CPT Aboriginal Justice Delegation Day 7: Gone Fishin'

14 Aug 2014

Note: these are my own observations/reactions/musings, not Christian Peacemaker Teams’ official communications. Please also follow Caitlin’s delegation blog, Peace Pigeon, and the official CPT Aboriginal Justice tumblr!

Personal ethnographic note: I am white, Jewish descent, and from San Francisco, California, Turtle Island.

##Fishing

Today is a short post: we went fishing. Two Anishinaabek guides-in-training took our delegation fishing for Walleye in the beautiful English River system, and then treated us to a “shore-lunch”: we sat on a rock, and lit a fire with dried branches, and fried the fish we’d just caught with onions and potatoes. We were asked to go on the fishing trip so that the fishing guides-in-training could practice their routine to take tourists fishing in the future. This program is part of the Grassy Narrows band council’s social services program: they hope to train more young people for jobs as guides, to bring some income to the community. We were also asked to evaluate their performance, as the nearest thing they had to real live tourists.

Grassy Narrows is a place of low employment, but it used to have a lucrative tourist-fishing industry until mercury poisoning of the fish and water supply mostly ended it. Mercury in the English River was a by-product of local paper mills, which incidentally used the timber from clear-cut logging of Grassy Narrows forests; for years the community has labored under this double assault on their physical safety, and at-least-triple assault (i.e. fishing, trapping, employment) on their ability to feed themselves. As milling in the area has decreased, the mercury problem has subsided somewhat, and the community would like to encourage more tourism for fishing in the area.

We sorely hope that this does happen, and pray that plans for an upstream gold-mine do not go through: mercury is used in gold-extraction, and would likely be dumped upstream into the English River system. It’s amazing that people here have survived at all, given the number of forces arrayed against them at every moment. Besides, the English River system is so breathtakingly gorgeous that I’m amazed anyone could treat it with the disrespect it’s been shown for years here. I’d think you’d only have to look at the dense, forest-lined finger lakes and islands, and anyone would be in too much awe to intentionally vomit industrial poison all over it. Oh well.

We were actually surprised that the guides took a whole day for us, and the “shore-lunch” struck us as fairly elaborate. We hadn’t really expected to be treated like tourists. But the following morning, an officer of the band council asked us detailed questions about the experience, including about how good the lunch was and whether we caught enough fish. Apparently this evaluation of the guides skills was serious business, and they had known to be very careful with us. Thus the picture began to come together, particularly after a funny, but poignant moment: one of the other community members heard about the trip and said, “yeah, they’re learning how to please the [white] fishermen. Cook them a good meal and they’ll be happy.”