Chief Mike Sack: The face and voice of Mi’kmaq lobster fishing that is met with ire and violence
Chief Mike Sack is on his way to Digby. In his pickup, skirting along Highway 101, it is two and a half hours of picturesque driving from his band’s reserve in central Nova Scotia to communities on the province’s southwestern coast, where lobsters grow plump and delicious in St. Marys Bay.
It’s a road he’s been on a lot lately, while his band, the Sipekne’katik First Nation, is embroiled in a stormy dispute with non-Indigenous lobster fishers over its claim of aboriginal right to catch lobster out of season, while others must keep their traps dry.
It’s not a great time for him to be away from home.
Monday is election day, when the 1,400 adult voters, about half the Sipekne’katik band list, elect a chief to lead the province’s second-largest Mi’kmaq community for the next two years.
“I haven’t had a chance to campaign. I haven’t campaigned at all. I’ve just been down there fighting for this, right,” he says as he drives. “But this is a big thing for our community, so I’m putting a lot of my energy here.” There are two women running against him, this time.
“I guess that will be my report card.”
While he is well-known in his community, most in Canada only recently noticed Sack, through the news and, for a certain demographic, online memes, both heroic and horrific, sparked by alarming events as the lobster dispute turned violent.
After a lobster pound housing the band’s catch was attacked, a van torched, and the chief himself assaulted, Sack, a youthful-looking 39 years old, walked over to speak with reporters, wearing a sweatshirt with a fish and moose logo and the large number 1752, the year of a peace treaty between the Mi’kmaq of Shubenacadie and the British.
On his head was a ball cap with a play on the industrial rock band NIN’s logo, cleverly changed to read NDN, meaning “Indian.” He understands the power of visual messages.
Sack told reporters that day, Oct. 15, he is sending a letter to the prime minister, calling for police to protect aboriginal fishers: “Does Trudeau care about our people? Does he care about reconciliation,” he asked. Those are a different kind of fighting words from the often-racist abuse thrown at him in the month-long dispute.
It’s a fight he watched growing up.
In 1999, 35 Mi’kmaq men were charged with cutting timber on Crown lands without authorization. They admitted to the logging but denied they needed permission. They said it was their treaty right. It led to a lengthy legal appeal to the Supreme Court.
One of those loggers was Carl Joseph Sack, the chief’s father.
“I used to cut for him in the woods as a kid. Their equipment was seized and their lumber,” says Sack. “It was the same thing — just wood instead of lobster, I guess.
“We’ve been fighting for this forever.”
Only it wasn’t the same.
The lumber charges followed on the heels of a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in a similar challenge, when a Mi’kmaq fisherman was charged with catching and selling eels out of season. That case, R. v. Marshall, 1999, accepted the centuries-old treaty that allowed the Mi’kmaq to continue to extract “a moderate livelihood” from its traditional trading activities.
The loggers were not as fortunate as the fisherman. The Supreme Court later differentiated commercial logging from fishing, saying it did not have the same tie to Mi’kmaq’s traditional trading.
The convictions were upheld but Carl Sack died before the final decision was delivered.
Sack came of age during his father’s treaty right dispute. He inherited his father’s fighting spirit and also his father’s businesses.
Sack became an active entrepreneur. He wholly or partially owned several local companies over the years — construction, management, contracting, excavation, seafood brokerage.
He was also involved in band affairs, serving as a band councillor on and off for years since 2004, and was first elected chief in 2016 — defeating the incumbent by just 26 votes.
This mix of business and politics didn’t always go smoothly. His companies did a lot of business for the band, receiving millions of dollars in contracts over the years. Sack also lent the band money to help with cash flow, often with extremely high interest rates, which a financial audit released in 2014 called “questionable.”
At the time of his first election as chief, Sack had been under a cloud of suspicion. He was elected while owning a luxury house that was partially built with money stolen from the band.
An audit commissioned by the band found $790,000 of band money was unaccounted for between 2009 and 2012. The fraud was pinned on the band’s financial manager, who used some of the stolen money to buy property for a new house. He hired Sack to build it.
When police followed the missing money trail, they found Sack now owned the house. The manager was charged with theft, fraud, breach of trust by a public official and possession of stolen property. Sack was charged with possession of stolen property and perjury.
In 2016, a jury in Halifax convicted the manager. Charges against Sack were withdrawn, after he agreed to an adult diversion process. By Sack’s account, the manager hired him to build the house but halfway through construction couldn’t pay him. His lawyer arranged for him to take ownership of the house in lieu of payment.
While the prosecutor at the manager’s trial said Sack must have been wise to the manager’s schemes, Sack denies it: “I never knew where his money came from,” he says. By agreement, he paid what the manager spent of the band’s money on the house. Sack sold the house a few years ago, he says, having never lived in it. He called it “the house from hell.”
“I had to fight it in court and spend God-knows-how-much or I could (pay) that and it’d be done with. I had a hard time accepting that because I knew I did nothing wrong but, at the same time, I needed my life back on track.”
Once in Digby County, Slack visited the scenes of the lobster dispute and met with his fishers. Things had settled down by Thursday.
Sack hopes it stays that way. For him, this is how this ends, with a whimper not a bang. No more violence but no epic legal showdown, either. He doesn’t want to emulate his father’s plod through a court challenge.
“It’s going to take a long time for people to get used to it. People are uncomfortable with change, so over time, eventually they’ll adapt to it. They have no choice but to adapt to it.”
Sack says he wants to get home for the weekend, with an eye to Monday’s election.
“I don’t know how much I’ll get accomplished campaign-wise,” he says. He will do what he can before the vote.
Chief Mike Sack is coming home from Digby.
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