Elaboración y desarrollo del plan de auditoría

During the first few months of fieldwork, I spent time with friends in Salt Harbour whom I had met over the previous two summers of pre-dissertation fieldwork. These friends invited me to join them at pool halls, feasts, family boat rides and picnics, and also took me to work with them so that I could meet more people and understand the current issues on the reserve. During this early phase, it was especially important to me that both I and the potential research participants had a clear idea about what the research would involve, and what they anticipated outcomes would be. To this end, I met with several people considered to be leaders in the community – a fisheries administrator, and several Elders. They were most interested in knowing how my research could benefit their community. Elder Sally Atwin, who was initially skeptical of my proposal, told me, “We’ve been studied to death and nothing has ever come back to us.” I interpreted Sally’s statement as a warning, a challenge and a statement of fact. Throughout the course of my research, Sally’s concern was repeated to me at least a dozen times, and it was really the impetus for some intense conversations that ended up shaping and guiding my fieldwork. When I encountered this sentiment, I was glad, because it was a

conversation starter. “What would you like to come of research?” I would ask. People wanted researchers to help them figure out how to build a sustainable local economy, and they wanted

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research to help them lobby the state for improved social services and dependable access to and control over natural resources in their territories. These conversations, which continued through the entire course of my fieldwork, tremendously influenced my conception of the research, and my comportment in the community. They shaped my interview questions, and how I analyzed and engaged in conversations and other activities. Throughout the entire process, I strove to be mindful of the expectations and aspirations of research participants – an approach that was often complicated by the multiple (and sometimes conflicting) perspectives expressed by community members, but I believe that this dissertation is the richer for it.

The result of all this is a dissertation that I hope conveys the multiple ways that band members were experiencing life in Salt Harbour since the Marshall decision, and how these experiences were embedded in larger cultural, economic and political landscapes. A number of Band Councilors told me that this information could be helpful to them as they move toward development of a local fisheries management plan, and in their engagements with federal officials. Additionally, many community members asked if they could read my “report” when it was finished. With this in mind, in April of 2008 I returned to Salt Harbour to present the preliminary findings of my research at an open community meeting, elicit feedback (which was constructive and overwhelmingly positive), and distribute a 40-page plain-language report that I created for the community.27 For me, conducting research informed by community questions and needs was a natural extension of my reasons for enrolling in graduate school in the first place: to produce data that would be useful to local communities. Of course, I also had academic interests in this research, and my methods were informed by the theories and practices described in the next section of this chapter.

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With this approach to the research in mind, I went about the actual practice of fieldwork, an experience that I would describe as simultaneously methodical and messy. By messy, I mean that the methods themselves were occasionally fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants (e.g., scrambling to figure out how to conduct an interview on a lobster boat against a roaring diesel engine), and also that the work itself was sometimes messy (e.g., hosing muck off of oysters before sorting them.) In retrospect I appreciate that the messiness of the fieldwork has added to the dissertation, and to my own identity as an anthropologist, in two important ways. First, during the seat-of-my-pants moments, community members were usually trying to tell or show me something really important that I would not have necessarily seen for myself had I insisted on following scripted interviews or expected interactions. For instance, eating moose meat at family parties may have jolted my vegetarian sensibilities, but the social act of eating moose and talking about hunting moose illuminated the centrality of food, hunting and sharing to Mi’kmaq social life. Second, while I wouldn’t necessarily concede that finding myself up the elbows in various dubious substances (bait, oyster muck, eel slime) was character building, it was during these messy times that I truly learned a lot about the practices of fishing and of human- environment relations.

In the early days, in addition to meeting with band leaders to discuss the parameters and purpose of the research, I determined that a good strategy for meeting more people and filling up the days that I often found lonely would be to get involved in community activities. Luckily, during my first week in Salt Harbour, I was introduced to Mike Prentice, who directed the band’s salmon restoration project, as well as oyster aquaculture. Mike and his family quickly became one some of my most helpful research participants and best friends in the community. Working with Mike and his crew on the salmon restoration project, I helped to write grant proposals to fund salmon monitoring and press releases to share information about the project

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with band members. I accompanied the salmon crew out on the river to check their nets in the fall and Mike also invited me to volunteer with the oyster aquaculture crew in the spring, and with a healthy rivers study that took place during the spring and summer. Nearly all of the 20 band employees working on the salmon restoration and oyster aquaculture programs were from the community’s less wealthy families and were not participating in the commercial fisheries. Conducting interviews with these folks and their families helped me to learn about how the asymmetrical ways that the Marshall decision was being experienced in the community, and also about the persistent cultural and subsistence importance of fish and fishing.

My fall arrival in Salt Harbour also proved to be a good time to meet some of the Salt Harbour commercial fishers. Lobster season in that region runs from roughly August 15 to October 15, and after some cajoling, I was able to talk my way onto several lobster boats in the fall of 2006 (and even more the following fall.) Commercial fishers, who were initially leery to have a keen anthropologist aboard all day, usually relented when I agreed to clean out the traps and stuff bait bags. Not surprisingly, this is the least savory of tasks on a lobster boat.

Eventually, I developed a knack for baiting lobster traps and the fishers got over their

trepidation about having me on board and I learned a lot about lobster and rock crab fishing, and about how these young commercial fishers were developing a new economic and social landscape of fishing in their community.

In addition to participant observation and interviews with salmon and oyster crews and with commercial lobster fishers, I interviewed Elders, Band leaders, food fishers, federal officials, academics, activists, and policy analysts. These methods, in concert with participant

observation and just-plain-living in Salt Harbour and Baie Claire, presented a complex and multi- layered picture of contemporary life in Salt Harbour. In my daily life in Salt Harbour, when I

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wasn’t working with fishing crews, I ran errands – getting coffee, transporting broken engines for repair, picking up materials for the fishers at the hardware store in town, and shopping at the local grocery store. I made mini-presentations to Band Councilors who asked how the post- Marshall fisheries were going. I mended nets, shucked corn, played with children, drove hitchers into town, visited with Elders, lost miserably at bingo, drank strong tea and warm beer, and was lucky to be allowed to participate in many other activities that helped me learn about life in Salt Harbour – about the people and the environment. I learned that life in Salt Harbour revolved around children, family, land, water, animals, work, poverty, humor, politics, food, history, illness, a strong cultural narrative, weather, and hope.