Canada wants to hear more about Island fishermen's fight for indigenous rights

This week I received a letter from Canada.  A week which sees a rather large trawler, MFV Margris off our coast, which according to Waterford Whispers has dragged Inis Mor off its moorings.   A week were the social justice organisation, Uplift has coordinated a campaign to ban supertrawlers of our coast. the campaign kicked off  on the 10th of November and has 24721 signatures to date.Sign petition.
 
The letter is below, with a link to the database.  Warren is looking for further information.  It is interesting to see that our islanders are making waves that are reaching across the Atlantic to another fishing territory.

MFV Margris

My name is Warren, I am Geography student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John's, Canada (we are the furthest east city in North America, so if you sailed across in this direction from Arranmore, you'd hit us after about 1800 miles or so!).

I am currently doing a project for my final year fisheries class on small scale fisheries and have been focusing on the island of Arranmore.
One of the assignments is to create a profile for the fishery in question, using a piece of software developed by my university that is accessible across across the world.

It is called the Information System on Small Scale Fisheries (ISSF) and can be found at this web link.

https://dory.creait.mun.ca/

https://dory.creait.mun.ca/details/profile/2419/

The first web link is for the program itself, the second is the profile for Arranmore the fishery itself which I have recently created.

I've done quite a lot of reading with regards to the fishery, and watched interviews and a documentary about the decline of the fishing industry, the associated legal battles and ongoing fight to relax the ban on certain species and catching practices.

However, there is a lot of information that would require a more personal and local knowledge for me to answer, specific to the fishery itself, the kind of equipment, boats, employment characteristics.

So I'm writing today to ask first of all if I have your blessing to continue my project on Arranmore, and secondly if you could help me, or point me in the direction of a fisherman/boat owner who would be able to help be complete this project.

At Memorial we are very proud of the ISSF software, and each year new students and research members from faculty are increasing our database through a variety of means, be that through placement of academic articles onto the map, through researchers all over the world contributing to the site and adding local contexts. The small scale fisheries profiles is an exciting student based program as well, which I hope you will be able to see the value of.

If you would be able to be of any assistance, it would be much appreciated in equal measure, I feel it would be a very positive thing for Arranmore as well.
Thank you for your time.
Yours Sincerely
Warren Moore



Dictionary from Wikipedia

Indigenous peoples are those groups especially protected in international or national legislation as having a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory, and their cultural or historical distinctiveness from other populations.


Dr Shirley Gallagher