Mi’kmaw harvesters treated unfairly
Collaborative relationship between Indigenous fishery and DFO thwarted by individual incidents
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada decided in the Marshall case that Mi’kmaq have a constitutionally protected treaty right to fish for a livelihood.
Donald Marshall Jr. had been harvesting eels with a net, with no Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) licence. He was found to have the treaty right to do so. Since Marshall was decided over two decades ago, very little progress has been made in treaty right recognition. A colonizer mindset is continuing to impede reconciliation and fostering racial tension and physical and cultural violence.
We can all remember footage in 2000 of armed federal officers storming Mi’kmaq in their small boats. That is a memory that is seared into the minds of Canadians. But while this stands for oppression in the minds of Mi’kmaq, there are elements in Canadian society who see that federal conduct as meaning that the Mi’kmaq must be doing something wrong. The government-created public perception that “Mi’kmaq are doing something wrong” fosters racism, which fosters hate, which in turn fosters violence — physical, mental and structural.
When an enforcement arm of a government engages in selective enforcement against minorities, that is racial profiling, a form of structural and institutional racism. We do not have to look far in Canada to find proof that such racism exists, and to see what terrible effects it has on Indigenous people. You can see it in the report of the Donald Marshall Jr. inquiry into his wrongful conviction and incarceration.
You can see it in the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. You see it starkly in the report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Colonization has, at its root, an intent to take lands, resources and power away from the Indigenous people of the land, and to transfer it to the pockets and control of the settler colonizer. That is a world view that pervaded the occupation of Canada by nonIndigenous people.
In modern day Nova Scotia, some non-Indigenous people are determined to reverse that colonization and engage in true and meaningful reconciliation.
Others remain intent on continued colonization, on the re-victimization of Mi’kmaq.
RECONCILIATION MEASURES
Over the course of the past four years, the Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw communities have been developing comprehensive, conservation-based fisheries management plans in support of treaty rights-protected (TRP) fishing activity by their members. This work has, in some cases, been implemented through understandings in a working collaborative relationship with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
The department’s regional management has attempted to implement certain aspects of the Mi’kmaq TRP fishery plans, although constrained by a restricted federal mandate with limited flexibility. This is an issue that the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs (ANSMC) has raised with DFO and will maintain as a focus for improvement.
Unfortunately, while management at DFO is trying to work towards at least some reconciliation measures, the department’s conservation and protection arm has presented a different challenge.
The ANSMC, through its fisheries implementation team and its network of community liaisons, has over recent years sought collaborative working relationships with C&P officers and have requested increased fisheries officer capacity, education and training in reconciliation. This has, for the most part, not happened.
Racial profiling continues to be an issue. Our harvesters, both men and women, are often targeted, racially profiled and criminalized, even when fishing in a manner consistent with a DFO authorization.
In two recent examples, a Potlotek-authorized lobster fishing vessel and money from a Kespukwitk First Nations’ conservation-based elver fishery were seized and are being held “under investigation.”
These public displays foster the view that the Mi’kmaw harvesters “must be doing something wrong,” which promotes racial hatred, which increases the likelihood of physical and cultural violence.
As well, the harvesters involved in these incidents have suffered an undue hardship during the ongoing seizures.
CULTURAL PRACTICE
The public displays of differential
enforcement continue to send the message to Canadian society that Mi’kmaw fishers, although acting under their constitutional rights, are actually criminals. This fosters increased tensions and a lack of trust, which we have seen all too often in the past, leading to racialized hatred, violence and conflict.
Our elver fishers include both men and women, who often fish in family groups with their children as part of a cultural and generational practice. It is simply not right that DFO has employees trying to make them victims of targeted enforcement or non-Indigenous hostility.
The ANSMC is calling on the department’s management, the minister and the prime minister to evaluate its enforcement employees, through an Indigenous lens, and support the development of collaborative, discretionary conservation and preservation enforcement practices, with Indigenous-led, managed, and actively practised enforcement divisions.
Chief Gerald Toney is fisheries co-lead for the Assembly of
Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs. He is also the chief of the Annapolis Valley First Nation.