By Michael Tutton As night falls along the banks of the Fitzroy River, Tabitha Morrison pauses from dipping her net for baby eels, and explains why she believes Ottawa’s rules shouldn’t govern Indigenous fishers. “We’re out here trying to make a living,” said the Mi’kmaq fisher in an interview Tuesday about 50 kilometres west of Halifax, where headlamps of 15 other fishers intermittently brightened the tidal waters. “There are catch limits we follow …. We have the right to self-govern ourselves and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Morrison, 38. The member of Sipekne’katik First Nation was harvesting baby eels, known as elvers, migrating along the waterway — even as the federal Fisheries Department had assigned the harvesting rights in the river to a non-Indigeous, commercial licence holder. After chaos…
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