"Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

These are the words a colonel in the U.S. Calvary uttered in 1867. Called the “Indian’s commissary,” the buffalo stood in the way of a powerful movement west of cattle, ranchers, and railroad men intent on settling the prairies. The military drove the imperative to clear the plains and invited “sportsmen” to join the annihilation. Beaver trappers became bison killers, even “hunting by rail” from aboard the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific railroads, sharpshooting from roofs or windows.

In 2020, the carcasses of lobster piled outside a Mi’kmaw processing facility echoed the earlier carnage of the bison slaughter. Here was the livelihood of the Mi’kmaw fishers destroyed by another angry white mob. Instead of aiming to clear the land, now they tried to clear the waters.

Twenty-one years earlier, Mi’kmaw man Donald Marshall was acquitted of illegally fishing by proving he had Treaty rights under the Peace and Friendship Treaties, 1760–61. Mi’kmaw boats were attacked on the water by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans when they attempted to assert these rights, though.

A provisional program emerged for communal access to commercial fisheries for the Mi’kmaq, but a negotiated political settlement of their treaty rights never came. 

So in the fall of 2020, the Sipekne’katik First Nation used their self-government powers to enact fishing rules and regulations under their Indigenous law — the L’nuwey Tplutaqan legal order of Netukulimk, defined by the Mi’kmaq as “use of the natural bounty provided by the Creator.” They were attacked again. White fishermen set fire to a van and mobbed Indigenous processing plants: First Nation “modest livelihood”— their “Indian commissary” — was once more interpreted as a threat.