How Do You Say Netuklimk in English? Using Documentary Video to Capture Bear River First Nation’s Learning through Action

Abstract

The Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 Marshall Decision recognized the treaty rights of the Mi’kmaq people to fish commercially, sparking a violent backlash from nonindigenous fishers across the region. The case was the result of generations of struggle for recognition of the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties and the inherent rights they were meant to protect. But as Bear River First Nation has learned in the ten years since the Marshall Decision, treaty rights “recognition” in the maritime provinces, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, is being enacted through a process of assimilating Indigenous Peoples into the neoliberal capitalist fishing industry. It is a process that has relied on the centuries-old divide and rule tactics—between First Nations, and between Indigenous and nonindigenous fishing communities—that have so fundamentally etched racism into Nova Scotia’s social fabric. This process has solidified Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO)’s control over fisheries management in the interests of furthering a neoliberal program of resource privatization and corporate concentration of ownership in the industry (Davis & Jentoft, 2001; Stiegman, 2009; Wiber & Kennedy, 2001).