Indigenous sustainability protects Lake Nipissing

By Kelly Anne Smith

NORTH BAY— A firm stand on sustainability has Nipissing First Nation ensuring immemorial pickerel feasts on the shores of Lake Nipissing continue.

Nipissing First Nation Chief Scott McLeod shared the history of the fight to keep the lake healthy at the Sustainability Summit at Canadore College. Chief McLeod appeared virtually to the event held on the traditional lands of the Nbisiing people that overlooks the third largest lake within Ontario.

Chief McLeod talked of how Treaties were made to share the land. He says the Two Row Treaty, displayed in the Two Row Wampum Belt, joined the British and First Nations with commitments to live together but never intersect.

“…Two rows of wampum beads that never touched each other, but they were close. And that was significant in the fact that our relationship was never to interfere with the other. And that we would live in harmony and balance.”

But then the Indian Act quashed the equitable intent of the Treaties. Chief McLeod explains the legislation was unilaterally imposed upon Indigenous People.

“We didn’t agree to it. We didn’t sign anything. At that point, I guess that’s when we became Canadian citizens. I’m still not clear on how we’re identified as Canadian when we are our own Nations. Not to be facetious or not show pride in this country, but it’s just the factual events and legal events that lead us to our relationship today,” he explains. “All the things that the Treaty represented, as far as protecting our inherent rights such as self-government, such as ceremony, culture, education, that was all taken away from us and replaced with Indian Act approved band councils. It was replaced with Indian Residential Schools. We weren’t allowed to practice our culture. Our language was lost.”

The Indian Act stopped Nipissing First Nation from accessing their lands and resources.

“We were a very vibrant trading community. That was all taken away from us. It was replaced with a lot of poverty in our community, with not being able to access the lake that was right in front of us that helped us survive for in excess of 10,000 years.”

The Chief talked of the 1950s and 60s, when the non-Indigenous exploited Lake Nipissing with commercial and sport fishing. “By the 1970s, our community started to fight back.”

“At first, there was a lot of controversy. We were getting charged. We were forced to fish under the cloak of darkness. I remember growing up as a young boy, hearing the stories of game wardens that were chasing our fisher people that were going out. And these were just small boats. They weren’t commercial size by any means. They were also grandmothers and aunties, uncles, my father, and many other men in the community that tried to eke out a meagre living,” he recounts. “Fishing pressure starts to increase. Now you have Indigenous fishermen going out and setting nets. The angling sport fishery is booming. It came to a head in about 1990. The ministry put together a sting operation, Mike Harris being the Minister of Natural Resources at the time… In 1990, as a result of all these charges, they had helicopters surveying our community. They had cameras on the telephone posts. They had undercover conservation officers purchasing fish from our families, all to build their case. It went before the courts and subsequently, we won the case… We successfully argued that we had a commercial right to access the resources in Lake Nipissing based on our historic and Treaty signed in 1850 that protected our way of living. And so, we won. And unfortunately, things didn’t really change.”

Chief McLeod points to the Sparrow case, showing the most paramount priority is the resources and the management of it.

“Secondly, was Indigenous access to sustenance and ceremonial purposes. The third was Indigenous access to commercial fishing.”

The Chief says that about the year 2000, Ontario offered Nipissing First Nation an ACFL – Aboriginal Community Fishing License to commercially fish.

“We refused. In the simple fact that if we were to accept them as the licensor and us as the licensee, we would be admitting that they had jurisdiction over what we did and how we did it. We elected to create our own fishery department and start working on our own fisheries law,” he states. “We knew also in that Sparrow ruling was that if the First Nations didn’t have the capacity to manage the resource sustainably, that it would be defaulted back to the province.”

Nipissing First Nation had to create fishery law to manage it responsibly. Ratification came in 2004. All agreed to a fishery that was well managed and sustainable and would provide for generations to come. But then came a big setback with the Indian Act stopping Nipissing First Nation from making laws to govern their own members off-reserve.

By 2015, Lake Nipissing’s fishery was on the verge of collapse with overfishing. Chief McLeod explains the pickerel were not reaching sexual maturity to reproduce.

That year, a Memorandum of Understanding with Ontario is signed. Recovery efforts have early signs of success but efforts must continue.

Nipissing First Nation has its own system and the province incorporates Nipissing First Nation laws into the provincial system. The Chief says Nbisiing fisherpeople not following the rules are asked to make a choice.

“Now, we simply talk to our fishermen and said, ‘Look, you have to decide. Are you part of our community or are you part of their community? There’s no more lawless in-between. You have to make a choice,'” he explains. “If they had an infraction, …they would make amends to correct what they did. And that might be donating fish to the community or to the food-bank or to Elders… We do have individual rights within our community, within our Nation. But they do not supersede the rights of the collective. In other words, one single person cannot infringe on the entire community’s right.”

That’s how it’s always been done, says Chief McLeod.

He points out that Indigenous laws have been around forever.

“It took over 150 years of losing that jurisdiction to finally regain our place in governing our own people and protecting our resources.”