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Abstract

In August 2017, Ernest Alfred led a group of First Nations protestors and environmental conservationists to Swanson Island, located off the east coast of northern Vancouver Island. Their arrival marked the beginning of a 284-day occupation of the Norwegian owned fish farm, Mowi. They aimed to pressure the British Columbia government to revoke licences granted to foreign-owned industrial fish farms in unceded Kwakwaka’wakw territories without their consent. The Swanson Island occupation represented a new chapter in the Kwakwaka’wakw’s ongoing struggle against colonial dispossession. This paper addresses the following questions: How do open-net fish farms mark a new chapter in the settler state’s continuous attempts to sever the Kwakwaka’wakw’s connection with the land for the purposes of capitalist development? And in what ways have the Kwakwaka’wakw resisted against forced dispossession both historically, and contemporarily? In this paper, I engage with various primary and secondary sources. I draw on the works of Indigenous scholars, including Heidi Stark, Glen Coulthard, Leanne Simpson, and Audra Simpson, who provide important theoretical frameworks for understanding Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land. I also incorporate a number of archival materials, including correspondence between colonial officials, as well as the writings of Joseph Trutch. Additionally, this paper engages with Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, as well as Coulthard’s critique and transformation of the theory. Importantly, I draw on oral histories and myths shared by Kwakwaka’wakw elders, such as Agnes Alfred, and place them in conversation with archival materials. By employing these rich sources, especially Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson’s framework of grounded normativity, and Audra Simpson’s framework of the politics of refusal, I argue that there is a fundamental tension between the B.C. government’s capitalist interests and their responsibility to recognize Indigenous title under Section 35 of the Constitution Act (1982). In response, these First Nations engage in a politics of refusal and resist against settler encroachment, demonstrating that they are active agents, rather than passive victims, in their continued struggle against settler colonialism. Resistance against salmon farms, therefore, is not only an assertion of their unextinguished territorial rights, but a matter of continuing as a people.