The 2020 Lobster Controversy

 

The Marshall Decision

The Supreme Court of Canada’s September 17, 1999 decision in the Donald Marshall case affirmed a treaty right to hunt, fish and gather in pursuit of a ‘moderate livelihood’, arising out of the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1760 and 1761.The Decision affected 34 Mi’kmaq and Maliseet First Nations in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and the Gaspé region of Quebec. 

 

Recently the country has witnessed a struggle between the Sang-Mêlés Acadien and their Mi'kmaw cousins, with the Sang-Mêlés Acadien being presented as violent, racist, entitled settler Acadians. This unfortunate dispute has its history not in the peaceful natural relations between the Sang-Mêlés Acadien and the Mi'kmaw, but in the machinations of the Canadian Government, private capital and the Indian Act. The Sang-Mêlés Acadien are as one with the Mi'kmaw. Both the Mi’kmaw and the Sang-Mêlés Acadien have always been fishermen harvesting the waters of western Nova Scotia. The Mi’kmaw taught our first mixed blood ancestors to fish and hunt.

In the years after the Mi’kmaw and Sang-Mêlés Acadien returned from New Brunswick following the fall of Québec, the peoples split with the Mi’kmaw falling under the control of the Indian Act and the Sang-Mêlés Acadien assimilating to the Land of Evangeline false history. The Sang-Mêlés Acadien lived equally impoverished with the Mi’kmaw in their respective territories until the beginning of the 20^th Century when the Sang-Mêlés Acadien created the western Nova Scotia lobster fishery. The Sang-Mêlés Acadien were able to accomplish this because they as individuals had access to capital, whereas the Mi’kmaw who lived collectively under the Indian Act did not. The suggestion the Sang-Mêlés Acadien cheated the Mi’kmaw out of their birthright and exploited them for their own ends is plainly false, divisive and deliberately hurtful.

The Marshal decision added a new form of false rhetoric to the discourse, the ideal of a “moderate livelihood.” There can be no moderate livelihood derived from a licensed fishery for any individual who lives collectively in a nation controlled by the Indian Act, where the nation and not the individual owns the fishing licenses and equipment. The Sang-Mêlés Acadien want our Mi'kmaw cousins to be part of the lobster fishery, to gain personal wealth and raise their children to be lobster fishermen in their turn. This security will benefit both our peoples. The only impediment to this progress is the Indian Act.