05/05/2025
Salmon Season Has Begun in Outdoor Education 🐟
Last week, our Outdoor Education program began our salmon season with an important and emotional introduction. We reflected on the powerful documentary Incident at Restigouche, where police entered our community on June 11, 1981, and told our people they could no longer fish salmon to feed their families. It opened the door to conversations about our rights vs. responsibilities, and our deep, ancient relationship with salmon—one that has sustained us for thousands of years.
We spoke about how our community stood together in the face of injustice, how times have changed, and how far we’ve come. We connected these events to the legacy of residential schools, and how later Indigenous knowledge was once reduced to a single paragraph in a textbook, told only through a Western lens. Then we flashed forward to today—where our youth are learning on the land, guided by our stories, our knowledge, and our truth.
We asked questions:
- How did our people feel on that day in 1981?
- Why did Alanis Obomsawin choose to tell this story?
-How would the story change if told from the lens of the police?
Of couse we don’t have the answers to all these types of question but hope to bring people in to share their stories. If you would like to share your raid stories, fishing stories, please sent is a text or give is a call at the school.
We would appreciate it and so would our students!
We spoke about the importance of salmon fishing, not just as a right—but as a responsibility to protect a resource for the next seven generations.
Afterward, students visited Moffat’s Landing—one of our community’s fishing lodges. They heard stories, learned about our Mi’gmaq fishing law, and reflected on the resilience of the men and women who continue to fish these waters today.
Some explored the water’s edge, others jumped in the mud or splashed in the shallows—but all walked away with something deeper: an understanding of who we are, where we come from, and why the salmon matters.
Today we start tying our Gil net and finishing our maple syrup! Updates to come
’gmaqPride
