Abstract
Abstract
Since 1982, 51% of New Brunswick's forests, which are on Crown Lands, have been managed by large industrial license holders, as mandated by the province's Crown Lands and Forests Act (CLFA). The government's 2014 renegotiation of forestry management agreements (FMAs) with licensees saw the size of forest conservation areas diminished substantially so as to provide industry with more wood fibre for its mills. New Brunswick's aboriginal peoples never ceded this land to the Crown, and were never consulted prior to the announcement of these new FMAs. Ten New Brunswick chiefs took the government to court, arguing that what the government was proposing infringed on their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather because the forest habitat required to provide them with fish, wildlife, and medicinal plants necessary to exercise those rights was about to be destroyed. The chiefs were unsuccessful in their attempt to block the new FMAs. Using institutional ethnography as my method of investigation, my goal was to explore and discover how it was that the chiefs came to lose their case.
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