Aboriginal Fishing Rights

This book examines the nature of aboriginal fishing rights before and after the Sparrow decision from the perspective of disadvantaged groups and includes interviews with the key players in the fishing industry--the Musqueam Indian Band, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the commercial industry.

Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections between the colonial land policy and the law governing the fisheries. In so doing, Harris rewrites the history of colonial dispossession in British Columbia, offering a new and nuanced examination of the role of law in the consolidation of power within the colonial state. This book received the 2011 Saywell Prize for Constitutional Legal History from The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History as the best new book in Canadian legal history, broadly defined, that makes an important contribution to an understanding of the constitution and/or federalism. It also received Honourable Mention, 2009 Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing, BC Historical Federation.

This book describes the events, personalities, and conflicts that brought the Maritimes to the brink of a major confrontation between Mi'kmaq and the non-Mi'kmaq fishers in the fall of 1999, and the author explains the cross-cultural, legal, and political implications of the recent Supreme Court decision in the Donald Marshall case.

The question of what rights might be afforded to Indigenous peoples has preoccupied the municipal legal systems of settler states since the earliest colonial encounters. As a result of sustained institutional initiatives, many national legal regimes and the international legal order accept that Indigenous peoples possess an extensive array of legal rights. However, despite this development, claims advanced by Indigenous peoples relating to rights to marine spaces have been largely opposed. This book offers the first sustained study of these rights and their reception within modern legal systems. Taking a three-part approach, it looks firstly at the international aspects of Indigenous entitlements in marine spaces. It then goes on to explore specific country examples, before looking at some interdisciplinary themes of crucial importance to the question of the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples in marine settings. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, this is a rigorous and long-overdue exploration of a significant gap in the literature.

Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections between the colonial land policy and the law governing the fisheries. In so doing, Harris rewrites the history of colonial dispossession in British Columbia, offering a new and nuanced examination of the role of law in the consolidation of power within the colonial state.

Despite a recent increase in the productivity and popularity of Indigenous playwrights in Canada, most critical and academic attention has been devoted to the work of male dramatists, leaving female writers on the margins. In Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada, Sarah MacKenzie addresses this critical gap by focusing on plays by Indigenous women written and produced in the socio-cultural milieux of twentieth and twenty-first century Canada. Closely analyzing dramatic texts by Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan, MacKenzie explores representations of gendered colonialist violence in order to determine the varying ways in which these representations are employed subversively and informatively by Indigenous women. These plays provide an avenue for individual and potential cultural healing by deconstructing some of the harmful ideological work performed by colonial misrepresentations of Indigeneity and demonstrate the strength and persistence of Indigenous women, offering a space in which decolonial futurisms can be envisioned. In this unique work, MacKenzie suggests that colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence against Indigenous women. Most significantly, however, she argues that resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic writing and production work in direct opposition to such representational and manifest violence.