Decision looms large

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An uneasy calm has settled over the New Brunswick reserve where an incident that has been described by some observers as a race riot pitted Native people against non-Native people and resulted in police laying charges against a number of area residents.

Non-Native fishermen staged a protest in the waters just off the Burnt Church wharf on Oct. 3. They were angry that Native fishermen were exercising the right, recognized two weeks before by the Supreme Court of Canada's Marshall decision, to fish without a license. The protesters then cut the lines on Native lobster traps, sparking an angry reaction from several young Native men. Violence erupted, which resulted in the hospitalization of one Native man.

On Oct. 18, there was little activity back on the reserve, located some 40 km east of the Miramichi Provincial Court where five Burnt Church First Nation members appeared, formally charged with breaking and entering a garage owned by a non-Native fisherman who they suspected had stolen fishing equipment owned by band members. One other Native man facing charges was unable to appear in court because he remains in hospital after suffering serious injuries during the Oct. 3 altercation.

The Burnt Church members appeared in court for the 9:30 a.m. session, which ended before 11 a.m. In what court officials said was a deliberate move, the 20 non-Native people facing a variety of charges related to the Oct. 3 violence were not scheduled to appear in court to go through the identical formal charging process until the 1:30 p.m. session. The groups of accused were kept separate to prevent further confrontation.

One non-Native man faces charges of assault with a vehicle and assault with a baseball bat. He and 15 others have been charged with cutting Native lobster traps. Two of those were charged with resisting arrest. Those 16 and four others also face charges of fishing out of season.

Local RCMP officers waited long enough to file the charges to prompt Canadian Race Relations Foundation executive director, Moy Tam, to worry that no charges would be laid. Tam felt the need to issue a statement urging the RCMP to lay the charges.

Judge Andrew Stymiest gave all the accused until Nov. 1 to obtain legal counsel and enter pleas.

As chiefs and government officials met under the close scrutiny of the media in Ottawa in an attempt to bang out an agreement that will defuse the tension related to a Supreme Court decision and to prevent further outbreaks of violence, newly elected Burnt Church Chief Wilbur Dedam stayed home to get up to speed on local issues and to be ready to respond should the conflict renew itself. A representative of the Mawiw Council, a group made up of the three largest bands in the province, represented Burnt Church at the Ottawa talks.

Dedam was chief of his band for 18 years before losing an election three years ago. He regained the position last summer and was sworn in as chief on Aug. 13, just barely in time to have this political hot potato dropped into his lap. In a region where fishing is by far the biggest industry, one from which Native people have long been excluded, the veteran politician sees little that's new about the recent conflict.

"When we won with the Sparrow case, it was the same thing. We didn't have too many traps out there. We were allowed to put out something like . . . I think we started out with 2,000 traps, I guess, but we didn't have traps. We only had five [hundred] something. And then they destroyed all our traps and I took it back to the council and the council bought 500 traps. So the people that lost them, we gave five here, 10 there," he told Windspeaker. "We're always losing traps and nobody's saying nothing about it. Every year, we lose around two or three hundred traps."

The band's welfare department advances recipients several payments in advance so they can buy traps and attempt to create employment for themselves, the chief said.

"They'll usually take four or five chequs ahead of time to buy traps," he said. "So when somebody goes out there and cuts all their traps, it's really frustrating. They're trying to get off of this welfare and make a living by fishing."

Dedam said the local authorities - RCMP, provincial Natural Resources ministry officials and federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) officers - took no action when informed of the assault on his people's legal fishing activities.

"Nothing's being done about it. Every time we go to the DFO they usually tell you, 'We don't have the manpower here.' One of the members there said, 'We're only allowed to work eight hours a day, then we're out of the water.' Well, you should just come down there. You'd see a lot of poachers. They're setting their own traps. They fish their own traps. And they get away with it! Nobody's talking about it. But they talk about us when we go out there with 500 traps. That's only just a license and a half," he said.

The chief and Native fishermen claim that non-Native fishermen regularly cut the buoys that mark the location of their traps. This means the traps are lost. It costs about $100 for each trap, including the cost of the buoy and line. Mi'kmaq fisherman Mark Simon said the RCMP and the DFO aren't exactly zealous about investigating these incidents.

"You have to pretty well take pictures of them right there and then," he said. "But if it was us going out there, we'd be in jail right now."

The chief said there are about 1,200 members of his band but only about 60 of those members fish. He said his band members currently own a total of 580 lobster traps.

So far, there has not been any visible surge in the economy of Dedam's community: no signs offering lobster for sale are visible in the central area of the reserve.

The Supreme Court of Canada, in rendering the Marshall decision which prompted Native fishermen to take to the water to the dismay of commercial fishermen throughout the Maritime provinces, said First Nations people who ar party to the treaty of 1760 have the right to engage in commercial activity to provide for a modest income. The law says his people have the right but the chief said they don't yet have the capacity to fully exercise it. He'd like to see his people begin to develop the local economy by doing so.

"Oh, I sure hope so," he said. "That would be my dream. On our reserve there's unemployment of 90 per cent."

Simon said there has been a slight improvement in the people's economic fortunes.

"The people at the garage, they notice it, the people at the stores. There's more money coming in. People are happy," he said.

But the lobster fishery won't make much difference this year, the chief said, since the prime fishing season is coming to an end as winter approaches.

"We'll probably stop fishing by the end of October," he said. "Usually we don't fish this long, but it's just to prove something. We don't want to be pushed out of the way."

When Fisheries minister Herb Dhaliwal tried to impose a 600-trap limit on the Burnt Church community, the people were motivated to keep fishing for two reasons, Dedam said. One, they felt they had to demonstrate to the government that it didn't have the right to create regulations that limited - if they didn't negate - the band's constitutionally recognized right to fish. Two, they felt the number was ridiculously low, considering individual commercial fishermen get 300 traps each.

"That 600 traps, that's an embarrassment. That's a slap in the face. The minister should just wake up. There's 1,200 people. What do you want them to do? Fight over the traps? He screwed it up," he said.

Dedam doesn't have the information or the resources to compile statistics about the various fisheries in the Maritime region, but he said he's heard government sources say that Aboriginal fishermen account for less than one per cent of the fishery.

Yet, there have been front page banner headlines in just about every daily newspaper in the country almost every da since the court decision was handed down. Frequently, the front page stories are accompanied by several other stories. If all of that is in response to less than one per cent of the activity within the fisheries, what's really going on, the chief wonders.

"It's racism, I guess," he said.

Since fishing is the major industry in the region and commercial fishing has traditionally been controlled by non-Native people (mainly because of the forced division of the races mandated by the Indian Act) any attempt by Native people to force their way into the fishery immediately creates divisions along racial lines, the chief said.

Most non-Native families have at least one relative who's in the fishing business, so it really becomes an 'us versus them' situation.

He said the fishermen's unions pressure the DFO who in turn pressure the First Nations. Dedam also claimed that the unions are organizing boycotts of markets that purchase from Native fishermen.

"They're boycotting all these markets so nobody wants to buy. They're scared," he said.

Individual fishermen have also taken action to intimidate local market owners, Simon said.

'The markets that were buying from us, they went and broke in and vandalized them. They threatened them. It's like logging. They stopped buying our wood," he said.

Ever since the non-Native fishermen staged the Oct. 3 protest that got out of control and resulted in the violence which led to the criminal charges, Mi'kmaq warriors have occupied the entrance to the Burnt Church wharf, watching over the boats tied up there. As tribal leaders and chiefs of provincial organizations talk to the federal government about wide-sweeping political solutions in Moncton and Ottawa, Dedam looks after the local situation, checking with Elders and the warriors and fishermen on regular basis.

He was scheduled to meet with the mayor of Miramichi on Oct. 20, after Windspeaker's publication deadline, and said he hoped they could find a starting point to mend the rift