Sustainability is not in their dictionary
Where even to begin with this quote...
Fishtofino: Pre-contact aboriginal population estimates for BC vary widely with some estimates ranging from a conservative 200,000 to more than a million. Most authorities put the figure at a conservative 300,000. By post-contact 1929, the population had dropped to 22,000. The Kwakwaka'wakw population alone was reduced From a pre-contact population estimated to be 19,000 to about 1,000 by 1921 primarily by waves of epidemics. Similarly, the precontact (1775) population of Snunéymuxw people is believed to have been about 5,000. In 1838 a census figure was 1,000. All these pre-contact people had to eat something. it wasn't from Overweightea.
So how did they generate and conserve these pre-contact populations and societies?
Were the economies based on the "rape-pillage-and-plunder" corporate mentality? Or was there some other social dynamic at work like what is now termed "sustainability" or "conservation"?
The populations of Pacific salmon seemed to be abundant until at least the 1950s or so.
What have we done, in comparison? Whose dictionary doesn't include "sustainability"?
Over the 10,000-14,000 years of settlement in North America - The aboriginal peoples or "First Nations" developed their own societies that had built within their practices and governance ways to ensure that the resources did not get depleted. This is especially true for the aboriginal groups in what is now called BC. There were some failures, particularly in the marginal areas of the American South-West where some groups got populated past what the marginal land could provide when climatic changes made the land less productive. Same goes for the large city-states of the Incas and Astecs - although the Spanish Conquistadors also had an influence in the decay of those civilizations.
BUT overall - aboriginals within Canada were the original "conservationists" long before that word was coined, and long before Europeans and Colonization arrived.
In some areas, some groups still have a functioning hereditary system that performs a similar function that it did many thousands of years ago protecting against over-extraction. In many areas, that system is now but a distant memory.
We have all been impacted by Colonization and subsequent to that - the Capitalist system that needs continual "growth" and new resources to fuel the Stock Market. The problem is - we only have 1 planet to use - only 1 spaceship to inhabit. We can't keep expanding our resource needs indefinitely. I think we have a much bigger problem than what happens when we acknowledge the developing co-management input from a group of peoples that want the resources to last for their kids and their grandkids. These peoples are NOT the enemy.