What the people who lived here for 9,000 years knew — and what we are only now, out of sheer necessity, beginning to understand.
The Humbling
In the first weeks after landing, we nearly starved surrounded by food.
This is not an exaggeration. Heceta Island is one of the most biologically productive landscapes on Earth — salmon streams, tidal flats teeming with shellfish, forests full of deer and berries, ocean waters rich with marine life. And we stood in the middle of it all, forty-some former citizens of the most advanced civilization in human history, and we did not know how to feed ourselves.
We didn’t know which berries were safe. We didn’t know when the salmon ran or how to catch them without equipment designed for sport rather than survival. We didn’t know how to read a tide, how to split cedar, how to smoke fish so it would last through winter rather than rot in a week. We had graduate degrees and stock options and opinions about pour-over coffee, and we could not do the single most basic thing that every human being who ever lived on this island before us had done as a matter of course.
What saved us was a box of U.S. Forest Service documents salvaged from the Craig Ranger District office, a handful of academic papers on Northwest Coast archaeological sites, and — most importantly — the knowledge that Dr. Yuki Tanaka, our marine biologist, had accumulated studying traditional ecological practices before The Correction. She became, almost overnight, the most important person on the island. Not the strongest, not the loudest, not the one with the most “leadership experience.” The one who knew things.
This is the story of what we’ve learned from the people who were here first. We owe them more than we can express.
The Chuck Lake Record
The Chuck Lake archaeological site (designated 49-CRG-237 in pre-Correction academic records) sits on the eastern shore of Heceta Island near our primary settlement. Excavations conducted in the 1980s and 1990s by Robert E. Ackerman documented continuous human habitation stretching back approximately 8,800 years.
Let that number sit with you. Eight thousand, eight hundred years. The Roman Empire lasted about 500. The United States made it 250. The global financial system we built our entire civilization around lasted roughly 80 years in its modern form. The people of Chuck Lake were here for 8,800.
What the archaeological record tells us is not just that people lived here — it tells us how. Shell middens reveal diet: Pacific herring, shellfish, sea mammals, fish. Tool assemblages show a people adapted precisely to this environment — microblade technology, bone tools, specialized implements for processing marine resources. Later sites like Rosie’s Rock Shelter (5,200–2,600 years ago) show increasing complexity, more sophisticated resource management, and the emergence of the cultural practices that would become the Tlingit, Haida, and Eyak traditions.
These were not primitive people eking out a marginal existence. These were engineers of abundance. They managed salmon streams. They cultivated clam gardens. They built social structures complex enough to sustain large populations through the darkest winters. They did all of this without electricity, without metal tools for most of their history, without any of the things we thought we couldn’t live without.
We thought we were surviving. They were building civilizations.
What We’ve Learned
Fish Processing
Our first attempt at smoking salmon produced something that tasted like salted leather and gave three people stomach cramps. Our current method — developed after studying ethnographic accounts of Tlingit fish processing — produces food that keeps through winter and actually sustains us. The difference was not technology. It was knowledge: which wood to burn (alder, not spruce), how thin to cut the fillets, how long to smoke at what temperature, when to pull the fish based on texture rather than time.
This knowledge existed. It was documented. It was sitting in university libraries and museum archives. Nobody thought it mattered. It turned out to be the most practical information in the history of our species.
Shelter
Western red cedar. The Tlingit called it the “tree of life” and they were not being poetic — they were being precise. Cedar is naturally rot-resistant in a climate that rots everything. It splits cleanly into planks. Its bark can be woven into rope, baskets, mats, and clothing. Its roots can be processed into cordage stronger than anything we could manufacture.
Our first shelters were built with spruce and hemlock because those were the trees we recognized. They rotted within months. Our current structures use cedar, following construction principles derived from documented Northwest Coast building techniques. They are still standing after two years. The trees were trying to tell us something. It took us a while to listen.
Seasonal Awareness
Perhaps the most profound shift has been learning to think in seasons rather than schedules. The Tlingit calendar was organized around the movement of salmon, the ripening of berries, the behavior of deer, the cycles of tides. There were no weekends. There was no “time off.” There was the work that the season demanded, and if you did that work well, you ate. If you didn’t, you didn’t.
We have adopted a version of this. March through October is acquisition season — fishing, hunting, gathering, preserving. November through February is maintenance season — repairing shelters, processing stored food, making and mending tools, and teaching. Everyone teaches. Everyone learns. The former marketing executive teaches her surprising carpentry skills. The former barista teaches plant identification (he was a botany minor; who knew). The marine biologist teaches everything.
The Debt
We want to be clear about something: we are not “rediscovering” Indigenous knowledge. We are not “honoring” it in the way that word was used Before — which usually meant acknowledging something’s value while continuing to ignore it. We are depending on it to stay alive. There is a difference.
The Tlingit, Haida, and Eyak peoples who lived in this region developed a body of ecological knowledge over thousands of years that is more sophisticated, more nuanced, and more practically useful than anything our civilization produced in its entire tenure. This is not sentiment. It is observable fact. We are the proof.
If any members of these communities find this record — and we hope, genuinely, that they are out there, that they are well, that their knowledge lives in living memory and not just in the documents we’ve scavenged — we want them to know: you were right. About all of it. We’re sorry it took the end of the world for us to figure that out.
“Eight thousand years of peer-reviewed data, and we called it folklore.”
— Dr. Yuki Tanaka, addressing the Council, Day 200