By Canadian Press

Return of Donald Marshall Jr.’s eel nets recall days of historic fishing decision

Oct 6, 2019 | 10:48 AM

HALIFAX — The recovery of eel nets that helped recast Aboriginal rights to earn a living from fishing is bringing back powerful memories for those touched by their story.

Donald Marshall Jr. was charged with three counts of violating federal fisheries laws when he and his former partner Jane McMillan set the nets near Pomquet Harbour, N.S., in 1993.

The seizure — and the storage of the gear in an Antigonish fisheries office — took Marshall all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where a ruling upheld treaties from 1760 and 1761 that said Mi’kmaq can earn a moderate living from hunting and fishing.

However, Marshall died in 2009, at the age of 55, unaware the nets were still locked away.

They were first noticed by Sana Kavanagh, a fisheries scientist at the Confederation of Mainland Mi’kmaq while she was doing a tour of a federal office earlier this year — which led to Fisheries and Oceans Canada sending the nets back to Marshall’s family.

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McMillan says when she attended the recent 20th anniversary of landmark legal decision, it was deeply moving to see and touch the nets that had once had been at the centre of a “happy and challenging” time of her life alongside Marshall.

Jeff Ward, the director of the Heritage Park, says when he saw the photos of the nets on Sept. 14 and received notice they would be returned, he felt like he’d “discovered the Holy Grail.”

Marshall, well-known for having been wrongfully convicted of murder in the early 1970s and himself the son of a Mi’kmaq grand chief, had become an eel fisherman in hopes of living a quiet life.

He and McMillan had bought the nets in 1993 after a year of saving their money, she recalled.

According to McMillan’s recently published book “Truth and Conviction: Donald Marshall Jr. and the Mi’kmaq Quest for Justice,” when a fisheries officer asked Marshall for his licence on a clear morning in August 1993, he replied, “I don’t need a licence. I have the 1752 treaty.”

In addition, Marshall later informed fisheries officials that the chief of the Paq’tnkek Mi’kmaq had granted him permission to fish for eels in the waters near Antigonish.

However, after Aug. 24, 1993, when Marshall sold about 463 pounds of eels for $1.70 per pound to a New Brunswick buyer, the fisheries officers swooped in and took all of his gear, and laid the charges.

McMillan, now a professor of anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University, said it devastated their ability to earn a living, and set off the “public, expensive and lengthy” court battle that started on Oct. 17, 1994 in a provincial court.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 6, 2019.

The Canadian Press