Program subject to change.
Updated October 19, 2026
Living Lakes, Living Responsibilities; A Syilx Call to Change How We Protect Water
For the Syilx Nation, lakes and waters are living systems, connected to the land, salmon, people, and all living things. Our relationship with siwɬkʷ – water carries responsibilities that have been passed down through generations and must continue for generations to come.
Across Syilx territory, lakes and watersheds are telling us that the way we manage and make decisions about water needs to change. Consecutive years of drought, declining water availability and quality, habitat loss, and cumulative impacts are placing increasing pressure on the health of our watersheds. These challenges are not simply technical or scientific. They are also questions of governance, values, and responsibility.
What would change if we rewarded the protection of water as much as we reward its use?
Drawing on experiences from Okanagan Lake, Osoyoos Lake, and Arrow Lakes, Syilx leadership will share how our laws, knowledge, and responsibilities to water can help guide a different approach to lake and watershed management. One that moves beyond consultation to meaningful Syilx authority in decision-making, places greater value on preventing harm rather than repairing damage, and measures success by the health of the water and the life it supports.
Science and innovation have important roles, but knowledge alone is not enough. We must also change how decisions are made, where investments are directed, and how governments and institutions are held accountable for protecting water.
This is a call to move beyond plans and commitments toward decisions and actions that truly protect water.
Our responsibility is not only to the lakes and watersheds we know today, but to the generations who will depend on them long after we are gone.
Tiyanetkw Manuel-Herd
way’, my name is Tiyanetkw Manuel-Herd. I am Syilx from the Okanagan Nation, specifically the Upper Nicola Band. I am currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies at UBC Okanagan. I serve on the TELUS Interior and Northern BC Community Board and founded and currently lead the Upper Nicola Band Youth Council. Raised with strong cultural teachings and traditions, I am committed to protecting our lands and waters and creating opportunities for youth leadership. My work focuses on strengthening youth connections to culture, land, and the responsibilities we carry for future generations.
Tessa Terbasket
Tessa is a Syilx Nation member from the Lower Similkameen Indian Band and the siwɬkʷ – water Program Lead for the Okanagan Nation Alliance. She leads Syilx-led watershed planning and water governance initiatives across the territory, including advancing the siwɬkʷ Water Strategy and the 250-Year siwɬkʷ Responsibility Plan. Her work focuses on strengthening Syilx authority in water decision-making, building government-to-government relationships, and ensuring Syilx laws, knowledge, and responsibilities guide the protection and restoration of water and lands for future generations.
Richard Bussanich
Rich Bussanich, MSc, is a water, food, and fisheries biologist who has worked with the Okanagan Nation Alliance since 2010. He has played an important role in the return of salmon to the Okanagan, contributing to Indigenous-led fisheries restoration, water protection, and community water-use planning. A resident of the Powers Creek watershed, Rich brings both a personal and professional commitment to healthy watersheds and fisheries. His work brings together collaborative science and Indigenous knowledge to support water and fisheries restoration across the Columbia, Fraser, and Salish Sea regions.
Trish Manual
Xwayluxalqs – Fox Dress, also known as Patricia Manuel, is a member of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, Upper Nicola Band. She is a Syilx Traditional Knowledge Keeper, carrier of the Syilx puberty ceremony, and granddaughter of Syilx hereditary chiefs. Guided by the teachings and instructions of her Elders, she has dedicated her work to supporting wellness and healing for families, communities, and the Nation. She works to restore and carry forward Syilx ceremonies, supporting youth through rites of passage and strengthening their responsibilities to the land and water. Through her ceremonial responsibilities to siwɬkʷ – water and ntytyix – salmon, she carries a prayer that the water remain clean and clear for all life, for all time.
Freshwater Lakes and Pacific Salmon: Precious ecosystem services, sensitive indicators of environmental change, and powerful levers of social change towards improved environmental and lake management
Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) have intimately connected people and aquatic ecosystems of NW North America for millennia. ‘Swimming upstream’ to natal watersheds in impressive annual spawning migrations, salmon overcome seemingly-insurmountable hydraulic, elevational, and environmental gradients to seed the next generation, mobilizing vast marine-derived nutrients to oligotrophic coastal and inland watersheds upon their death. The Pacific salmon resource yields substantial regional food securities and economic revenues across North America and beyond. Veritable icons of resilience and adaptation, Pacific salmon have long inspired us to undertake rich ‘partnerships’, aligning disparate communities through countries around common values and actions (e.g., sustainable use/management, FW habitat management, conservation).
We face an unprecedented era of environmental change, presenting cumulative and interactive ‘environmental challenges’ across FW and marine habitats for Pacific salmon, and making our shared reliance increasingly uncertain in space and time. This future will be significantly different and require substantial investments in ‘science’ and ‘innovation’ to effectively steward these critical species through the challenges we have imposed upon them. As with all environmental management, his future confronts us with a need to fundamentally change our perceptions on the use and distribution of Pacific salmon, and the monitoring and management of their aquatic habitats, all of which are in a state of flux.
For Sockeye Salmon (O. nerka), which uniquely rear in numerous FW lakes, which span vast geographies and biogeoclimatic diversities, an estimated > 97% of mortality occurs in FW (i.e., egg-smolt), making the structure and functioning of these watersheds critical to overall population productivity. Applications of limnology, paleolimnology, and watershed sciences lead characterization and prediction of management challenges for salmon and natal watersheds, highlighting the fragility of environmental boundary conditions for food security, and identifying lake management options most likely to promote Pacific salmon resilience and productivity.
Daniel T. Selbie, Ph.D.
Head, Lakes Research, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), Science Branch, Pacific Region
Dr. Selbie leads DFO’s Lakes Research Program, where he studies the freshwater habitats and ecology of anadromous Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.), iconic ecological, cultural, and economic resources throughout NW North America. Sockeye Salmon (O. nerka) uniquely spawn, incubate, and rear in nursery lakes and their tributaries, and natal salmon watersheds span vast landscape, biogeoclimatic, and anthropogenic impact gradients, yielding exceptional complexity in lake food webs, FW salmon growth and survival, and ultimately resource availability. Dr. Selbie’s interdisciplinary monitoring and research integrates limnology, paleolimnology, watershed and fisheries sciences to examine cumulative environmental forcings on lake habitats and juvenile salmon, providing science advice that scales from lake management to international treaty fisheries.
Dan came by his predilections for lakes naturally, born and raised in central Ontario on the glacially-carved systems of the Canadian Shield. Dan holds an honors BSc (Environmental Science, SSP Biology; 2000) and a PhD (Biology; 2008) from Queen’s University, mentoring under Dr. John P. Smol. He completed a research fellowship with Dr. Irene Gregory-Eaves at McGill University, before coming to the Government of Canada in 2008. Dr. Selbie fulfills most lake-related science advice for DFO in the Pacific Region, and maintains active communities of practice and collaborations across all levels of government, academia, Indigenous nations, ENGO’s, and the natural resources sector. He maintains four adjunct professorships (SFU, Queen’s, UNBC, UFV), carrying forward student and post-doctoral mentorship, wherever possible. Dan is an Associate Editor for the journal Environmental Reviews, and an elected, multi-term Director of the BC Lake Stewardship Society (BCLSS), a not-for-profit citizen-government collaboration which monitors, reports upon, and advocates for resolution of lake issues (~20,000 in BC).
Dr. Selbie’s career spans the lakes of Pacific Northwestern North America, studied across contemporary and geological timescales, exposing him to a complex array of lake and natural resource management issues, from the impacts of Canada’s largest mining disaster (Mount Polley), to lake management sustaining species at risk. His unique scientific path and reach have given him deep perspectives on environmental change and lakes, providing a pragmatic view on lake-derived ecosystem services, and resource sustainability in the face of climate and other environmental changes.
Today, Dr. Selbie will share his learned perspectives on accelerating environmental changes in Pacific North America, emerging lake management issues, and cryptic threats in freshwater to a deeply-valued Pacific salmon resource. Salmon are inspiring agents of resilience and adaptation, whose future conservation is a veritable ‘upstream swim’, both for the fish and Society. This future will require significant and informed coordination, planning, and watershed stewardship, along with paradigm shifts on resource abundances and sustainability, to meet the most unprecedented period of environmental change in human history.
Lake Pulse – key findings and lessons learned.
Yannick Huot
Irene Gregory-Eaves
Irene Gregory-Eaves1,2, Yannick Huot2,3 and the NSERC Lake Pulse Network
1Dept. of Biology, McGill University; 2Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Limnologie; 3Département de géomatique appliquée, Université de Sherbrooke
The NSERC Lake Pulse network was a five-year program designed to assess the health of hundreds of Canadian lakes through a multi-faceted approach. The team launched the largest standardized sampling campaign done to date in Canada, collecting data on ~100 variables for 664 lakes across 12 ecozones. Sampling of the water column was complemented by the collection of sediment cores and in-situ measurements designed to calibrate remote sensing data, facilitating the scaling up of results to most lakes in Canada. This talk will highlight the work of many trainees who quantified changes in surface water chemistry and plankton within and among ecozones, as well as identified major landscape gradients; the proportion of agriculture in a watershed emerged as a top predictor for many analyses. Our snapshot sampling of lakes was complemented by paleolimnological research that examined either paired contemporary and pre-Industrial (top-bottom) samples, or more complete time series analyses. For example, we detected elevated concentrations of nutrients and major ions from lakes set in the Prairies or Boreal Plains ecozone, which are regions with expansive agriculture. Paleolimnological analyses both confirmed that these lakes were nutrient rich during the pre-Industrial era but have also undergone significant changes between then and now. This work was only made possible through the strong collaborative spirit embodied by all participants of the network. The network, although technically finished, lives on with a rich open dataset available through the Gordon Datastream, a web-based interactive portal and has seeded many new projects that are currently underway.
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