Settler forgetting in Saulnierville: the Sipekne’katik Mi’kmaw fishery as reminder
We as Mi’kmaq have rights that predate the existence of Canada. And as settlers began to move into our territory centuries ago, we made treaties with them—not to create rights, but to remind settlers that we had them, to protect our rights. We are taught as Mi’kmaq, not only to be memory-holders for ourselves, but to remind Canadians who live in Mi’kma’ki of the agreements that govern our territory, and the responsibilities they have. And because it is my responsibility to serve those reminders, and I’ve been doing this for a while, I would venture to argue that the Canadian issue with memory isn’t a benign one. See, we’re not just dealing with a regular memory problem: Canadians have a problem with deliberate forgetting.
I’m writing this on October 14, 2020. This morning I awoke to a news update from home where a large group of settler fishers surrounded two Mi’kmaw fishers inside a lobster pound on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. The settlers whipped rocks at the two Mi’kmaw men, and set their van on fire while they were trapped inside the building. Despite a persistent settler rhetoric of pushing back against a Mi’kmaw fishery in the name of conserving lobster populations, the settler fishers killed crates of lobsters at the pound, even poisoning some with PVC cement, and dumped the carcasses on the ground. [Read more]