N.L.’S Trail of Tears

In 1830, the U.S. government passed the Indian Removal Act in which peaceful tribes of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw East of the Mississippi River were force-marched out of their homelands west to Oklahoma and Wyoming territories.

Thousands died on the 1,800mile winter journey from starvation, exposure and hardship. The march became known as The Trail of Tears.

Since early in Newfoundland and Labrador’s joining Confederation, governments of N.L. and Canada have continuously distributed fish licenses and quotas to foreign and Canadian fishing fleets to the point today where near all species are in sensitive or critical condition.

The overall bio-mass of fish is at such a level nature’s biological interdependent relationship of species no longer functions in a fully collective way for its own health and sustainability.

The mismanaged destruction of our great fishing resource has resulted in the abrogation of N.L. fishers’ adjacency rights to the point today where the fishery and fishers are approaching their own extinction.

Fishers have gradually and systematically been removed from access and opportunity to fish. Sixty years of decreasing and removing their right to fish has had a similar effect on them as the effect on the indigenous people who were removed from their resources, their land.

In their case a way of life and culture was destroyed, in our case it is being destroyed.

It is true nothing can compare to the tragedy suffered by indigenous people on the Trail of Tears, but the psychological devastation, loss of personal meaning and family structure, loss of provision and opportunity is the same devastation for N.L. fishers as it was that befell the native peoples of midamerica.

For all this, and more, at the hands of the Canadian and N.L. governments, we the fisher people of N.L. are now suffering our own prolonged modern day Trail of Tears.

Phil Earle Carbonear