Imaginary Lines: Transcending the St. Croix Legacy in the Northeast Borderlands

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Imaginary Lines 49 RACHEL BRYANT Imaginary Lines Transcending the St. Croix Legacy in the Northeast Borderlands Beware of the language, the use of the language of industry, the language of corporations, the language of Government, and the language of conquest. —HUGH AKAGI, “PAY ATTENTION: ADVICE OF AN ELDER” IN 1993, Nova Scotia authorities arrested a Mi’kmaw man named Donald Marshall and charged him with three violations of the Canadian Fisheries Act: “the selling of eels without a license, fishing without a license, and fishing during the close season with illegal nets.”1 The defense insisted that Marshall ’s actions were lawful under the authority of a 1760 treaty between Aboriginal nations and the Crown, and in 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged that the federal fishing regulations failed to make sufficient accommodation for those treaty rights; Marshall was cleared of all charges. Shortly after this decision, Canadian federal officials found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to answer to the Passamaquoddy peoples of Point Pleasant, Maine, as to whether or not they were entitled to the same commercial rights in the waterways of eastern Canada. At this juncture , confusion and frustration among non-Native fisheries workers in the Atlantic Provinces was fueled by a misguided and inflammatory Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article out of Fredericton that opened, “The court ruling that gave First Nations people the right to fish year-round without a license doesn’t extend to non–First Nations people [in Canada]—but it might apply to Americans.”2 With public indignation on the rise, the director -general of Resource Management for the Fisheries Department issued a statement to declare that, as American citizens, the Passamaquoddy would be necessarily excluded from benefits granted by the ruling; in response, Ernie Altvater, then chief of the Point Pleasant Passamaquoddy, was quoted as saying, “We’ve been fishing and hunting on both sides of the imaginary line for a long time and will continue to do so.”3 Ironically, as the Canadian historian William Wicken has noted, those initial 1760 treaty negotiations on which the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision was based “did not directly involve the Mi’kmaq” but instead “included delegates from the Maliseet and from the Passamaquoddy,” the latter of whom moved freely throughout the Rachel Bryant NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 50 northeast until they were pushed into Maine by Loyalist settlers and by the subsequent sealing of the Canada–U.S. border after the American Revolutionary War.4 To complicate matters further, a sizable Passamaquoddy population remains in the vicinity of what is now St. Andrews, New Brunswick, but because the Passamaquoddy have been denied federal status in Canada, they too have been refused all rights granted by the Court’s decision. For all intents and purposes, the Passamaquoddy are treated as extraneous to contemporary Canadian Aboriginal rights negotiations, for they have been neatly categorized as a U.S. tribe. As a settler-state, Canada certainly stands on contested ground even as its elected officials continue to use their borders, both cognitive and cartographic , to deny Indigenous nations access to their lawful and traditional lifeways. Since the Marshall ruling, a small number of historical and anthropological scholars have grappled with the question of whether the Passamaquoddy abandoned their British treaty rights by “settling” in the United States—a phrasing and historical interpretation that does much to obscure the shameful violence that first sparked the eighteenth-century Passamaquoddy migration. Indeed, one Passamaquoddy woman, Rose Cunha, in an interview with the Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence, speaks of the gradual process through which her ancestors were dispossessed of their homelands by Loyalist settlers. As she explains, In the United States, I’m a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine. But here in Canada, where our people come from, I’m non-status. Our people once lived in what is now New Brunswick and welcomed the Loyalists. But then they drove us off our territory to a little island in the middle of Passamaquoddy Bay. But even that was, I guess, still a little too close for the Loyalists. So my people were driven to the other side of the...

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