To fair and Spile: Toward Good coastal Livelihoods

Things Keep Getting Worse In Fisheries, Lawlessness on the Water, A Wild West, DFO Officers Refusing to Enforce Fisheries Act, Call for Federal Fisheries Ministers’ Resignation, No Peace on the Water.

Every few days headlines like these crop up in local papers. They tell the tale of tense and sometimes violent relations amongst Nova Scotian coastal communities who are trying to maintain fishing livelihoods in the face of legal, economic, and environmental uncertainties. These people are no greenhorns to hard times, but in the last few decades serious challenges have been mounting a threat to the stability of their traditional ways of life: economic rationalization of the fishery which has led to increased commercial concentration of fishing effort and a chipping away at ocean access; heightened environmental anxiety because of warming oceans and a lack of clear leadership on species protection; and perhaps most importantly an increased unease on how best to enact settler-Indigenous reconciliation in the fishery. These problems are consequences of what I see as common social and ecological rifts, a set of material and symbolic relationships run aground by the imperious attitude of capitalism and colonialism. This research seeks not only to better understand the roots of these problems, but to also work out how we might build better coastal lives going forward.

This project takes the notion of “building” quite literally. I propose to follow the process of building a traditional wooden workboat as my research guide. Why? Because it is a real step into the history, labour, and relationships that the above conflicts emerge from, but most importantly the act of building itself presents an opportunity to work in the world in a new way. Wooden boats were once very near to coastal lifeways, but over the last half-century have become commercially obsolete – leaving the realm of the utility and becoming an object of heritage. However, they represent a smaller scaled, less industrial, more ecological responsible version of coastal life. The idea is not necessarily that everyone returns to fishing out of trap skiffs and longliners, but to allow the wooden boat to act as a question and a proposal, a question of what progress really looks like and a proposal for a surer way of working, a more embedded and peaceful way to work.