gaps, the nation took data collection into their own hands.

Keith Sayers, Mississauga First Nation’s lands and resources director, remembers seeing poachers coming for the sturgeon in his nation’s waters.

Anthony Chiblow Jr. is a technician for Mississauga First Nation’s lands and resources department.

That’s why, when the Province of Ontario decided to list lake sturgeon as a “species of special concern” in 2008, and then “endangered in the Great Lakes” in 2017, Mississauga First Nation was against it. They were not opposed to protecting sturgeon; it was that no one consulted them about the species’ status in their traditional territory, especially in the Mississagi, where people had continuously observed sturgeon despite their disastrous decline elsewhere in the Great Lakes.

But for the province, the initial listing was necessary to deal with poaching and the commercialization of sturgeon. The species wasn’t making the recovery conservation scientists wanted to see. Sayers remembers seeing poachers from outside the community, even from outside the country. “They would cut up the fish, take the caviar and waste the rest, leaving it on the ground to rot,” Sayers recalls. “But we didn’t want the fishery to become a conservation issue,” he says, explaining that could infringe the nation’s rights to subsistence and cultural harvest under the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850 and under Section 35 of the Constitution.

More recently, in 2023, Mississauga First Nation launched a collaborative sturgeon tracking project in the Mississagi River with scientists from Mount Allison University, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and others. The nation brings multi-generational, on-the-land observations of nmé and its habitat — a culture-based ecosystem view. They know scientific methods can add the fine-grained data needed to ensure nmé will be around seven generations from now. And Mississauga First Nation is one of many nations around the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed adding a new chapter to their rivers’ stories — and to their continued relationship with nmé.

Map: Chris Brackley. Data: GLATOS; courtesy Lisa O’Connor/Tom Pratt, Ed Baker,Chris Robinson and Keith Sayers/Matthew Litvik/Warren Zeinstra.

The team from Pukaskwa National Park set gill nets on the White River, just upstream from Lake Superior.

“When I was young, we didn’t talk about conservation. But because fish, including sturgeon, has always been an important source of food and medicine for us, we’ve always been careful not to catch more than we need. I was in my mid-teens when I caught my first sturgeon, using a pole with a short line. My grandpa once caught a sturgeon so big that, when he carried it on his back, its tail dragged along the ground. And my grandma, who made fishing nets for my dad, said that when the tiger swallowtail butterflies show up in spring, sturgeons would be swimming upriver to spawn.”

—Stan Nabigon, Elder from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, Heron Bay, Ont.; former warden at Pukaskwa National Park, Lake Superior

Stan Nabigon may be retired from his 34 years with Pukaskwa National Park, but, like travelling sturgeons, he’s eager to get out on the water when an opportunity presents itself. So when the park’s ecology team packs a boat for a few days of sturgeon field work in June on the White River, Nabigon joins for the ride.

After a smudging ceremony — the park’s Indigenous interpreter, Stephanie Moses, wouldn’t let the team leave without it — Nabigon settles in beside the captain. Just as soon, he nods skyward. “Look!” he exclaims, pointing at four crows harassing a bald eagle. As the boat enters the mouth of the White, Nabigon nods toward the shore and a series of one-by-two-metre depressions in the cobble beach. Dating back some 5,000 or more years, they’re proof of how long his people have been here. “They’re tent rings, hunting blinds and food caches,” Nabigon says. Some archeologists speculate his ancestors may have used some of them to create paleo-refrigerators using lake ice. Maybe they even stored sturgeon meat and eggs in them.

The survey site is five kilometres upstream from Lake Superior, below the Chigamiwinigum Falls. Old-growth cedars, perhaps as old as the oldest sturgeon in the river, prop up the sandy riverbank alongside balsam firs, white spruce and maples. The team — ecologist Chris Robinson, resource manager Tyler Ripku and technician Marissa Fugere — sets up a sturgeon processing station under a tarp: a two-metre cattle trough to hold sturgeons, a generator, an operating table and three different fish-tracking devices. Then they jump into a small boat and motor out to set nets, which they check the following morning.

Stan Nabigon of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg joins for the ride on the White River.

A waterfall churns through the White River in Pukaskwa National Park.

Most fish wouldn’t survive being stuck overnight because they thrash around so much: they get tangled, their gills get smothered and they can’t breathe. But sturgeons tend to stay calm despite being caught, seemingly waiting for what might happen. Rarely is there bycatch: the team uses large mesh nets to let smaller fish swim through. Most net checks yield sticks (“stickerels”) and logs. But sometimes, the team gets lucky.

Ripku rushes sturgeon from the boat to the water-filled trough. Robinson and Fugere lift the fish in a sling, just long enough to record its weight. Back in the water for oxygen, then quickly up on a board to measure its size. Robinson holds the fish steady — sturgeons have a powerful tailkick — while Fugere runs a scanner over the back of the head to check for a tracking tag. Finding nothing, Ripku inserts a PIT tag (like a microchip) and a spaghetti-thin Floy tag with an ID number. This way, growth and movement can be charted over time.

This study, which started in 2023, is part of Parks Canada research on vulnerable, threatened and endangered species. Nabigon and others from the area always knew sturgeon were in the White River, even if their overall numbers in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed had declined. When sturgeon became listed provincially as a species of special concern in 2008, no sturgeon population survey had been done on the White River. So in 2010 the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Pukaskwa researchers struck up a collaboration, tagging 45 sturgeons with radio telemetry implants. They learned the White had one of the most abundant sturgeon populations in the Great Lakes.

The main objective now is to catch adult fish and equip them with acoustic telemetry tags to track their movement. “We want to know how much time they spend here and when, so that we can create a general idea of how they use different areas in the park,” says Robinson. “With that data, we can develop conservation measures, like limiting activity at or access to certain areas at certain times, for example during spawning.” The telemetry will also show how the fish in White River fit into the larger Great Lakes sturgeon-conservation puzzle.

Robinson, the “sturgeon surgeon,” takes a deep breath and sits down beside the upside-down fish in the trough, its snout and gills underwater. After palpating the sturgeon’s abdomen, Robinson injects a local anesthetic, waits for it to set in, then cuts an incision just long enough to insert the pinky-sized tag. Three stitches and a wound cleanup later, Ripku lifts the sturgeon out of the trough, cradles it and carries it to the river. He bids it farewell and puts it back in its element. For the next seven years (the tag’s battery life), the tag sends signals that are picked up when the sturgeon passes within range of the park’s 21 acoustic receivers or any one of the hundreds installed in Lake Superior or the wider Great Lakes. Individuals can be tracked over time, creating a continuum of lines on a map that, if sturgeon are allowed to thrive and reproduce, could come to resemble family trees with roots in different habitats.

Pukaskwa’s ecology team knows it pays to collaborate with the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg. Nabigon’s way of knowing the land and Robinson’s methods of reading it overlap like the lines on a telemetry chart. Put together, it’s not just an image of lake sturgeon: it’s about the ecosystem the species lives in. Seeing it from both worlds is something lake sturgeon will need to survive.

A juvenile sturgeon caught for tagging in Goulais Bay, Lake Superior.

“When they built the locks in St. Marys River, that’s a very sad story. Our villages were all along the riverfront where the locks stand today. In 1836, we signed treaties in which we were forced to give up our land with threat of removal. We were able to stay along the shores of St. Marys until the 1850s when the land was required for the locks and then we were forcibly removed. They loaded people in wagons and burned the villages, everything along the shore. Some people were moved to Sugar Island, others scattered. This is an oral history that’s in my family; I’ve never seen it in history books. We, the original people, have been here since the end of the last ice age. Settlers came here 350 years ago. We have been here for 350 generations.”

—Cathy DeVoy, division director of language and culture, Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan

Navigating through dense fog, Gardner takes the team toward Goulais Bay. O’Connor covers her face with a buff and pulls a tuque over her ears. Although it’s the middle of July, it’s cold on Lake Superior, especially when you’re on a fast-moving boat. By the time Gardner brings the boat into the bay, the fog has lifted like a theatre curtain to reveal a play of blues and greens stitched together by pebble beaches. On the north side of the bay, a scattering of camps, or cottages, poke through the trees; to the east, the Superior Highlands nudge the remaining clouds.

Four nets per day, for four consecutive days, are set and pulled the following morning. Gardner hands out earplugs. Unlike the shorter nets Robinson’s team hauled by hand on the White River, these ones are so long and heavy the crew uses a mechanical net lifter — a carousel with a noisy engine that reels the net in. Each time there’s a fish, the person standing guard at the gunwale where the net comes out of the water hollers “Fish!” and the person manning the lifter switches off the carousel for the crew to gently pull up and untangle the fish by hand.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada researchers (opposite) team up with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Biologist Lisa O’Connor on the sturgeon population dataset mission.

Each net is 300 metres long, with different size mesh to capture sturgeons of varying sizes, or ages. “In some places, we see only aging fish,” says O’Connor, who’s swapped her tuque for a cap with an embroidered sturgeon. “In Goulais Bay, we catch spawners, juveniles and adults, seeing most of the population structure come through. What we see is the potential for a full lifecycle for sturgeon, which is necessary for the population to be self-sustaining.”

The best way to find out exactly how old a lake sturgeon is — without killing it and taking its otolith, a bone in the inner ear — is by cutting off a small piece of the thick, spiny front section of the pectoral fin. At a lab in Sault Ste. Marie, researchers slice fin samples into fine cross-sections using a saw. Under the microscope, clearly defined rings represent years of growth, with one ring per year, like tree rings. They reveal the fish’s age and offer clues to its growth rate — a snapshot of how good a life the sturgeon was leading up to the time of sampling.

Pratt logs into the lab computer and pulls up photos of a sample from a five-year-old fish. The bright lines represent winter, the season with slow or no growth; it is used to separate the years. The darker lines show growth times. At the centre of this sample are two wider rings, showing this fish grew faster in its first and second years of life.

The youngsters that were caught and tagged in the earliest years of the annual survey might just be reaching spawning age now, says Pratt, because it takes at least 15 years for males and 20 years for females to spawn. And the conditions in Goulais Bay are favourable for supporting a healthy, growing population: the sandy, silty bottom is the right substrate for the food that sturgeons like to eat. Goulais River offers a long flow, giving larvae ample time to drift and learn to feed before they enter the bay. Pratt hopes that if the Goulais Bay population stays healthy and grows, some individuals might start to migrate to other areas in southeastern Lake Superior.

A tagged juvenile lake sturgeon is released into Lake Superior.

Perhaps one day, the Goulais Bay sturgeons will fan out into the lake and start repopulating other shallow and food-rich bays like Whitefish and Batchewana, both Anishinaabe territories where sturgeon were pushed to near-extinction by settlers.

Waishkey Bay Farm, run by the Bay Mills Indian Community, operates per Anishinaabeg values of reciprocity with nature.

Dennis Carrick of Bay Mills Indian Community learned spearfishing by targeting much softer walleye (a.k.a. pickerel) before moving onto sturgeon.

“Sturgeon is one of the best foods I’ve ever had. You can use every part of the body: its oils for candles, parts for regalia, for medicines. His name in Anishinaabemowin also means ‘prayer.’ He gave us one of the clans. He’s also part of our origin stories because the ball used in the Creator’s game, lacrosse, was made from sturgeon cartilage. All the body parts have gifts; inside the head is a sacred man with a feather. To learn all the gifts from nmé, you have to work with him in the water.”

—Dennis Carrick, Member of the Bay Mills Indian Community, Brimley, Michigan; sturgeon spear fisher

On dry land, Dennis Carrick’s day job includes tending to a village of honeybees and a herd of grass-fed cows at Waishkey Bay Farm in Brimley, Michigan. When Carrick leaves dry land for water to harvest sturgeon, it’s to exercise his treaty rights and practise his culture, spearfishing from a boat at night, using a light. He prides himself on providing a taste of this traditional food for Elders.

Carrick laments people catching the fish in shallow river waters when they come up to spawn. “We’ve put in years to re-create and protect natural spawning areas in rivers, so I don’t want anyone to walk in and ruin what took so long to bring back,” he says. “I don’t want to harass fish that are about to spawn. Hopefully, other Tribes will follow.” In the meantime, he takes Tribal people to lakes to show them how to find and harvest sturgeon. “They have a bony armour on the back of the head, so you have to spear them behind their gills,” explains Carrick. The reward for that precision goes beyond safeguarding culture. “Sturgeon tastes like grilled pork chop,” he says. “It’s delicious smoked, with salt or Cajun spices.”

Hatchery-reared fish have been released into Mullet Lake, Michigan, since 2006.

Few people get to catch, much less taste, lake sturgeon. Despite the 1836 Treaty, which stipulated Indigenous fishing rights in treaty waters, fishing hasn’t always been a sure thing. Fed up with their fishers being harassed by state officials over the years, the Tribes appealed to the federal government, which sued the State of Michigan on behalf of the Tribes for not honouring the treaty right to fish. The Tribes won, and in 2007, they entered into a Consent Decree with the state to co-manage fish and wildlife in the treaty territory. The Consent Decree opened the door for Indigenous knowledge holders and Western-trained scientists to collaborate on sturgeon conservation in Michigan.

In Michigan, where the species is listed as threatened, a strictly controlled harvest is now permitted only in certain inland waters, including Black Lake on the Lower Peninsula. Following the state’s Department of Natural Resources regulations, the 1836 Treaty Tribes (the Bay Mills and Sault tribes on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and, on the Lower Peninsula, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians) can catch a total of six sturgeons per year — one sturgeon per Tribe per year, with an extra tag for one Tribe annually on a rotating basis. Non-Tribal anglers also vie for six sturgeon tags per year, given through a lottery for a winter spearfishing festival, The Shivaree, on Black Lake.

But harvesting on most lakes is not on the immediate horizon. The sturgeon population of Mullett Lake, Black Lake’s neighbour to the west, is too small to sustain even a minuscule quota. The solution? Restocking: raising baby fish in hatcheries and releasing them into the wild.

Sturgeon fingerlings at Little Traverse Bay Band Fish Hatchery. These little fish will be released into nearby Burt Lake, Michigan.

The array of tanks at Little Traverse Bay Band Fish Hatchery.

Restocking rivers and lakes became part of the statewide sturgeon rehabilitation plan in 1998. The Black River Sturgeon Stream Side Research Facility in Onaway — the self-proclaimed “Sturgeon Capital of Michigan” — opened in 2009, with hatchery-reared fish now released annually into the watersheds of Black Lake, Mullet Lake and four rivers from the Saginaw Bay watershed. Elsewhere on the Lower Peninsula, the Little Traverse Bay Bands and the Little River Band also rear lake sturgeon. While they and other Tribal hatcheries and the state-run hatchery in Onaway work independently, they all contribute to lake sturgeon rehabilitation.

“The purpose of rearing fish in the hatchery is to boost the chance of sturgeon babies reaching adulthood,” says Doug Larson, a research assistant with Michigan State University, who manages the Black River facility, which keeps baby sturgeons safe until they’re old enough to develop their sharp, predator-deterrent scutes. “In the wild, only about one per cent of larvae make it. The other 99 per cent become snacks for other fish.”

By the time research biologist Ed Baker arrives at the hatchery after a day of surveying sturgeon on Mullett Lake, it feels like a Turkish hammam. Tanks range in size and shape from small hobby aquaria to rain barrels, all containing moving water and tiny sturgeons. With pointy, upturned noses, hedgehog-sharp scutes and mottled, sand-coloured skin, they are simply very cute.

Each spring, staff, students and volunteers collect newly hatched larvae from the spawning site 3.25 kilometres downstream. The larvae are transferred to the rearing facility; there, safe from predators’ maws, they grow into 15-to-20-centimetre-long fingerlings. At the end of the summer, they’re tagged and released into the wild. Every year, 500 lake sturgeon each are released into Black Lake, Mullet Lake and the rivers of the Saginaw Bay watershed. Baker hopes, one day, hatcheries will become obsolete. “The goal, ultimately, is to remove lake sturgeon from the [threatened] species list,” he says.

Maybe there’s reason for optimism. Fishing restrictions, habitat restoration and restocking have led to an increase in several sturgeon populations. In some regions, anglers can take part in sturgeon fishing derbies. Don Tadgerson, a commercial fisherman and Bay Mills member, scoffs at spearfishing as a sport. Spearing has been an important fishing method for his people, and the practice has cultural value. “But it’s not sport; you’re just standing there, waiting to spear the fish.”

Don Tadgerson, a Bay Mills member, mainly catches whitefish, but is no stranger to sturgeon.

For Tadgerson, fishing is intertwined with Tribal identity. “I was up at 3:30 a.m. to smoke whitefish for a dip I make with Miracle Whip,” he says with a glint in his Superior-blue eyes. Still, the offshore fisherman is no stranger to sturgeon. “We don’t target them, because they’ve been protected for decades,” he says. “But they sometimes end up in my nets as incidental catches. Once I caught a sturgeon that had been tagged in Goulais Bay, and another that was tagged in Wisconsin,” he reveals. And two decades ago, he tagged 50 sturgeon that had accidentally ended up in his trap nets for a Bay Mills biologist who saw the bycatch as an opportunity to tag and gather biological data from the species in Whitefish Bay.

As he swipes through photos on his phone — boxes of whitefish he’s caught, the limitless lake, his boat, named Mr. M$NE as he “bought it off a rich guy” — he stresses the need for collaboration between Indigenous People and biologists and across the border because “fish don’t see imaginary lines drawn by humans.” Today, Tadgerson feels cautiously optimistic about the future of lake sturgeon. In Anishinaabe culture, the sturgeon is known as the chief, or king, of fish. “It probably can be, if it wants to,” says Tadgerson.

Tiny sturgeon larvae from the Mississagi Delta.

“Fish will figure things out — the more we get out of their way, the better for them. We should stop referring to ‘fish management’ because fish manage themselves. Instead, we should manage humans to care better for the fish. We have an agreement with the Creator, who said we can harvest animals, but we have to be responsible and not take more than we need. Still, I’m hopeful for nmé because fish have intelligence, they have resilience, even though we don’t give them credit for that. Lake sturgeon have their own knowledge systems. They’re our oldest relative, but they’re in trouble, so we have a responsibility to help them out — to help sturgeon be sturgeon.”

—Kathleen Ryan, Anishinaabe ecologist; investigator on the Mississauga First Nation’s lake sturgeon research project

Ogimaa giigonh: the king, or chief, of fish. The philosopher, the mediator. The Anishinaabeg have always known that nmé holds ancient wisdom — how else would the species have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and, more recently, the onslaught of colonial greed? For ecologist Kathleen Ryan — a self-described “fish nerd” who can talk for hours on end about kinship with fishes — protecting sturgeon is as much about helping a relative as it is about safeguarding Anishinaabe knowledge.

For Mississauga First Nation’s sturgeon project, Ryan sat down with nation members with a paper map of the Mississagi River. They shared anecdotes and memories, saturating the map with colours, details and textures that show how, when and where people have interacted with nmé, and why. Did they catch them for food, medicine or ceremony? Are the fish bigger or smaller than before, are there more females vs. males, has their range changed?

Together, they created a living picture of the river as a lifeline, a cultural chart. “Indigenous knowledge is the longest time series of knowledge we have,” Ryan says. That granular, qualitative information enhances the quantitative data derived from scientific study. “The more Indigenous people are involved in research projects, the better for lake sturgeon.”

The research team is collecting data to try to figure out the time between spawning and hatching, but also to get a sense for what larvae eat and which parts of the delta they use to get to Lake Huron.

These sturgeon larvae, which Kenneth McLaughlin holds in a baster, are roughly 20 millimetres long and show just a hint of pectoral fins and barbels.

Guided by the nation, biology professor Matt Litvak of Mount Allison University has been spending time on the water to map the subsurface topography and zoom in on sturgeon specifics — how many are there, where do they go, how old and what sex are they. Empirical data, to this day, still garners more attention from policymakers and academia than lived experience, but Ryan says, with both sets of information, the nation can develop its own management plan and use it to hold outsiders accountable. Litvak points to co-production of science as a question of ethics: collaborating to make sure nmé is around 200 million years from now. It’s a big responsibility that includes tracking the littlest of sturgeons.

Shortly after the spawning season, in mid-June, Anthony Chiblow from Mississauga First Nation sets out on the delta in a boat, together with Matthew McIsaac and Kenneth McLaughlin from the Litvak Lab. It’s a Friday morning, and the team is on its last larvae-catching expedition of the field season. Chiblow steers through zigzagging channels with riverbank vegetation so dense it’s a bit like whizzing through canyons. Chiblow knows this water (he was seven when he started fishing salmon to give to Elders), but for outsiders, finding the way is a challenge.

Chiblow stops at the first buoy. McIsaac and McLaughlin pull up the sock-shaped drift net and pour the contents into a white dish pan. On a nearby island, the crew peers at what looks like seaweed soup and proceeds to remove bit by slimy bit to see if there are larvae. When they find them, they’re sucked into a turkey baster and moved to a clear container.

Anthony Chiblow bids the baby fish farewell as he releases them into their watery home.

The larvae are about 20 millimetres long. Some of them already show a hint of pectoral fins and barbels. McIsaac guesses they’re about 10 days old. They dart about, so they’re captured in photographs to be counted and measured later in the lab. After their mugshot, Chiblow takes them to the water’s edge. He kneels, pouring them back into the river they came from. “Grow up and make lots of new babies!” he tells them.

Each of the babies released back into the Mississagi Delta has the potential to become part of new river stories — for Mississauga First Nation and the world. Sturgeon aren’t just a resource to be managed. They’re individuals who animate the same intricate weave that humans are part of. To rescue sturgeon is to open the door to new narratives. Nmé, if we help them live, can guide us along rivers and bays and lakes, and in so doing, help us chart a new course on the maps of our own imagination.