Religion is a Team Sport

Evolution, religion

 

In his book The Righteous Mind,  moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt described religion as a team sport. Haidt compared it to the devoted fans at  universities’s football games. E.O Wilson used a similar analogy to describe ants as what he called eusocial creatures.

Haidt also says such religion is not irrational as many atheists, like the first two I mentioned, assert. Haidt explains that this must have had an effect on our evolution as a species. He calls this evolution by group selection.  I want to point out that evolution by group selection I believe is still controversial. It does not accord with classic Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Religion in a various formats has been around for thousands of years. Such activities over thousands of years must have had some genetic effect, he argues. Is religion hard-wired into us? Is religion baked into our DNA?

This is how Haidt explained it:

“If human groups have been doing this sort of thing since before the exodus from Africa, and if doing it in some ways rather than others improved the survival of the group, then it’s hard to believe that there was no gene-culture coevolution, no reciprocal fitting of mental modules to social practices, during the last 50,000 years. It’s particularly hard to believe that the genes for all those by-product modules sat still even as the genes for everything else about us began changing more rapidly, reaching a crescendo of genetic change during the Holocene era, which is precisely the time that gods were getting bigger and more moralistic. If religious behavior had consequences, for individuals and for groups, in a way that was stable over millennia, then there was almost certainly some degree of gene-culture coevolution for righteous minds that believe in gods and then used those gods to create moral communities.”

 

Nicholas Wade says it is obvious from looking at these ancient religious practices that they helped groups of people to compete with other groups. He explains the logic of group selection for religious practices this way:

“People belonging to such a [religiously cohesive] society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies, or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the ore united ones thrive.”

Religion survives because it confers an evolutionary advantage on the groups that employ it. Nature selects those groups that are religious!

Isn’t this exactly what sport’s coaches have been preaching for years? Effective teams are more effective than good individuals. Or as Haidt says, “religion is a team sport.”

Haidt says, “Gods and religions in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group.”

When groups are able to develop cohesion and trust they can accomplish much more than they could without it. Like the mountainside farmers in Bali I mentioned in an earlier post.

Haidt says that 10,000 years is enough time for such genetic changes to take place, “And 50,000 years is more than plenty of time for genes, brains, groups, and religions to have coevolved into a very tight embrace.”

Haidt says this account of religions (note it is not an account of any one religion in particular, but it could include your favourite religion) has important consequences. Haidt puts it this way:

“In Wilson’s account, human minds and human religions have been coevolving (just like bees and their physical hives) for tens of thousands of years. And if this is true, then we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course people can and do forsake organized religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But even those cannot shake the basic religious psychology of…doing linked to believing linked to belonging. Asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon, can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.”

 

Now some of my faithful readers may not like this concept of an evolving religion. On the other hand, one of them has already mentioned that religions evolve, not just people. You may insist on a religion that has been absolutely true without changes for centuries. Just like some people resist the idea that people, or other creatures, evolve at all. Others may find this evolutionary explanation more congenial. What about you?

Darwin’s Cathedral

Evolution, religion

 

Nowadays we often think of religion as dividing people. This is the dark side of religion. I will have more to say about this later. It is real and important. But for now I want to concentrate on the light side of religion. This is the side that atheists often ignore. And Haidt, I believe, is an atheist. I am not actually sure of that because nowhere in the book The Righteous Mind that I have been commenting on did he clearly say that.

 

In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson actually lists a number of ways in which religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper. There are many ways, but Jonathan Haidt emphasizes one amazing story. It is the story of rice farmers in Bali.

Rice farming is different from most forms of farming. It requires a lot of cooperation. They must work to create large rice paddies that can be drained at precise time during a planting cycle. As Haidt says, “It takes a cast of hundreds.”

Wilson described how rice farmers capture rainwater that would naturally flow down a steep mountainside. In Bali rice farmers have cooperated to create hundreds of terraced pools in steep mountainsides. According to Wilson, some of those mountains have hundreds of terraced pools. Each must release water into the next one at exactly the right time. How does such a system work?  Haidt says, “At the top of the whole system, near the crest of the volcano, they built an immense temple for the worship of the Goddess of the Waters. And that was the key to it all!”

The lowest level of social organization was what is called a subak, which is actually a group of several extended families that make decisions democratically. Imagine that a business run democratically! We in the west could learn a lot from the Balinese people. Each one of those subaks had its own temple with its own gods. How is that possible? Don’t competing religions have to fight? The answer of course, is why do they have to compete or fight? Actually that is a question not an answer but so what? Each subak then, after democratic decision making, had to do the hard work and they did it “more or less collectively.” Again, that’s important.

Traditionally groups where people have to share a limited resource don’t work well. The problem even has a name; it is so frequent. It is called the problem of the commons. Some people inevitably try to cheat. Let someone else pay for the commons while I take a short cut. Such problems are very difficult to resolve. In many places they lead to fights. Here the subaks each had their own god in their own temple at every fork in the irrigation system. According to Haidt this is how they solved the problem in Bali:

“The ingenious religious solution to this problem of social engineering was to place a small temple at every fork in the irrigation system. The god in each such temple united all the subaks that were downstream from it into a community that worshipped that god, thereby helping the subaks to resolve their disputes amicably. This arrangement minimized the cheating and deception that would otherwise flourish in a zero-sum division of water. The system made it possible for thousands of farmers, spread over hundreds of square kilometers, to cooperate without the need of central government inspectors, and courts.”

Of course, that last bit was going too far. Getting rid of courts meant getting rid of lawyers. Imagine replacing lawyers and courts with gods. This is insane. But incredibly it worked!

Haidt asked some pertinent questions about this:

“What are we to make of the hundreds of gods and temples woven into this system? Are they just by-products of mental systems that were designed for other purposes? Are they examples of what Dawkins called the “time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, rituals, the anti-factual counterproductive fantasies of religion”?

 

Haidt enlists a powerful metaphor—the maypole. He asks us to imagine a woman with flowers in her hair dancing in a clockwise circle while she holds one end of a ribbon in her hand with one and the other end of the ribbon attached to a pole—a maypole. This is how Haidt describes it:

“She circles the pole repeatedly, but not in a neat circle. Rather, she bobs and weaves a few steps closer to or further from the pole as she circles. Viewed in isolation, her behavior seems pointless, reminiscent of mad Ophelia on her way to suicide. But now add in five other young women doing exactly what she is doing, and add in six young men doing the same thing in counter clockwise direction, and you’ve got a maypole dance. As the men and women pass each other and swerve in and out, their ribbons weave a kind of tubular cloth around the pole. The dance symbolically enacts the central miracle of social life: e pluribus unum.”

From many, one. The motto of the United States. What many believe is the magic of it’s success. It’s almost like magic. No not magic religion—the spiritual. According to Haidt,

“Whatever its origins, it’s a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson’s account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively.”

 

This is what religion is all about. As David Sloan Wilson puts it: “Religions can exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”

This is what religion once did, should do, but doesn’t often do anymore. Now—too often—religion divides rather than connects. That’s why some say God is dead. He doesn’t have to be. You can kill him or bring him back to life.

According to Haidt, relying on Wilson,

“this kind of circling and binding have been doing this for more than 10,000 years. You don’t need moralistic high gods thundering against adultery to bring people together, even the morally capricious gods of hunter-gatherers can be used to create trust and cohesion.”

And with trust and cohesion humans can do incredible things. Things they can never do as individuals. Incredibly good and powerful things; and, of course incredibly bad things.

Religion helps Groups Cohere

Evolution, religion

 

 

I am still trying to explain how 3 atheists, particularly Jonathan Haidt, led me to religion. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt asserts this: “There is now a great deal of evidence that religion does in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.” I won’t get into free rider problems here. You will have to read the book to get this. The key is that Haidt claims religion gives groups an evolutionary advantage.

 

Remember Haidt is a scientist. He bases his theory on scientific data, not faith. First, he looked at studies of the history of 200 communes in the United States by anthropologist Richard Sosi. As we all know there are many kinds of communes but what they all have in common is that they are experiments in living cooperatively. In order to survive they have to be able to bind the members of the commune together. This is a key concept. I also want to remind you, as Haidt did not, that the word “religion” comes from the Indio-Asian word religio, which means connection or linkage. Binding in other words. That’s what religions do. That is the common thread. Religion connects people together and even, I would argue, connects us to the world. I have blogged about this earlier.

 

Communes were often founded by people who wanted to reject the common moral matrix (this is a Haidt expression) in favor of different principles. Many of them were religions but not all. Some were down right evil. Like the Charles Manson commune. Sosi wanted to know why some communes lasted longer than others. He found some very interesting evidence. Only 6% of secular communes were still in existence 20 years after they were founded while 39% of the religious communes made it that long. That figure jumped out at me. Why would that be? Was God on their side? Neither Sosi nor Haidt claimed that.

 

Sosi looked at all kinds of factors to try to find the common thread. He found that the common factor to the successful ones was that they demanded costly sacrifices from their members. That seems counter-intuitive doesn’t it? People had to give things up to stay in the commune. Things like giving up alcohol, or tobacco, or food for a time, or traditional clothing. The members had to make a sacrifice to stay. This caught my eye even though Haidt did not mention it either. That is this: I have always been struck by the fact that most religions emphasize sacrifice. Some of them to me seem crude. Like sacrificing animals in the Old Testament. Or even people in some other bloody religions like those of Central America. Christianity of course offered the ultimate sacrifice of God’s son. I have always wondered why sacrifices are important or even good. I am still not sure of the answer. I draw to your attention that it is surely no accident that the words “sacrifice” and “sacred” have a common root.

Commenting on the research of Sosi, Haidt said, “For religious communes the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted.” That to me seemed crazy, but the world of religion is crazy. Sosi had the scientific data to back it up!

But that was not all. Sosi found that secular communes that also demanded a sacrifice were not helped by it. Haidt described the situation this way: “Sosi argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized.” There is that word again.

According to anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of necessity.” After all who would agree that one can’t eat the food of animals with cloven feet unless there was some religious reason for it. It otherwise makes no sense. If people make a rational evaluation of customs often they don’t add up and are dismissed. With a religious support such irrational customs can be accepted and many members of the commune refuse to follow and eventually the commune breaks up. Ritual practices avoid that problem Even though rational atheists like the 4 Horsemen for example, would reject the practices because reason does not support them. Such practices can establish cohesion in the group to such an extent that it can survive. In fact, according to Haidt, such practices solve one of the hardest evolutionary problems, namely, how can you get cooperation among a group where they are not kin. If they are kin then even if you don’t get to pass your genes along, your genes are passed along by the kin!

This is how, as Haidt put it: “irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group; function…Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds to the arbitrariness of the practice.”

Getting back to natural selection. Haidt argues, based on Sosi, that

“Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups. This is a form of group selection…Religions that do a better job of binding people together and suppressing selfishness spread at the expense of other religions, but not necessarily by killing off the losers. Religions can spread faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. A successful religion can be adopted by neighboring people or by vanquished populations.”

 

Haidt touts David Sloan Wilson who was able to “merge the ideas of the two most important thinkers in he history of the social sciences: Charles Darwin and Emile Durkheim. Wilson showed how they complete each other.” Darwin’s idea was group selection. In other words, how groups could be selected to survive by possessing a trait that made it easier for them to survive and pass on their traits to their offspring. That is what an evolutionary advantage is. Wilson then used Durkheim’s definition of religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices” that unites members into “one single moral community.” Religions create cohesive groups that can function like an organism. And that helps them to survive. That is the evolutionary advantage religion gives to groups.

How 3 atheists led me to religion

Evolution, religion

 

I have had an amazing experience. Perhaps it was a religious experience. I am having a hard time believing that even though it happened to me. It really seems like 3 atheists have led me to have a religious experience. No that can’t be. Or can it? I’ll show how that happened.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett had a conversation that sparked a religious revolution. Actually it was an anti-religious revolution. All 4 of them were brilliant religious thinkers. They were the 4 most famous atheists in the world and a video of their discussion went viral. The 4 thinkers were later called “the 4 horseman” in reference to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse in that weird and wacky book of the Bible, Revelations. If you have ever read it you will likely be convinced it was written by someone under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. How could any of these figures lead me to religion? That is a good question.

The first of the atheists was  Daniel Dennett   and his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. And that really is the point. What kind of natural phenomenon is religion? That is step 1 in this process I am describing.

Dennett, like me considers himself to be an evolutionist. He accepts the theory of evolution, as do the vast majority of scientists. It is by now the foundation of science—the most famous and most accepted scientific doctrine perhaps in the history of science. It started out controversially when Darwin wrote his first book on the subject in 1859, Origin of Species.

Darwin is usually credited with originating the theory of evolution. That is not really true. What he did was launch the theory of evolution by natural selection. Other scientists and thinkers had thought of evolution before Darwin but his wholly original concept was that natural selection was the driving force of evolution.

Well what does all of this have to do with religion? I have earlier  blogged that in my view Charles Darwin is the most important religious thinker in the past 500 years. (https://themeanderer.ca/darwin-the-greatest-religious-thinker)  But I don’t want to repeat that now. I am here looking at Darwin and evolution and religion with a different lens.

Dennett in his book made a remarkable statement. He said, to an evolutionist like him, religious behaviors “stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade.” He did not mean that in a complementary sense. It was his view that evolution ruthlessly eliminates costly and wasteful behaviors over long periods of time. He viewed religion as a wasteful phenomenon. Why then was it not eliminated?

Evolutionists always think in terms of long periods of time. Over many generations incredible changes can be seen in many small steps. Small changes over long periods of time bring about astonishing changes. That is evolution. So religion sticks out.

This brings me to the second atheist Richard Dawkins who is probably the most famous of the 4 horsemen. He said, “no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, rituals, the anti-factual counterproductive fantasies of religion.” Again, as you would expect from an atheist, not the most attractive view of religion.

But notice the puzzle here. How could humans have been evolved by natural selection to adopt  religion? Natural selection picks traits that improve the individual’s chances of reproducing. How could religion, as described by these two atheists, have ever been selected? It seems impossible.

You really have 2 choices. One you could admit that religion (or really religiosity) must have been beneficial to humans. Naturally, atheists are usually reluctant to admit that. The second alternative though is much more complicated. There must be some reason that humans somehow came to adopt religions that are self-destructive (according to the atheists). Natural selection wouldn’t possibly do that, would it? Dennett and Dawkins both had complicated explanations for why this happened. Those theories are so complicated it is hard to be convinced by them.

Here comes the third atheist. An unlikely atheist and much less well known and much less of a fundamentalist atheist or militant atheist—Jonathan Haidt. He wrote an amazing book that deals with this fundamental thorny problem (among other thorny problems). This book is called The Righteous Mind and I highly recommend it.  And he comes up with some amazing solutions to this problem, all based on science and in particular his science which is Moral Psychology. He is the one that tried these two contradictory views together and led me to religion. His explanation was much simpler than the 2 atheists and unless you were an atheist trying to prove you are right, this is the theory that you have come up with. In other words, religion is not bad for people; it is actually good for people? It gives people an evolutionary advantage! That is why it was selected.

How can atheists like Haidt get to that position? I will consider that in my next blog post.

Health: Sometimes you have to Spend money to save Money

Health, Social democracy

 

I have learned a few things about our healthy system. Not many I know. First, it is a wonderful system. If you are sick our health care professionals can help. Not always, but often. And the workers are kind, dedicated, caring, and professional. Just what you need if you are sick. I know this from personal experience in a stressful time.

But there is room for improvement too. I have just gone for my 3rd Covid-19 test. And as I write this I am waiting for the results. Do I have a cold or Covid-19? We’ll see.

Yesterday, I was told because of the symptoms we had, Chris and I should go for a Covid-19 test. So we immediately, tried to make an appointment for the test. Thankfully, in Steinbach we can make appointments. A friend of mine in Winnipeg stood in line (yes you heard that right, she stood in line) for about 3 hours waiting for her test. No appointments? Why can’t they make appointments in Winnipeg? Can you imagine how many people can’t stand for 3 hours? How many people gave up in frustration long before they reached the end of the line? How many people did not get tests that they should have got? How many other people were then exposed to these untested individuals who should have been tested?

Why do people who walk rather than drive have to wait so long? Is this because the walk-in tests are given where mainly poor people live? Where many indigenous people live? Are they not important too?

 

For me trying to make an appointment was a very annoying process. They have so few telephone lines that you must phone over and over again after hearing annoying recorded messages. I don’t know how many times Chris and I called. We were both phoning repeatedly. Each time we had to listen to at least part of an annoying recorded message. I know the first time I tried to get a test a few months ago. I found the message very confusing. Again I almost gave up. How many people give up and don’t get tested when they should?

Eventually we got through and made an appointment. Even with the appointment we had to wait in line for about half an hour after waiting a few hours for the appointment. I considered that a reasonable delay. It is not easy to schedule appointments for an entire day and have them all align perfectly.

But why does the province not hire more people to take the calls? Why does the province not hire and train more people to administer the tests? I know not anyone could do the jobs, but surely it would not take that long to train people to administer a simple nasal swab. It should not take a highly trained health care professional.

 

We are experiencing high unemployment in Manitoba. Most of these people are being paid by the government not to work. I am glad they are getting paid. Yet, I know most people would rather work than receive a cheque not to work. In Canadian society jobs give us meaning and a sense of worth. That is why people want to work. At least until they become old like me and believe they have worked long enough. So why don’t we hire people who don’t have jobs to do these jobs? Then phone calls could be handled all day and all night. Why don’t we keep the offices open as long as it takes to get it done promptly? The same goes for administering the tests in a lab. That might be trickier but surely it could be done if we used a little ingenuity. In Manitoba we have been in this pandemic for more than 6 months, why have we not arranged for this by now?

It is important that people get tested quickly. It is important that the test results are available quickly. Not just for me. I am not that important. For others. So if necessary people who contacted me can be told to get tested and also self-isolate sooner rather than later.

Now I am waiting for my test results. This is already more than 48 hours after my test was taken. This is nearly 60 hours since I was notified to get a test. When the test results come, and if I am positive, they will want to contact trace. By the time the professionals come to see me to do that I will likely have forgotten at least some of the people I contacted. After all it is so long ago, and I have trouble remembering whom I saw in the last hour. And I have been staying isolated at home. That means some people who should be tested won’t be tested and will continue to contact other people.

The same reasoning applies to schools. Why don’t we hire more unemployed teachers? I think there are lots of them around. I know some of them who can’t find a job. Why don’t we hire more janitors and maintenance people and keep schools open 18 hours a day? Or more? Then we can have smaller class sizes. Then everyone in those schools, including my precious grand daughters can be safer. The staff and teachers can be safer because they will be able to stay socially distant? Then there will be less community spread and we will all be safer, even those of us who have no direct contact with schools. I think this makes sense.

I know this costs money, but the investment is worth it. Our conservative government likes to avoid spending tax money. But sometimes that is foolish. If we do a better job of this business people can go back to work sooner. Then we can all pay them less assistance. Businesses can avoid bankruptcy. Our economy can grow. Sometimes we have to spend money to save money. That is called an investment.

Imagine too how people can live better and safer lives! This is not just about money.

Doesn’t this make more sense than opening bars and restaurants without social distance requirements?

 

Deja vu All over again: Whites and Indigenous Fighting over Lobster

Indigenous Treaties

 

We are experiencing another hey-rube over treaty rights and the rule of law in Canada. This time the issue is the treaty right of indigenous people to fish. The  protesters this time are white. Funny how the rule of law means something different when the protesters are white. Whenever first nations such as the Wet’suwet’en blockade access to their land, or their supporters do that same across Canada, many Canadians complain bitterly that they don’t respect the rule of law.

This is what Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister said in February of this year about the “illegal blockades” across the country that supported the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, “We respect the rights of protesters…. But laws need to be applied.” Alberta’s premier Jason Kenney was even  harsher.

What about non-natives? I have not heard either Premier complaining about the non-native fishers vandalizing the Mi’kmaw fishers’ traps in the Maritimes.

The Mi’kmaq on the east coast of Canada are again embroiled over a dispute fishing rights and treaty rights with white fishermen. This brings memories of what happened 21 years ago in Burnt Cove.

I know when I first heard about Mi’kmaw fishers fishing out of season 2 decades ago I was appalled. How could they do that? Aren’t first nation fishers concerned about maintaining the fish and lobster stock on which they rely? Later I realized things are not that simple. They seldom are.

In 1999, the Supreme Court in the Marshall case upheld the Mi’kmaw right to hunt, gather and fish in pursuit of a “moderate livelihood” as a result of those treaties. The court did not define what they meant, leaving it to the parties to settle by negotiation. They have never managed to do that. The Harper Conservatives was not interested in negotiations. The Trudeau liberal government has agreed to negotiate but as always it is moving slowly.

Recently in 2020, a number of non-native protesters removed about 350 lobster traps off the coast of southern Nova Scotia. They took matters into their own hands again by attacking the native fishers. The non-natives claimed the actions of the natives were endangering lobster stocks. As a result, they took the law into their own hands and cut lines to native lobster traps and vandalized their traps. That is certainly not lawful.

Niigaan Sinclair described the dispute this way in a Winnipeg Free Press article:

“The fishers are angry that the Mi’kmaw have a right to fish “out of season” due to the 1760-61 treaty they share with the Crown — a right recognized 21 years ago by the Supreme Court of Canada.

At issue are approximately 350 lobster traps — which Mi’kmaw from nearby Sipekne’katik First Nation say gives them a barely liveable income. More traps would be set but Canada has used “conservation” as an argument to limit Mi’kmaw rights and impose a quota.

It’s a sham argument. Commercial Nova Scotia fishermen are allowed more than 325,000 traps during fishing season — and most companies break the law and overfish.”

 

Canadians claim the rule of law is sacred.  It should be. As Sinclair said, the rule of law

“The “rule of law” is universally loved by Canadians, politicians in particular. It’s evoked every time there is an Indigenous “protest,” march or action that expresses Indigenous and treaty rights and disrupts the comfort of Canadians.”

It seems the only ones who respect the law are the indigenous fishers. The Supreme Court of Canada, the highest authority in Canada when it comes to the law, declared the Mi’kmaw have the right to obtain a moderate living from fishing. The non-natives and their supporters across the country refuse to follow that law. The non-natives are the ones who are lawless, not the poor Mi’kmaw fishers.

Premiers Pallister and Kenney, if they want to be credible, should speak up for them too.

 

Mi’kmaw, Treaties, and the Rule of Law

Indigenous Treaties

 

The Mi’kmaq indigenous people on the east coast of Canada were among the first to make a treaty with Canada, and among the last to go to the Supreme Court and yet, as I write in 2020 their treaty rights are still not as clear as they should be and there is another dispute in the Maritimes.

 

The first Mi’kmaq treaty (though some say this was more of a Maliseet treaty, their cousins) was agreed upon in 1713. That treaty was called the Treaty of Portsmouth and was made in New Hampshire. It was followed by a second treaty in 1752 basically reaffirming what had been agreed upon. At that time of course, there was neither a country of Canada nor a country of the United States. It was a treaty between some of the east coast indigenous people and Great Britain. It was referred to as a treaty of “peace and friendship.” It permitted the indigenous people (as if they needed permission) the “free liberty for Hunting, Fishing, Fowling, and all other their Lawful Liberties and Privileges.” But what did that mean? Did provincial fishing laws apply to them?

 

In early cases that treaty was held to require certain actions on the part of the Mi’kmaq, such as obeying provincial  laws, but there was no mention of the obligations of the British. Those were conveniently forgotten. Funny how that happens. In 1984 the “other side” of the agreement was “discovered” in the public archives. Then it became clear that the British (now Canada) had to respect the right of the Mi’kmaq to hunt and fish. Before then the Canadian courts held that they did not guarantee aboriginal rights at all.

This matter was heard by the Supreme Court in 1985 in the case of R. v. Simon, where the court held that the law recognized that the treaty took priority over provincial hunting laws. This is what the court said,

“In my opinion both the Governor and the Micmac (as their name was spelled at that time) entered into the Treaty with the intention of creating mutually binding obligations that would be solemnly respected. The Treaty was an exchange of solemn promises between the Micmac and king’s representatives entered into to achieve and guarantee peace. It is an enforceable obligation between the Indians and the white man and, as such, falls within the meaning of the word “treaty” in s. 88 of the Indian Act. (emphasis added)”

 

But as so often happened the “white man” forgot about this again. In 1988 14 Mi’kmaq were arrested by a Nova Scotia Lands and Forests officer charging them with hunting illegally contrary to provincial legislation.

The charges against the Mi’kmaq were dismissed after the Supreme Court held that the Mi’kmaq did have the aboriginal right to hunt and fish for food and were exempt from provincial regulations when they were doing that. That was a right given to the Mi’kmaq by a Treaty freely negotiated with the British Crown in the 18th century and was still binding law in Canada. That is how Treaties work. They were not gifts granted to them by the crown, they were negotiated agreements  that resulted in a treaty that had the force of law. Ordinary provincial laws could not just override those treaty rights.

Again, non-native fishers were not done trying to overcome these rights. In 1996 in a case that made international news when white fishermen destroyed some of the boats of the Mi’kmaq fishers. Donald Marshall, Jr. who was also the subject of another famous case in which he had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 11 years, was now convicted of catching eels out of season. This case also went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada where the court declared that the treaty right “…is not a right to trade generally for economic gain, but rather a right to trade for necessities.” The court also determined that catch limits could be imposed on the Mi’kmaq by the province provided they allowed for a moderate livelihood for individual Mi’kmaq families. The treaty rights did not give absolute right to disobey provincial laws.

When this decision was made the lobster season was starting and the Mi’kmaq began to set up lobster traps. Many non-native lobster fishers objected vehemently as they felt this would threaten their livelihoods. At first the white protesters relied mainly on harsh words but then moved up to destructive actions. They destroyed more than 3,500 Mi’kmaq lobster traps and processing plants that were believed to be processing Mi’kmaq caught lobsters were vandalized. 3 Mi’kmaq were injured and a Mi’kmaq arbour used for sacred ceremonies was burned. These non-native fishers were not too keen on the rule of law. The rule of law was for natives, not them. Some of the Mi’kmaq also retaliated by burning some trucks of the non-native protesters as well as an Acadian flag. Neither side was perfect.

33 of the 35 Mi’kmaq communities agreed to a 30-day moratorium to allow negotiations to proceed but 2 did not. One of those was at Burnt Cove in New Brunswick. At that site there was a major confrontation and was watched by a large contingent of international press. Canada was in the news. I remember hearing about that case and wondering why indigenous fishers would be damaging their own fishery. I was ignorant in other words.

Later I learned that the reaction of non-native fishers, besides ignoring the law, was out of all proportion to the numbers of lobsters caught by the Mi’kmaq. At the time in the Maritimes about 2 million lobster traps were set. After the Supreme court decision the Mi’kmaq added about 12,000 traps. Burnt Cove, with a population of between 1,200 and 1,300 people was allowed 600 traps. The second Mi’kmaq community Shubenacadie Nova Scotia with a slightly larger population was permitted to have 800 traps. The non-native fishers however treated this as a flagrant attempt to decimate the lobster fishery on the east coast. As John L. Steckley and Bryan Cummings reported, “Generally, commercial lobster fishermen are permitted 300 traps each.”

The non-natives broke various laws to support their crybaby protest. The Mi’kmaq complied with the laws. Their Treaty rights by law gave them the right to fish for a moderate living. There can be no doubt that their actions were moderate. Hardly destructive of the fishery.

Of course the issue was never finally resolved. The federal government was given the right to regulate the fishery by the Supreme Court. As usual, as soon as the press left, and people stopped reading about the issue, successive federal government chose to do nothing more to avoid problems in the future, leaving the problems to reoccur again, as it did recently in 2020.

Black-capped Chickadee: the true friend of everyone who lives in Manitoba

Birds

 

 

The Black-capped chickadee is a very common, but nonetheless very handsome bird of the Northern woods. John Weier in his book Marshwalker: Naturalist Memoirs says “Apparently, chickadees that live in cold climates replace and enlarge their brains every fall, they need to remember all the places they stash food. When spring and warm weather come, their brain cells begin to die again.” I love these birds because they stick around with us during the long cold winter months. They might not be smart, but they sure are relentless.

I read the excellent book, For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide, written by Laura Erickson . She was the guest speaker and birding guide at the Baudette Wildlife festival that Eugene Reimer and I attended a number of years ago. She is a very interesting speaker and birding guide, and says,

“About chickadees she points out that “chickadees wear even less clothing than a New Year’s baby, but scales and special circulatory adaptations protect their feet from frostbite, and their birthday suit of thick down insulates them against bitterest cold. They eat frozen dinners of seeds, suet, and insect pupae and larvae and sip from dipping icicles, yet maintain their body temperatures at 104 degrees, with heat enough to spare to warm our hearts.”

Laura Erickson recommended that the state of Minnesota designate an emergency back up state bird, and she intends to petition the Black capped chickadee for that role. Unlike the loon, it never leaves the state of Minnesota, or the province of Manitoba for that matter. Do we need an emergency back-up bird? Sounds like a good idea.

 

 

Erickson  also talks about birds in flocks, as follows:

 

“In Fall, Black-capped chickadees form flocks. The year’s young separate from their siblings and join different groups: this prevents them from choosing a closely related mate when the time comes. Flocks are more efficient at finding food and spotting predators than individual birds would be. Nuthatches and Downy woodpeckers associate with these flocks in winter.”

 

She also mentioned how the chickadees maintain their body temperature in part by turning down their thermostats to conserve fuel during long cold, hungry nights. She says the chickadee can drop its temperature over 12 degree at nighttime.

 

Henry David Thoreau, one of North America’s finest naturalists,  described the sound of chickadees as “the lisping tinkle of the chickadees.” That is a pretty good description.