Fishery status quo under seige in Atlantic

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Amateur video showing a federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans boat ramming and sinking a much smaller boat carrying three Mi'kmaq fishermen on Aug. 29 leaves very little doubt that government employees are prepared to use violence to enforce federal fishing regulations.

Burnt Church First Nation spokesperson Karen Somerville said the chief and council are demanding that RCMP investigate and charge the DFO agents. She said the video is evidence of attempted murder.

"The DFO boat took two deliberate shots at the boat, completely submerging it, forcing the occupants to jump for their lives on the second attack," she said. "This gesture on the part of the DFO officers is a flagrant assault that can only be described as an attempt to murder. It is therefore the RCMP's duty to act on this and lay the appropriate charges."

Burnt Church Chief Wilbur Dedam said a failure by the RCMP to lay charges would be a very revealing development in an ongoing battle between First Nations fishermen and government over the interpretation of a Supreme Court decision on the Natives' fishing rights.

"Should the RCMP not proceed with laying charges, we will be left with definite proof that there are two levels of laws in Canada, one for First Nations, one for other Canadians. The DFO officers stated that rocks were being thrown. This is a different level of response to one where an offensive weapon, the boat, is used to attack people. The rocks were a reaction to a direct attack, a very legitimate yet much smaller means of self-defence to an unprovoked attack. Yet our First Nation members are charged for throwing rocks. We expect the DFO officers will be charged with attempted murder at the very least."

Former national chief Ovide Mercredi, a member of Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come's transition team, has been assigned to serve as an advisor to the Burnt Church First Nation council. He is in Miramichi. He compared the DFO actions to those of the Ontario Provincial Police, which led to the death of protester Dudley George in 1995.

While the majority of the members of the Atlantic Policy Conference of First Nations (APC) have entered into short-term agreements with DFO, Burnt Church has not. Dedam, in a letter to DFO Minister Herb Dhaliwal, told the minister why not.

"Our community takes great exception to your suggestion that we have been 'avoiding' your repeated efforts to negotiate with us. We were determined not to be forced into a 'template' agreement that was not in our best interests, and your designated negotiator lacked a mandate to go beyond that template," Dedam wrote to the minister on Aug. 25. "We would not enter into inadequate negotiations - but it is not true that we refused to negotiate at all. We have always been open to genuine negotiations."

Later in the letter, the Burnt Church chief asked the Fisheries minister if there was any reason to discuss the issue further.

"You have suggested we resume negotiations with Jim McKenzie (the federal negotiator who was appointed after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Marshall that Mi'kmaq people had the treaty right to fish and make a moderate living in the region). Does this mean that he has a new and expanded mandate to deal with our issues?" Dedam wrote.

The impasse over the Mi'kmaq right to fish has escalated to the danger point even though that right is the subject of an ongoing political debate that revolves around the interpretation of a Supreme Court of Canada decision.

As was reported in this newspaper last October, the Native fishing presence in the region represents less than one per cent of the total fishery and is attracting an inordinate amount of attention from government officials and the mainstream press. Native leaders believe Dhaliwal is under political pressure to avoid angering non-Native people who feel threatened by the Supreme Court-sanctioned change to the status quo. Last Oct. 3, non-Native people participated in hat some observers called a race riot off the Burnt Church pier. A spiritual site on the reserve was vandalized and violence sent one band member to hospital. More than a dozen criminal charges were laid as a result of that incident.

In this latest violent incident, the DFO boat sailed right over the top of the fishing boat from end to end. The three Native fishermen aboard were forced to dive into the water to avoid being seriously harmed.

Native activists on the Fraser River in British Columbia made similar charges against the DFO earlier this year, releasing video that appeared to show a DFO boat ramming a Cheam First Nation fishing boat. No charges were laid in that incident.

The day after the skiff was rammed in the Miramichi, Bill Namagoose, interim chief executive officer of the AFN, said the federal government's refusal to enter into a fair and equal discussion with Burnt Church is the root cause of the impasse and will be the main source of blame for any possible injuries.

"For us the issue is access to natural resources," he said. "When the Supreme Court rules there is a right to access natural resources and the federal government comes to the table to negotiate that issue there must be fairness and equity on the table. What we're seeing now is they're offering 40 traps to a community of 1,300 people. There's got to be fairness and equity. That's a policy I would like to work on for the AFN on these natural resource issues. There's going to be more rulings like this and there's got to be fairness and equity when the appropriate ministers negotiate access to these resources.

"The violence comes from the federal government. Clearly, it's been a show of force right from day one from the federal government, whereas the Burnt Church citizens merely wanted to practice their right as recognized by the Supreme Court and also wanted to make a proposal to the Department of Fisheries to have negotiations on a sort of co-management regime there," he said.

BurntChurch has played host to all the major figures in Native politics in the last few weeks. Coon Come visited the community and expressed his strong support for the people on Aug. 17. Nault visited on Aug. 28 but left abruptly when he discovered he was expected to discuss the issues in front of the press and public.

Namagoose said the people had the right to hear what Nault had to say and criticized the minister for leaving the community and not attending the public meeting.

"He was clearly abandoning his fiduciary obligation to protect Native people," he said. "That's a constitutional obligation that they have and they should deal with that. Clearly, it didn't show good judgment on his part not to address the members as they had expected him to do. He has a clear constitutional fiduciary obligation to do that. Under the Canadian constitution, that's what he's supposed to do. What other mandate does he need?"

The AFN is worried that the deadlock in New Brunswick could lead to injuries or worse. Namagoose said the AFN is trying to persuade the federal government to re-think its position.

"We're trying to make some effort to contact the prime minister's office and others. It has to be intervention on their side. They're the ones showing the force. They're the administrators of the violence we're seeing now," he said.

Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault was interviewed by Windspeaker in Frog Lake, Alta. on Aug. 24.

"One of the things I have been doing for the last six to eight months is talking to the APC about the need to get into a negotiating process where we can talk about treaty implementation," he said. "Where we can talk about not just Marshall, but our whole relationship and how we can create First Nation economies. How we can define a moderate livelihood if that is a moderate starting point of our discussions. We have done a lot of work in the last number of months on those particular issues, and we are now getting to a point where we do think we will goto the table and start discussing this.

"My only concern at this point is that I don't have a commitment from the provincial governments. We hope to have a commitment shortly by the Nova Scotia government, but New Brunswick at this point is not ready to come to the table to start discussing with the First Nations, not just fisheries issues, but the whole issue of treaty benefits and what they mean in a more modern context. That is really what we have been doing in other parts of the country and it shouldn't be any different in the Atlantic. So am I going down there with the objective of suggesting more cool heads prevail? Everywhere I go I certainly have that intention of saying to people 'look we can't resolve these things by not talking, people having diverging views.' Even though we're changing laws, we need to change laws over a longer period of time. You can't change over 400 years of fishing regulations in one year. If I had the opportunity, certainly, with the chiefs I would advise them to be careful and not put ourselves in a position of hurting people."

Minister Dhaliwal has been accused by Native leaders of being inflexible and being more interested in using his power than in treating Native leaders with respect. Nault said he would prefer if Burnt Church didn't challenge the Fisheries minister's authority.

"That becomes very difficult when that starts to occur. When you think about the 29 First Nations that have signed the interim agreement, they are willing to follow the regulatory regime that exists today with the understanding that we will work these things out over a period of time," he said. "And when one community or two communities out of the whole group decide to go a very different direction, it is difficult for all of us. The First Nations that have signed on obviously aren't going to talk against the fact that they signed an agreement. They would be supportive of the direction they have taken in their own communities. And so have been, as y