40 years of the salmon fishing war in Restigouche

On June 11, 1981, the Quebec government sent 500 police officers to Listuguj, in the Baie des Chaleurs. For the 40e anniversary of the skirmish in Restigouche, ethnologist Pascal Huot looks back on events and reflects on more recent conflicts.

On June 9, 1981, Lucien Lessard, Minister of Recreation, Hunting and Fishing, issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the Mi’gmaq to stop their salmon fishing activities following the announcement of its ban by the government of René Lévesque. The resource – the salmon – would be endangered and should be preserved, which the Mi’gmaw fishery would jeopardize. At the time, the salmon rivers of the Gaspé were very popular with American fishermen who made the fortune of private fishing clubs: the resource “to be preserved” should therefore be reserved for these well-heeled tourists.

On the morning of June 11, 1981, faced with the Mi’gmaq’s refusal to cease their ancestral net fishing activities in the Restigouche River, the riot squad, forest guards and local police officers in charge of confiscating the nets landed. “Since the 1850s, the Mi’gmaq have been considered ‘poachers’ and are prohibited from fishing on their river. If the Mi’gmaq refuse to stop their activities, it is because net fishing is part of their ancestral rights and the place on the Restigouche River is the historic fishing site. To add insult to injury, net fishing is prohibited for them, while commercial fishing in New Brunswick, on the same river, continues freely, ”says Huot. According to him, the intimidation and violence of the police are spectacular: “In Listuguj, there was a government desire to scare and impress: there were helicopters, there were three police officers for each fisherman, some armed with batons. . “

Many echoes since

We can speak of a prelude to the Oka crisis, according to Huot. In Oka, in addition to serious occasional violence, the crisis was marked by strong tensions and intimidation over a long period of time. During the events of Listuguj, the violence was uninhibited: “The riot squad of the 1980s was a force mobilized to intimidate, of impressive violence: the fishermen are pulled by the hair, several are clubbed, the fishing nets are cut. with a knife. Even the ranger boats are used to cut fishing nets. There is something surreal about this story. “

In the fall of 2020, in Saulnierville, Nova Scotia, a conflict broke out between native and non-native lobster fishermen. As in Listuguj, in Saulnierville, questions of resource preservation and ancestral rights are mobilized. Pascal Huot reflects: “We have the impression that history is repeating itself: we go from salmon to lobster, but it’s the same old story. The law does not help: subsistence fishing is recognized, but ill-defined and, for this reason, conflicts are bound to recur. What is happening in Nova Scotia is also a repeat of Restigouche. According to Huot, there is cause for concern: “Are relations going to become healthy again?” Will there remain resentment and ignorance? The same population will continue to live alongside each other on the high seas, on the docks… even once the conflict has been settled, the risks that quarrels will persist are quite high. “

A history doomed to repeat itself

For Huot, one of the crux of the problem is the overlapping of jurisdictions which leads Aboriginal people fighting for the recognition of their ancestral rights to apply to multiple provincial and federal courts. “In some cases, you have to negotiate with the federal government, with the provincial in Quebec and the provincial in New Brunswick. It never ends! It is made of perhaps a voluntary complexity: it means that the problems cannot be solved, it lasts over time, it is a way of not paying and not solving … “

Although Pascal Huot concedes that efforts have been made to ensure that indigenous realities are better known, understood and represented, “the balance of power remains the same: conflicts are not equal to equal. We have fallen into a dynamic where the only recourse is legal recourse, a no man’s land government and the end of it all, I don’t see it. We fall back into the same patterns, conflicts can be confused, it is absurd. For the Aboriginals, it is not even to have their rights to the territory and their right to manage the territory recognized, it is to have their autonomy recognized, and it is up to them to prove their ancestral presence and their capacity to manage the territory and the resource. “

Listuguj, Oka, Saulnierville and many others are some of the many contemporary manifestations of colonialism in what is most violently material: the issues of access to territory and resources are still the foundations of the repression of the ‘State in the face of indigenous demands for autonomy and self-determination.

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