Observation Teams for the Chippewas of Nawash

At the end of August, Peace Brigades International (PBI) responded to a request by the Chippewas of Nawash to provide observers to a conflict over fishing. The Nawash were monitoring sport fishing during the annual "Salmon Spectacular" fishing derby at Owen Sound, in Ontario, Canada, and were concerned there might be a repeat of last year's incidents of violence.

The Chippewas of Nawash and their neighbours, the Chippewas of Saugeen, have treaty rights to the fisheries in an area around the Bruce Peninsula that divides Georgian Bay from Lake Huron. Until 1992, these treaty rights had gone unrecognized by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), who had been charging the Nawash with illegal fishing. In 1992 a federal court decision upheld the Nawash fishing rights, and directed the MNR to establish a fisheries policy that prioritized conservation, Chippewa fishing, commercial fishing, and sport fishing, in that order.

Since that time, the MNR has bought out all the commercial fisheries. The Nawash are regulating their use of the fishery, amid varying statements by the MNR and the Nawash about numbers of the different fish species and whether the fishery should be closed down completely. At the same time, sport fishing has continued largely unregulated. The Nawash say that the sport fishery has a signifcant impact on the bay's ecology, as well as their commercial fish stocks, and asked that the fishing derby be cancelled. The MNR responded by scheduling a meeting after the derby is over.

At a press conference on Friday August 23, the first day of the Salmon Spectacular, Ralph Akiwenzie, chief of the Chippewas of Nawash, announced that the Nawash would monitor the fishing during the derby.

"We hope to come up with some very interesting statistics" to back up the idea that "conservation is a two-way street. It's not just the native people, it's everyone," said Akiwenzie. He stressed that the Nawash band wanted to avoid a confrontation with anglers on the water, while underlining its conservation concerns, and what it regards as the "unregulated" state of sports fishing in Ontario. [The Sun Times, Aug 24].

During last year's Salmon Spectacular, a number of incidents were seen by the Nawash as evidence of a violent backlash to their assertion of their fishing rights. Two of their boats were sunk in unexplained circumstances, one was burned down to the hull, several Nawash youth were stabbed with no charges being laid for ten months, and many yards of nets were lost to vandalism. Earlier in the summer, a Nawash woman selling fish at the local farmer's market was the target of an angry and violent protest by anglers.

Over the two weekends of the derby PBI members travelled with the Nawash on their fisheries assessment boat as they monitored the numbers of boats and anglers in the bay. We witnessed some harassment from anglers in the form of angry gestures, but other anglers were friendly and waved.

Nevertheless, in interviews with the derby co-chairs, and through informal monitoring of the feeling amongst anglers on the shore, we gathered that there is a great deal of hostility towards the Nawash. There is a real, and justified, fear amongst the anglers that the sport fishing around Owen Sound will be shut down because of the Nawash. They do not consider their sport fishing to be affecting the Nawash at all since the fish they catch are almost all from their own stocking programs.

The question of how the salmon stocking affects other fish in the bay was a topic of debate during the press conference. Salmon eat their own weight in other fish each day, and the presence of large numbers of salmon is assumed by the Nawash to be creating competition with the other fish (mostly whitefish, but also some trout) for limited food stocks. More fundamentally, the two sides disagree on the ethics of putting salmon into Georgian Bay, where it is not a native species.

Amongst the fisherman along the shore we heard little sympathy for the Nawash position, and a growing sense of frustration. One fishermen expressed his impatience by saying, "if you poke a bear to often, he'll fight back." This feeling - that native people are asking for and getting too much is quite common. A national poll taken a few months ago in Canada also reflected non-Native resentment towards Natives. Unfortunately, the poll results were not accompanied by some basic facts about the situation of Native people compared to non-Natives.

How the hostility we witnessed might be expressed is still uncertain. At the moment, the low-level, everyday racism experienced by the Nawash is likely to increase. If the sport fishery is directly challenged, it will be even more likely that more incidents of violence, like the ones from last year, will be repeated. We hope that our visible witness of the situation as outside, independent observers has some effect in reducing the chance of such incidents. We also helped to organize local people to participate in the observation effort, and hope that this can challenge some of the local non-Native population to reconsider their views on the situation.

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