Aquaculture: LNG Lawsuit Exposes Salmon Farming Hypocrisy by some First Nations

The First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance, which counts the Gitanyow among its allies, talks a big game about Indigenous rights, but those rights seem to matter only when they align with its anti-aquaculture agenda.

Commentary
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

If you’re going to demand respect for your way of life, you better be prepared to give it, too.

That’s the uncomfortable truth the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs need to reckon with as they pursue legal action to halt a northern B.C. LNG project, they say threatens salmon habitat tied to their territory, culture and economic opportunities.

While their case winds through the courts, the Gitanyow are crying foul about being excluded from consultations over the Ksi Lisims LNG project, located about 80 kilometres from their traditional territory, at the mouth of the Nass river.

The Gitanyow have every right to raise those concerns.
Their insistence on rigorous consultation and scientific scrutiny is commendable.

But behind their legal challenge, is a textbook case of selective outrage, one that exposes a troubling double standard at the heart of the Gitanyow’s position.

While the Gitanyow call for respect and consultation in their own backyard, they’re actively backing efforts that deny those very same principles to other Indigenous communities.
Communities that have chosen a different path—salmon farming—as their expression of stewardship, sovereignty, and economic resilience.

For the Gitanyow and several other First Nations that support the anti-aquaculture stand of the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance (FNWSA), commitments to consultation, economic reconciliation and respect seem to stop at their own territorial boundaries.

Salmon farming First Nations are called “sellouts” by groups like the FNWSA, which assails Indigenous communities fighting to preserve their rights to farm fish in their traditional territories.

The FNWSA talks a big game about Indigenous rights, but those rights seem to matter only when they align with its anti-salmon farming agenda.

The FNWSA, which counts Gitanyow among its allies, frequently claims that salmon farming is destroying wild salmon runs, despite a mountain of peer-reviewed science and government data showing otherwise.

They accuse First Nations in the salmon farming sector of harming the environment, while turning a blind eye to the fact that many of their own allies’ support or benefit from large industrial projects—pipelines, LNG terminals, logging, and mining—that pose far greater and more direct threats to wild salmon​.

So, what is the FNWSA really about? Protecting salmon? Or gatekeeping which Indigenous economies are acceptable?

The First Nations in the Coalition for Finfish Stewardship (FNFFS) has made it abundantly clear: salmon farming, for them, is not just an economic lifeline—it’s an evolution of traditional stewardship.

It’s a way to create food security and economic opportunities for future generations.

Their fish farms operate under rigorous environmental standards. Data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, independent scientists, and the farms themselves show that these operations pose less than a one percent risk to wild salmon stocks.

But FNWSA refuses to acknowledge this evidence.
Instead, it dismisses legitimate concerns from salmon farming First Nations, sidesteps science, and pushes ahead with an ideological agenda fuelled mainly by urban-based activist groups​.

If the Gitanyow and their FNWSA allies want to be taken seriously as champions of Indigenous rights and environmental protection, they must start by practicing what they preach.

Respecting Indigenous self-determination doesn’t mean only backing the causes that mirror your own—it means defending the right of all Indigenous communities to choose their own path, whether that’s resisting an LNG project or operating fish farms.

By tacitly supporting one and attacking the other, FNWSA leaders are undermining the very principle they claim to uphold. They’re turning what should be a united Indigenous front into a battleground of division, contradiction, and hypocrisy.

And in the process, they risk weakening all Indigenous voices fighting for meaningful consultation, sustainable development, and true reconciliation.

The FNWSA and the Gitanyow can’t have it both ways.
Either stand together for Indigenous sovereignty—all of it—or let double standards tear that unity apart.

(Main file image from a Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs media release on their opposition to Ksi Lisims LNG)