After Canada announced Tuesday would not list the American eel under the Species at Risk Act (SARA) Some indigenous peoples with cultural and spiritual ties to the species question the decision.
“It doesn't look encouraging right now because we don't see anything being done to help them,” said Charles Doucette, fisheries director for Potlotek First Nation on Cape Breton Island.
Doucette has vivid memories of his father coming home with a pile of eels that needed to be hung in the basement to dry and ready to be distributed to family and friends.
“That’s been gone for a long time,” Doucette said.
“You heard all the stories about people using eels for medicine and at feasts, and that disappeared too.”
Doucette fished with his father around the Bras d'Or lakes and in areas of southern Cape Breton, but he said those lakes are now largely devoid of eels, so he questions the decision not to list the American eel under the Species at Risk Act.
The American eel was assessed as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife of Canada in 2012, but for 13 years the federal government has not decided whether to list it as a threatened species.
Listing under SARA will result in automatic legal protection from killing, capturing or harming the species.
Instead, the federal government says it will continue to manage eel populations under the Fisheries Act. applauding.
In Nova Scotia, where debates over the health of the eel population often pit commercial eel harvesters, environmentalists, treaty fishers and Mi'kmaw knowledge custodians against each other, some say population declines are already visible.
Doucette said people like him and his aunts and uncles, now in their 80s, struggle to find eels to eat in the winter.
He said baked eels, with their fatty, fatty flesh, are more than food, they're personality.
“It's just part of their sense of being Mi'kmaw,” he said.
“We are related to the eel.”
Data The Nature Conservancy of Atlantic Canada says eel populations are vulnerable in Nova Scotia, threatened in Prince Edward Island and appear to be safe in New Brunswick.
Eel decline is felt in Kitigan Zibi
In Kitigan-Zibi Anishinabeg, about 150 kilometers north of Ottawa, the number of eels in the area's traditional waterway, the Ottawa River, has plummeted over the past few decades.
Christy Leora Gansvoort from Kitigan Zibi says her connection to the eel is in her DNA, through her father's Onondaga eel clan and her mother's Anishinaabe culture, where eel was historically used as a medicine, a seasonal indicator and a food source.
“I remember hearing stories from elders that at night you could hear eels moving through the water because there were so many of them,” she said.
“And it was in living memory.”
She said the number of eels in their region, once making up more than half of the Ottawa River's biomass, has declined by 99 per cent due to dam construction and habitat loss.
“All of these exacerbating factors kind of erased acne from our memory,” Gansvoort said.
Gansvoort is skeptical whether listing the eel on SARA will be a solution to the problem, as it places restrictions on public fishing for ceremonial or cultural purposes.
Connecting countries
Gansvoort said concern about eels became the connection between Kitigan Zibi and Mi'kma'ki.
The unofficial name of this network is Eel Backhas roots in the work of the late Kitigan Zibi Elder William Commanda, who considered the eel a critically important species whose health reflected the well-being of the Earth and Indigenous peoples.
Inspired by Commanda's efforts, L. Jane McMillan, chair of the department of anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, North Carolina, helped organize Eel's Back with members of Commanda's advocacy work.
The group, made up of representatives from countries across North America, is meeting to discuss the eel and consider ways to protect the species while using indigenous knowledge and self-governance.
McMillan fell in love with eels thanks to her late partner Donald Marshall Jr., whose eel fishing case led to the Supreme Court upholding Mi'kmaw treaty rights.
“I'm surprised. I'm concerned,” she said of the federal decision.
“I think there is a claim to meaningful consultation, but with whom and in what context questions remain unresolved.”
McMillan worries about what DFO will do to address habitat modification, dams, turbines and fishery management, especially the eelfish fishery, which she says is extremely destructive to the eel's life cycle.
John Couture, senior fisheries adviser to Oceans North, a marine conservation group, said he was not surprised by the lack of listing given the economic pressures surrounding the expensive elf fishery.
Listing under SARA would result in the termination of all harvesting—commercial, ceremonial, recreational, and treaty-based.
Couture believes that a compromise would be not to list the species on SARA, but to list the species on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). This would mean taking measures that would strengthen traceability and limit illicit trade.
Canada voted against it at the CITES World Wildlife Conference in late November.
In a statement to CBC, Indigenous DFO said the decision not to list eel on SARA was made taking into account scientific, socio-economic evidence and consultation with Indigenous groups, provinces, partners, stakeholders and the Canadian public.
The statement said managing the eel under the Fisheries Act will be the most effective way to conserve the species while maintaining economic benefits for all Canadians.
He said The American eel does not meet the Appendix II criteria set out by CITES, which requires a 70 percent population reduction, citing national science review 2024 However, eel numbers across Canada have remained “relatively stable” for two decades.
International scale
Marine biologist Shelley Denny, senior advisor at the Unama'aki Natural Resources Institute, has studied eels throughout her career, focusing on the Mi'kmaw cultural connection to the eel and its role in food, medicine, spirituality and economics.
Denny, a Mi'kmaw from Potlotek, is wary of the SARA listing and its potential implications for the Mi'kmaw-eel connection.
“This will literally put everything in the hands of the government,” Denny said.
Instead, Denny believes attention should shift to industries contributing to habitat loss, especially in Ontario and Quebec, where hydroelectric dams the turbines of the dams kill large numbers of eels.
She also advocates for international coordination of management of the species as it crosses international waters and spawns in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda.
“It’s not just one country or one group of people that can solve this problem,” Denny said.
“Let's think about how we can all contribute to eel conservation and sustainable fishing practices.”
DFO said management measures for the 2026 season, including total allowable catch, will be announced next year.
