The Passamaquoddy Culling

On a moonless Nov night, the rain-swollen St. Croix River flows unseen through the forests of eastern Maine and western New Brunswick. The river passes through the darkness nigh by feel, and dozens of female American eels—silver eels, every bit they are called—snake forth the bottom with the current, their noses toward the sea.

The American eels—Anguilla rostrata—are catadromous, meaning that they alive in fresh- and brackish water, and spawn in the open ocean. On the St. Croix, their journey of a g miles begins with running a gauntlet of hydroelectric turbines at the Grand Falls and Woodland dams, and finally Milltown, where the lights of the New Brunswick (NB) Power generating station cut open the night. The dam in that location forces the entire volume of the St. Croix River, over 200 tons of h2o an hour, through iii generating units with dozens of blades spinning at up to 200 rpms. The eels, driven by the equally powerful need to accomplish common salt water, swim foolishly into the suction of the turbines that may cutting them to pieces.

Fifty miles to the west, luckier eels laissez passer unmolested through the torrent of Bad Niggling Falls on the Machias River. Higher up the falls, on this drizzling November night, the Passamaquoddy tribe'southward Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) holds a public meeting on the campus of the Academy of Maine at Machias.

Mikoo Mendoza checks his net for eels while his mother, Veronica Sapiel, dips into the waters of the St. Croix River in spring, 2013.

In a warm, well-lit auditorium, Denise Altvater tells a very personal story of how the State once systematically removed children like her from their homes at the Pleasant Point Indian reservation known as Sipay'm to the Passamaquoddy people, justifying the action as a fashion to improve their educational and economic plight.

"I was only 5 years old, and had inappreciably been off the reservation," she says. "Imagine how it felt when these cars full of strangers drove in and they took me and my sisters and put us in those cars. My parents could do nothing."

Altvater describes ten years of abuse in those homes: beatings, hunger, and later, rape, before being returned to her reservation abode at age 15.

Esther Altvater Attean, co-manager of the TRC, offers a litany of atrocities perpetrated against her people, reminding the primarily white audience that the ground the university stands on was taken from her tribe. "Ninety percentage of our people were wiped out," Attean says.

The Passamaquoddy and other indigenous people happened to be in between a new earth order and the natural resources it needed. What might exist called a culture of depletion has eclipsed an indigenous civilisation of respect. Though less tragic than seizing children from their parents, the conflict between Native values and an expanding colonial economy as well left the tribe a victim, many Passamaquoddy members believe.

Veronica Sapiel stands on the banks of the St. Croix River in Calais, with St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on the other side.
AN ONGOING TRADITION OF FISHING

Trounce middens along the St. Croix bear testimony to millennia of healthy fisheries that preceded Samuel Champlain'due south sailing upward the St. Croix in 1604 to establish the French colony, Acadia. My ain grandfather eleven generations dorsum, Charles de la Tour, arrived in the region with Acadia'due south new governor de Poutrincourt in 1606. After two years living with the Mi'kmaq, he congenital forts at what are now St. John, New Brunswick, and Castine, where his company traded guns and steel for furs. He spoke the local Native languages.

But he also helped to introduce the tribes to European diseases, inadvertently, and deliberately, to the European economic organization, which relied on the plunder of fisheries and forests, and on the often-tearing reallocation of resources admission to the wielders of the most avant-garde applied science.

"I call it 'privileged exploitation,' " said Fred Moore III, a fellow member of the Passamaquoddy Fisheries Advisory Committee.

Non-Native fishing communities on the coast also have felt at least some of the bite of this system. In the last one-half-century, weir fishermen lost the herring fishery to purse seiners, who lost it to mid-water trawlers. When resources decline and fishing cultures are reduced to exhibits in shoreside museums, the prevailing narrative calls information technology progress. Bated from lobster, however, Maine has progressed steadily down the road of fisheries decline.

Elvers, also known as glass eels.

In rural Downeast line-fishing communities, many fishermen once eked out a living by scalloping, harvesting sea urchins, picking periwinkles, and clamming. They fished for cod, haddock, pollock, and mackerel within sight of their homes, and herring weirs dotted the coastline. On a local level, all of those enterprises have disappeared or are slipping toward economic and cultural irrelevance.

State management plans, commonly based on free-market theory and the mantra "Too many fishermen, likewise few fish," take not given adequate consideration to habitat issues, while permitting unsustainable harvest levels and the consolidation of resource access into the hands of fewer and fewer players. Landings in all of the important inshore fisheries, aside from lobster, accept either declined or plummeted. Like the Passamaquoddy, cod have lost over 90 percent of their populations.

The Passamaquoddy occupy the oldest angling community on the coast of Maine—thousands of years older than any other—and many members of the tribe believe survival depends on direct admission to resource, forth with the culturally relevant cognition of how and when to use them.

"The name Passamaquoddy means, 'People who spear pollock,' " said Moore, who also is the master author of the tribe's newly developed fisheries management plan. "Information technology's who we are. We are inextricably tied to the sea."

The Passamaquoddy fisheries plan aims to restore habitat, harvest seafood responsibly, and broaden fisheries access; it includes specific management plans for many species. Scallops, lobster, groundfish, alewives, and the lucrative elver fishery all play a role in the future health of a fishing community thousands of years older than the land. "Our cultural norms are codification in our programme," said Moore. "We don't exploit resources; we apply them."

For Moore, change does not mean going back in time, nor does he programme to assimilate. Looking for a way to provide a future for his children and the tribe, Moore is grooming his sons and other tribal members as lobstermen, and moving toward getting scallop boats offshore. His management plans continue to take shape, garnering input from elders and the fisheries informational council. Amid other things, he has proposed reducing the trap limit for the tribe's lobstermen and increasing the number of lobster licenses the tribe bug.

In addition, Moore'south visitor, Native Harvest Seafood, has begun preliminary piece of work on an eel-farming project to add value to the elver (or "glass" eel) harvest, and to use surplus production to help restock local watersheds.

"The State doesn't want us to accept an LNG terminal, or casinos, so we're expanding our fisheries," he said.

The purity of the St. Croix River has been compromised by industry and development over the years.
THREAT FROM GOVERNOR

Moore and other Passamaquoddy fishers have hunted porpoise, declared their intentions to operate larger vessels in the area that stretches out to Georges Bank, and Moore regularly sets his lobster gear on both sides of the international border between the Us and Canada. None of that has caused much reaction.

Simply when the tribe issued 575 eel-fishing permits in the spring of 2013, Governor Paul LePage accused hundreds of Passamaquoddy eel harvesters of violating land law. According to Moore and other Passamaquoddy leaders, the governor threatened to withdraw support for issues important to the tribe, such as the TRC and economic development initiatives.

A heated confrontation took place in March 2013 on the Pennamaquan River. Maine Marine Patrol officers, with backup from state police, confiscated nets and upshot some summonses, all of which have been dismissed.

In the 1980 Indian Land Claims Settlement, the Passamaquoddy agreed to relinquish whatsoever "right involving such land or natural resources." Speaking at the Maine Nutrient Summit in December 2013, Pat Keliher, commissioner of the Department of Marine Resource (DMR), said the tribe has in outcome surrendered its rights to any fisheries not specified in past treaties.

"Treaty-shmeaty," said Moore. "Our rights don't come from a treaty. They are part of united states, and role of our collective consciousness stretching back for hundreds of generations. Remember when people wanted to bring the wolves dorsum to Maine, and at that place were those bumper stickers, no wolves? Well, as far equally the DMR is concerned, we're the wolves."

A FISHERY RENAISSANCE

In spite of the threat of State legal action, Moore believes the biggest challenge to creating an eel fishery based on traditional knowledge may come from inside the tribe itself. Historically, threatened communities are often caught in a dilemma where forcefulness depends on a united front end, nevertheless any member tin can beguile the mutual good for personal gain. In addition, Moore believes that reliance on dividends from the tribe'southward investments may reduce reliance on past cultural practices.

"The eel fishery represents the essence of our spiritual connexion to the Earth," Moore said. "When a Passamaquoddy child is carried to the banks of a river by a Passamaquoddy woman, to harvest a resources, that is a continuation of thousands of years of culture. Merely in order to maintain our rights we must occupy the moral high ground. The programme has to be adhered to and enforced."

Besides harvest limitations, the glass eel fishery plan includes strong penalties for those who forget what Moore described as "their cultural obligation to protect the resource."

In what might be chosen a Passamaquoddy fisheries renaissance, other members of the tribe accept taken up the cause of a fish that has long sustained littoral communities, both physically and culturally.

"For seventeen years the Maine Legislature unilaterally blocked alewives from inbound the St. Croix watershed, what we call the Schoodic River," says Brian Altvater, cofounder of the Schoodic Riverkeepers. "The state of Maine cut the alewives off from 98 pct of their spawning grounds," he said, "just to protect smallmouth bass—which were brought into the Schoodic watershed in 1877. Between 1987 and 2002, the St. Croix alewife run collapsed from 2.half-dozen million fish to a mere 900. And they were able to get to our leaders and get them to support this."

After 2002, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, working with NB Power, caught and trucked alewives to the waters above the Milltown dam. Altvater believes this prevented the species from becoming extinct. In 2011 he helped to start the Schoodic Riverkeepers, a group responsible for a renaissance within the joint tribal council that has led to the state reopening the St. Croix to alewives in May 2013.

Passamaquoddy chief Hugh Akagi believes the Native people were put in an untenable position.

"Never again should ethnic people be involved in blocking an indigenous species from its homeland," he says. "This is what has been done to united states."

Altvater agrees.

"The parallels are there. This is our state, but we are constrained past others' standards. The same for the alewives; forcing them to stay below the dams isn't working," he said. "They need to swim costless."

Altvater notes numerous studies that show better bass production in watersheds that allow passage of alewives, which serve as a nutrition pump, bringing the wealth of the body of water far inland in their flesh. "These fish, because they are so prolific, feed other species of fish, eagles, otters—you name it," he said.

Ted Ames, who won a MacArthur Grant for his report of historic inshore groundfish habitat, vigorously supported the restoration of alewives, largely because of their importance to cod. "When the alewives are in that location, the cod are in that location," said Ames, who, in the 1970s and '80s, often sailed to the St. Croix in the fall to fish on concentrations of cod and flounder.

Fred Moore III waits for sunrise as the full moon sets behind him at Pleasant Point Reservation on Passamaquoddy Bay.
Fred Moore III waits for sunrise as the full moon sets behind him at Pleasant Point Reservation on Passamaquoddy Bay.
EELS AGAINST THE ODDS

Different the alewives, mature American eels swim downstream on their spawning migration, and like everything else coming out of the river, they go through the turbines at M Falls, Woodland, and Milltown. While observers guess that the millions of 3-inch-long juvenile alewives lose about 5 percent of their number in the turbines, the few 30-inch eels making the passage oftentimes fare worse.

"I've seen plenty of eels below the dams," said Fred Moore. "Just they're all about this long," he said, holding his easily a few inches apart.

Those same eels made their upstream journey many years earlier, globe-trotting and swimming from plant nursery grounds in the Sargasso Ocean to the rivers and lakes of Maine. And the little transparent glass eels hardly needed help getting over the dams, observes NB Ability's hydro director, Phillip Gilks. "They are very diligent. If at that place's a crevice in the concrete, they come through it. I've seen them coming through joints in the masonry."

Simply Gilks cannot offer any assessment on how many mature eels make it out of the river. "I know there'south always elvers coming dorsum," he said.

Elvers do not accept fidelity to whatsoever particular waterway, however. Eels are panmictic—free spawners—and their young are built-in in the open body of water. The parents of the elvers that enter the St. Croix might well accept come up down the Machias River, or the Potomac, for that matter.

"We know the eels don't pass through the turbines every bit hands as alewives," said Gilks.

An gorging outdoorsman, Gilks expressed regret nigh the situation. "But at the moment we practice non have a way to aid. Nosotros cannot beget to do the research. We're waiting to encounter if someone comes upwardly with the technology to get the eels by. When they do, we'll use it."

Every mother eel that gets sushied in the hundreds of hydroelectric dams on the Eastern Seaboard dies with anywhere from ii million to 15 million eggs in her ovaries. Her reason for being, the culmination of 20 years of survival in the wild, lost without a eulogy. Eagles and gulls congregate below the dam and make clean upward the testify.

According to Ken Oliveira, an eel proficient at the University of Massachusetts, eels that survive the external obstacles may face insidious internal obstacles.

"Some carry a swim bladder parasite, Anguillicoloides crassus, an invasive nematode worm from Asia," says Oliveira. The parasite arrived in North America via Europe, likely in the ballast water of transatlantic freighters, and information technology tin prevent eels from diving to great depths—which may be an important part of their sexual maturation process.

"That's just one strike against them," Oliveira said. "Near all eels have bioaccumulated PCBs, mercury, and other endocrine disrupters that have proven to reduce the viability of their eggs."

Providing good for you habitat for all sea-run species—eels, alewives, and salmon, which already may be extinct from the St. Croix—plays an important role of the Schoodic Riverkeepers' program.

"Our next goal is to better water quality, moving toward total restoration of the watershed," said Altvater.

Genocide tin can be as much a factor of negligence as intent, but the results look the same. For the Passamaquoddy Truth and Reconciliation Commission, healing needs to accept place on many levels—personal, social, and environmental, to proper noun a few—but not everyone shares the same enthusiasm for the task.

When asked what non-Native people can do, Denise Altvater turned to the audition in Machias that nighttime in November and smiled. "Whatever yous tin can. You can listen, and piece of work on your ain racism," she added.

Making sense of that advice requires a clear view of history. "When I hear other lobstermen brag near coming from 6 or seven generations of fishermen, I have to express mirth," Fred Moore said. "I say, 'Oh aye? I come from two hundred generations.' "

Every bit Ester Altvater Attean reminded the audience at the Machias TRC meeting, "Your prosperity has depended on the removal of our people."

Moore sees a similar design unfolding in the fisheries.

"Every bit competition for depleted resources increases," he said, "so do the opportunities for disharmonize." Maine's coastal communities seeking to create real wealth to share with everyone can continue the conflict-prone management strategies generated by the introduced economy of privileged exploitation. But if they desire to cultivate a salubrious resource base, attainable to as many fishers every bit possible, they may want to consider adopting a more-indigenous approach to resources management. It begins with respect for all things, including each other and the ecosystem we all depend on.