American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article argues that Indigenous practices of eviction can serve as a method of territorial reclamation that challenges state claims to property and jurisdiction within unceded Indigenous homelands. In the coastal seascapes of British Columbia, Indigenous leaders travel to docks, corporate offices, fish processing factories, and sites of aquaculture production with notices of eviction, seeking to evict industrial aquaculture facilities from the coast and asserting that coastal waterscapes are unceded Indigenous territories. This article suggests that attempts to evict aquaculture facilities go beyond specific companies, infrastructures, and industrial practices to also refuse the legal status of coastal waterways and seabeds as a “public commons” under state ownership. In positioning the state as a landlord of the sea and seabed, I further explore how evictions intervene in the landlord-tenant relationships between state and industry that are characteristic of how resource development and extraction occur within public lands and waters in settler states. While practices of eviction offer emerging avenues for realizing Land Back and Water Back objectives, the article ends by considering how the enduring legal classification of coastal waterways as “public” causes Indigenous claims to seascapes to come into friction with historical and international components of marine governance. In this context, the politics and processes of evicting industrial aquaculture facilities from the waterways of BC offers insights into how colonial histories inform contemporary coastal and ocean governance and how the exercise of Indigenous rights and sovereignties are influencing how ocean-based development unfolds.