‘Starlight tour’: Mi’kmaq fisher allegedly dumped without boots or phone feared death
HALIFAX – Hours into a barefoot trek in the middle of the night along a highway in rural Nova Scotia, stranded without a phone, Mi’kmaq fisher Kevin Hartling says he and his friend felt that if they stopped walking they might die.
Hartling, who is from Membertou First Nation, and Blaise Sylliboy, from Eskasoni First Nation, say that last week they were detained by federal fisheries officers for fishing near Shelburne, N.S. The two men from Cape Breton say that at around 1 a.m., they were left at a gas station far from home without footwear or cellphones and ended up walking for about six hours before they used a borrowed phone to get through to a friend, who picked them up.
“It’s basically a starlight tour, ” Hartling said in an interview Wednesday, referring to a practice where police in Canada have taken vulnerable Indigenous people to a secluded location and left them to find their way home, sometimes in freezing conditions. “That’s what was going through my mind the whole time …. If we stop moving, we’re going to die. If we go and just sit somewhere to rest and fall asleep, we’re dead.”
Hartling, 29, and Sylliboy, 25, were apprehended in the late evening on March 26 as they fished for baby eels, known as elvers. They say three fisheries officers put them into a vehicle and confiscated their phones and hip waders before leaving them at a gas station about a 45-minute drive from where they had been fishing.
The pair said when they were dropped off, they asked the DFO officers if they could have supervised access to their cellphones to write down contact information, or cut the feet off the waders so they wouldn’t have to walk barefoot, and Hartling said they were turned down.
“They said: ‘No. That’s not our problem,”‘ Hartling said. Sylliboy gave a similar account in a Facebook post and during remarks at a protest Tuesday. |Read more https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/starlight-tour-mi-kmaq-fisher-allegedly-dumped-without-boots-or-phone-feared-death-1.6832346| atlantic.ctvnews.ca/starlight-…
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