Native fisheries opponents trade targets

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The tide in the dispute over West Coast Native fishing rights took a strange and sudden turn this past month.

The B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition, the group representing mostly non-Native fishermen, took a remarkably different tack in their quest to hold sovereign reign over the quickly shrinking stocks of sockeye salmon. The coalition is suddenly blaming the federal government, not the Native fishermen, for all their woes.

The conflict began last year when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans first imposed the Aboriginal Fishing Strategy. The strategy allowed Natives to catch fish for commercial purposes, that is to sell the stuff. For the first time in a long time, West Coast Natives weren't just fishing for social or ceremonial reasons or to feed themselves.

Non-Native fishermen didn't like the idea of a little healthy (and historically justified) competition. They saw the Native fisheries as being unduly protected by the strategy, which was designed, in principle, to give Natives access once again to a resource they had been denied for decades.

Things between Natives and non-Natives got ugly. Groups like the coalition blamed Native fishermen for the disappearance of the 1992 fall run of sockeye salmon. They said Indians shouldn't receive special favor under the strategy because Natives had no special rights to the fish. There were protests and rallies and nasty cases of intimidation through the winter. The coalition called it tactics. The Assembly of First Nations called it racism.

The ugliness was further compounded by the Department of Fisheries own agenda. In negotiations with Fraser River bands this past spring, the department insisted that catch allocations be tied to enhancement funding. That meant that if bands wanted money to protect and increase fish stocks (and create jobs for band members), they had to accept the department's decision on catch size.

Fisheries Minister John Crosbie made things worse through his inability to negotiate catch limits with the United States. Native were not forefront in his mind on June 17 when he suggested that Canadian fishermen could catch as many salmon as they could to stop the Americans from getting too many and thereby teach the U.S. a lesson.

The B.C. Court of Appeals also got into the melee when it ruled that a woman from the Stolo First Nation was wrong to sell $50 worth of fish to someone on the basis that she had the inherent, Native right to make a living that way. The coalition rejoiced

at the news. They claimed the decision was proof that the law was on their side and that Ottawa's Native fishing strategy was illegal. Coalition spokesman Phil Eidsvik even went so far as to say the conflict was never about race and that the federal government was the bad guy for alienating Natives in their own fishery.

But the conflict has always been about race. It has always been about pettiness and politics in an industry that favors non-Natives. And it's been about the differences between an ancient culture that has responsibly managed salmon stocks for thousands of years and an infantile one that threatens to destroy the resource forever through greed and spite. It's about one nation's right to livelihood and self-sufficiency being regulated by another.

Eidsvik can say what he likes about the federal government but it won't erase the coalition's record. There's no denying that they are an inseparable part of this racist mess.