Conceptualizing Mi’kmaw Aboriginal and Treaty-Based Fisheries: Legal Constructs or Value-Based Way of Life?

Abstract

Abstract Indigenous peoples’ resurgence to use their own ways, laws, and political and intellectual traditions is becoming synonymous with fisheries governance in Canada. On the east coast, a Mi’kmaw perspective was garnered to enhance understanding of the Mi’kmaq image of their fisheries based on Aboriginal and treaty rights to fish to inform governance design. Using semi-structured interviews exploring governance challenges and opportunities with Mi’kmaw participants and desktop research, an image of the Mi’kmaw fisheries was derived. Based on content analysis of the transcripts, historical, legal, and current perspectives of Aboriginal and treaty rights-based fisheries, Mi’kmaq fisheries is described as one that supports the individual’s and collective’s physical, spiritual, cultural, and economic needs yet is self-governed, ethical, shared, responsible, conservative, respectful, and intermittent. This image of the Mi’kmaw fisheries was found to conflict with the current fisheries image held by the federal government and thus requires a shift of federal understanding of the role of the legal and historic interdependency as one fishery. Such understandings would require changes to federal policy to reflect an integrated understanding and image of the Mi’kmaw Aboriginal and treaty rights-based fisheries.