Regrowing from the Depths: How Kwakiutl (Kwaguʼł) Seaweed Forests Reshape Indigenous Knowledge in Global Supply Chains

Abstract (English)

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Kwakiutl community of Fort Rupert (Vancouver Island, British Columbia), focusing on a Kwakiutl entrepreneur engaged in the wild harvesting of giant brown kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), a brown seaweed that can grow up to 35 cm per day in those areas and create extensive marine forests that support entire ecosystems, offering shelter and food to a wide array of marine life. The harvesting is carried out manually during the summer using small boats, and involves cutting the upper fronds in a way that ensures the seaweed regeneration. The biomass is processed into biostimulants for agricultural and horticultural use worldwide.
This case invites a critical reconsideration of how “Indigenous knowledge” is conceptualized in anthropology. Often framed as a stable cultural inheritance or an oppositional stance to modernity, it is here understood as a situated, adaptive set of practices that interact with scientific knowledge, state regulations, and transnational economic flows.
In line with Menzies, reducing Indigenous knowledge to a static “alternative” to modern systems risks neutralizing the agency of those involved, reinforcing narratives that confine Indigenous subjects to roles defined by external expectations. The figure of the “authentic traditional Indigenous subject,” who rejects the market, the state, and science, ultimately serves the interests of those who benefit from maintaining dispossession. It is precisely the Indigenous actors who engage strategically with political, scientific, and economic infrastructures who challenge these hegemonic narratives.
These dynamics demonstrate that Indigenous knowledge today does not stand in opposition to capitalism or science, but rather reflects a capacity to engage with and strategically reorient them. The goal is not rejection but realignment—mobilizing external tools in service of local ecological values and relational ontologies. This approach produces situated models of sustainability that speak directly to global ecological concerns.
The case of Macrocystis harvesting thus exemplifies a dynamic synthesis of tradition and modernity. It disrupts entrenched dichotomies—not only between “Indigenous” and “Western” worlds, but also those produced by the ontological turn, which tends to treat these worlds as radically incommensurable. Instead, this research shows how Indigenous actors craft hybrid interventions across epistemic and political domains, through the use of market, institutional, and techno-scientific tools from the perspective and with the aims of Indigenous ecology and self-determination.
It is no coincidence that this very region has received little ethnographic attention in recent decades. Anthropology has often favored artistic expression, myth, and ritual, contributing to the tribalization and essentialization of Indigenous subjects while neglecting domains like labor, entrepreneurship, and political economy. Scholars such as Rolf Knight had already pointed to these dimensions, yet the discipline remained more interested in “preserving” tradition than in exploring how Indigenous people continue to make history.