Restigouche by Philip Lee

Restigouche by Philip Lee

Author:Philip Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00


11 As the Globe correspondent chased the story of the vice-regal fishing expedition upriver, there was a different kind of story unfolding downriver from the Matapédia train station that he missed altogether: the Mi'gmaq were fighting for their survival. The leasing of the fishing rights on the Restigouche combined with new fishing regulations, had turned the ancient order of the Mi'gmaw world on its head. The Peace and Friendship treaties the Mi'kmaq had signed with the British a century earlier had confirmed their right to fish and hunt in their traditional territory as they always had. But the terms of the treaties were not honoured on the Restigouche. For the British had brought to the Restigouche the common law tradition of private fishing rights and a history of regulation that gave priority to angling over harvesting for food with nets or spears.

By the time Sir Edmund Head arrived in the colony of New Bruns­wick with his fly-fishing kit to be the next lieutenant-governor, the government had already established seasons for fishing on the Restigouche that limited the use of nets or spears above the tidewater. Soon after he arrived in Fredericton, Head had seen to it that the legislature passed new laws that banned fishing by any method other than angling with a fly above the head of tide and created a licensing system for nets at fishing stations in the estuary.

The rules were loosely enforced in the early days. Dean Sage wrote about white settlers drifting nets in the river, an activity he described as “harmless law-breaking.” Spearing was another matter, and Sage explored this issue in a passage in his book that could have been written by Hallock. “Until about fifteen years since, the Mic-Macs at the Mission depended for a large part of their subsistence on the salmon, which they got entirely with the spear; and when they were suddenly prohibited from exercising this immemorial right, they felt it to be the worst blow that the dominant race had ever inflicted. The poor creatures could not at first believe that the river was no longer theirs to fish, and that after a certain day it would be a crime to take their food from the waters which had always been free to them. After a few sad experiences from their violation of which they could not but consider a most unjust and cruel law, they submitted, and addressed themselves to the impossible task of extorting a living from the sterile farms they have at the Mission. Under the influences of whiskey, natural improvidence, and the deprivation of their chief means of support, their extinction seems a matter of not a very long time.”

For Sage, the preservation of the salmon for the angler was a moral imperative, while the extinction of the people who had lived in the valley for thousands of years before he came to vacation there was simple inevitability, unrelated to the American acquisition of river rights in a foreign land. The sport of angling



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