Shellfish harvesting in Boundary Bay - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 113

Here, divergent policies in the U.S. and Canada have perpetuated an internal-
ization of “foreign” borders within the Coast Salish communities. Differential access
to limited resources based on political demarcations accentuates the reality. Though
Canadian Coast Salish peoples may want to exercise traditional rights in U.S. waters
because they are not “closed” for contaminants, the rights are not recognized across
national borders, which serves as a double-exclusion for Canadian Coast Salish
peoples.
However, Coast Salish leaders have made strides in re-imagining a “unified
space” that provides a counter-narrative to postcolonial constructs of space. This
has occurred through the creation of new transboundary governance mechanisms,
such as the Coast Salish Gathering (Chapter 6) , and the use of counter-mapping
and critical cartography to re-imagine a unified space through the “Salish Sea”.
The Gathering provides an important mechanism to start addressing issues of shared
concern in a unified Coast Salish voice, rather than tribe-by-tribe, band-by-band.
For governmental employees and policy makers, this means “seeing” the waters
and tidelands of Boundary Bay as a connected ecosystem and part of the wider
Salish Sea. The participants of the Coast Salish Gathering call for increased capacity
to govern and protect natural resources such as shellfish for the benefit of historically
connected cultural groups (Thom, 2010). The 2010 naming of the Salish Sea as a
supplement to the Georgia Basin-Puget Sound raised the political profile of such
divided landscapes. This cartographic construct had a dual purpose: to honor the
traditional territory of the Coast Salish communities and to acknowledge a
connected aquatic ecosystem (Rose-Redwood, 2011). The Salish Sea naming,
the development of the Gathering, and the Canoe Journeys may be preliminary
steps in a political re-imagining of the territory as a connected region, indicating
a movement towards “decolonizing the landscape”. For Coast Salish community
members, this means realigning governance mechanisms to reflect unified
conceptions of place. Both the naming and the new governance structure de-
emphasize the line that has made shellfish harvesting legal only to those on one
side of the border, and that has reified a colonial construct counter to the Salish
sense of space/place and counter to intact ecosystems. Whether these changes will
translate into a re-evaluation of relevant policies and procedures in Boundary Bay
is yet to be determined.
Conclusions and reflections
In this chapter, I suggest that jointly examining the politics of calculation and
concepts of ecocolonization is helpful in the ongoing effort to unpack the
complexities of the colonial present. By investigating shellfish closures for Boundary
Bay, I show that Indigenous rights to harvest traditional foods are being com-
promised by a polluted ecosystem, a lack of government funding to monitor
tidelands and protect habitats, and calculative techniques.
I have shown that the nation-state project of occupation continues to reify and
entrench borders, rules, and regulations that are often incongruent with historical
and cultural practices of Indigenous communities. Exacerbating these challenges is