Indigenous Fishers First

09/30/2026

Today, we pause. We listen. We remember. 🧡
On this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day, Indigenous Fishers First stands with deep respect for residential school Survivors, their families, and every community that still carries the impacts of this system.
We remember the children who were taken and never came home.
We also remember the ones who did make it home but were never the same. They came back to families and communities that had been changed forever, and many still live with that loss today.
Here in Port Alberni, on Nuu-chah-nulth territory, this history isn’t far away. It’s part of the land we live and work on. Over the years, Survivors have trusted us with their personal stories, and we’re deeply grateful. Those stories give us only a glimpse of this tragedy. We know we will never fully understand what they went through. We also know it’s our job to keep listening.
We see more than pain, though. We also see strength.
Every day, we see incredible resilience in our Indigenous partners and communities. People are bringing back language and culture, protecting their rights to fish and harvest, raising the next generation, and building strong economies for the future. Much of this strength comes from knowledge passed down over thousands of years about the ocean, the rivers, the salmon, and how everything is connected. We’re thankful for the knowledge that has been shared with us, and humbled to be part of work that is making a real difference.
Reconciliation isn’t something that happens in one day. It shows up in our work every day: in how we listen, how we build partnerships, and whether communities stay in control of their own knowledge, resources, and future.
We look forward to a time when the harms of residential schools are only a memory and a lesson from the past, not something families still struggle with today. Until then, we’ll keep listening, learning, and doing the work.
Every Child Matters. 🧡
If you are a Survivor or a family member who needs support today, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Line is open 24/7 at 1-866-925-4419. The Hope for Wellness Help Line is also available 24/7 at 1-855-242-3310.

09/22/2026

🐟 Nobody got into fisheries because they love paperwork.

Ask anyone who manages a federal fisheries agreement what the hardest part of the job is. It's almost never the fishing.

It's the fourth version of the same number, typed into the fifth template, for the sixth person who needs it by Friday. Finance has the spend in one spreadsheet. The fisheries manager has the catch in another. The training coordinator has paper in a binder in a truck.

Back in 2002 the Auditor General counted 168 reports a year to four federal organizations — for one community. The templates have multiplied since. The fishery hasn't.

So this year we built the alternative, from the ground up. 👇

✅ CARES holds the agreement, the spend, the harvest and the people in one record — then writes the funder's report on demand. It also refuses ineligible spend before it can land in a claim.
✅ APEX captures the set, the species, the weight and the position right on the boat, with no signal. Nothing gets retyped ashore, so nothing gets invented.
✅ GlobalTrace follows a lot from the hold to the carton, in the same language buyers use — structured to GDST 2.0.
✅ CFE keeps enterprises, governance approvals and quota transfers in one auditable record, logged under OCAP. "Who decided that?" becomes a record, not a memory.

Right now it's running 17 agreements across 9 programs, 8 templates and 4 output formats — completely offline, on hardware a Nation can own, with zero calls to the cloud. Community data stays under the Nation's ownership, control, access and possession. Enforced in the code, not just promised in a policy.

And it isn't only for fisheries. Housing, health, education, water, heritage, community facilities — any funding agreement, any funder.

Our rule is simple: the system does the assembly, you do the judgment. It drafts, checks, flags and formats. You review and approve.

Full story in our newsletter — link below. If reporting season has a familiar dread to it, send us a message. We'd rather show you than tell you.

Indigenous Fishers First · Newsletter, Autumn 2026 Ask anyone who manages a federal fisheries agreement what the hardest part of the job is. It's almost never the fishing.

09/21/2026

New website, same wharf.

indigenousfishersfirst.com now shows the full picture of what we do with Nations: licences, vessels, processing, funding, and six fisheries software systems that run on a computer the Nation owns.

Watch the narrated demonstrations on the Technology page, read the first guide in the Resource Hub (how Nations buy a commercial fishing licence in BC), and book a conversation if there is a question your Nation is sitting with.

https://indigenousfishersfirst.com/

Our Commitment to Indigenous Fishers' Prosperity Indigenous Fishers First harnesses over 20 years of community collaboration to deliver sustainable, tech-driven, and culturally grounded solutions that empower food processing and economic growth in Indigenous communities. We are developing a new proj...

09/14/2026

Indigenous Fishers First is in Halifax this week with working tools that let Nations run their fisheries, report to funders and keep their own data on their own hardware. See it running at the Sustainable Blue Economy Summit, September 17–18. Live walkthroughs on request.

09/08/2026

Most grant-funded projects do not fail in the field. They stall in the reporting.
The funds arrive, the workplan is built, the crew delivers. Then the final report comes due and the requirements turn out to be far heavier than anyone accounted for: more data, more financial detail, more staff hours that were never budgeted. Nations wait six months to several years to recover money they have already spent.
Indigenous Fishers First is called in at that stage more often than at the start. Communities ask us to interpret what the funder actually requires and rebuild a year of project history from receipts and recollection. Most of it was solvable before the first dollar moved.
So we built the system we kept wishing existed — designed around the grant-funded organization, not the funder.
It begins with the funding agreement itself. Every reporting obligation is mapped, then the workplan, data structure, and collection tools are built backwards from those requirements. Field crews capture harvest data, inventory, supplies, and expense receipts on tablets and mobile devices as the work happens. Automation replaces the monotonous entry that invites human error.
Because the record is clean from day one, it works harder. The same project data produces council and community presentations, newsletter articles, social media content, and final reporting documents built precisely to the specifications in the agreement.
And reporting is only the tip of the iceberg. It is one module in an integrated system built to move communities and organizations into the future already equipped with the tools they need to succeed.
The system does more of the work for the people, so the people can do more work for their people.
For Nations carrying a reporting backlog, or preparing to launch a funded project and wanting it structured correctly from the start, we are ready to partner.
Indigenous Fishers First — your dedicated partner in fisheries.

09/03/2026

From Ice Machines to Operating Systems
Two years ago our work looked like forklifts, ice machines, and cold-chain logistics. Infrastructure was the bottleneck — so we moved equipment into communities: a forklift to Tla-o-qui-aht, an ice machine to Klemtu, more in the works for Tla-o-qui-aht and Ha’oom.
That work continues. But it exposed the next bottleneck: information.
Every landing, every temperature log, every harvester payment, every funder report — scattered across paper, spreadsheets, phones, and other people’s databases. Communities were generating the data and still asking outsiders for permission to see it.
So Indigenous Fishers First has shifted toward technology and innovation. We’re building the layer that sits under the whole operation:
• Seafood monitoring at the point of harvest — catch, condition, and cold-chain captured in the field, offline, on a boat with no signal
• Enhanced traceability from the water to the buyer, so a Nuu-chah-nulth product carries its own verified story into the market
• A comprehensive community reporting and management system that turns daily operations into contribution-agreement reporting, audit trails, and management decisions without a second round of data entry
• Automation that connects the pieces — monitoring feeds traceability, traceability feeds reporting, reporting feeds the next funding cycle
The part that matters most: it runs locally. Models built for sovereignty at every level — data stays in the territory, on community-controlled systems, governed by community decisions. Not hosted in someone else’s cloud under someone else’s terms.
Sovereignty starts at the smokehouse. It doesn’t end there. It has to run all the way through the systems that record what we caught, prove what we sold, and report what we accomplished.
Infrastructure gets the fish moving. The operating system keeps the value — and the authority — where it belongs.

08/20/2026

08/20/2026

08/20/2026

Knowledge, leadership, and infrastructure — Gitanyow showed us all three.
Indigenous Fishers First just made our first trip up into the Lax’yip of the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, and it left us genuinely inspired.
We came to work on an exciting project: building the kind of infrastructure that adds value to fish already being harvested and preserves the catch properly — so Gitanyow harvesters have more choices, more options, and more opportunity from every fish that comes out of the water.
What we found was a nation already doing the hard part. Standing at the traditional fishing sites, you understand immediately why these places matter. And the fisheries science coming out of the Gitanyow Fisheries Authority — the technical arm of the Hereditary Chiefs — is deep and comprehensive: stock assessment, catch monitoring, habitat restoration, and watershed work across the Nass and Kitwanga systems. This is a program that voluntarily stood down from fishing Kitwanga sockeye for conservation reasons. That tells you everything about the values behind the data.
Just as powerful was seeing the traditional government in action. The Wilp system and the Hereditary Chiefs making decisions for the territory and the membership — not as history, but as working, functioning governance. It’s a great example for anyone who thinks reconciliation is an abstraction.
Indigenous Fishers First is proud to be working with GitWet CFE, the Gitanyow–Wet’suwet’en Commercial Fishing Enterprise, on building a better future for these communities and their harvesters.
Already looking forward to the next visit — and to the Wet’suwet’en project and getting into that territory.
Wil’aa’ayin — thank you to the Chiefs, the GFA team, and everyone who took the time to show us the territory. 🐟

07/28/2026

So glad we could be a part of bringing this critical infrastructure to a community that needs it. Thanks for trusting Indigenous Fishers First and Celt Industries to get the job done.