Sulla linea dell’acqua. Le foreste di alghe giganti Kwagu’ł (Kwakiutl) tra economia, ecologia e ‘tradizioni’

This dissertation investigates the wild harvesting of Macrocystis pyrifera (giant kelp), known in Kwak’wala as ḵ̓ax̱ḵ̓alis, in the ancestral waters of the Kwakiutl/Kwagu’ł First Nation, on the northern coast of Vancouver Island. Starting from the small Indigenous enterprise led by Marc Peeler and the Confidence Fishing Company, the research follows kelp as both a material resource and a conceptual node through which ecological, economic, political, historical, and cultural processes become entangled. In recent years, giant kelp forests have become central to global imaginaries of the Blue and Green Economy. They are described as allies in climate mitigation, ecosystem restoration, carbon removal, cosmetics, biofuels, and agricultural biostimulants. Yet these promises also reproduce the contradictions of contemporary sustainability discourses, in which ecological regeneration is often translated into new extractive markets. Against this background, the Kwagu’ł case shows a different configuration: kelp is harvested by hand from small skiffs, cutting only the floating fronds while leaving the holdfast attached to the rocks, allowing the algae to regenerate. The harvested biomass is processed locally into a liquid extract and exported to Europe for agricultural use. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork over three years, the dissertation combines participant observation in harvesting operations, archival research, interviews and conversations with hereditary and elected leaders, harvesters, marine biologists, entrepreneurs, and community members. It shows that Marc Peeler’s project cannot be reduced to a commercial initiative. It is also an attempt to create work on reserve, reactivate ecological knowledge, negotiate with provincial institutions and scientific actors, and reposition the Kwakiutl First Nation within emerging environmental markets. The thesis argues that Indigenous knowledge should not be understood as a static survival of “tradition,” but as a situated, dynamic, and intergenerational practice able to incorporate science, policy, technology, and market instruments for Indigenous purposes. In this sense, Marc’s work continues a longer Northwest Coast history of Indigenous mediation, entrepreneurship, and political adaptation, from commercial fishing and roe-on-kelp practices to the contemporary governance of marine resources. By treating kelp as an actor-network and as the center of a multispecies assemblage, the dissertation questions rigid oppositions between tradition and modernity, Indigenous and Western worlds, economy and ecology, humans and non-humans. Rather than confirming radical ontological separation, the Kwagu’ł kelp harvest reveals the possibility of shared, negotiated, and practical worlds, where sustainability becomes meaningful only when rooted in relations of responsibility, care, and self-determination.