🎣 We Don’t Pay to Fish What Was Always Ours: Why Many Black & Native Families Oppose Fishing Licenses

For Black and Native communities, fishing is not simply recreation.  It is survival.  It is culture.  It is a treaty right and an ancestral practice. It is a form of resistance that sustained our peoples through genocide, slavery and forced displacement long before fishing licenses existed.

Yet today, many of us are forced to pay the state simply to access the waters our ancestors fished freely.

This is not a neutral policy.  It is one more mechanism of colonial and racial control, another way the state exerts power over Indigenous lands and Black bodies.  Here’s why many of us say no to fishing license fees:

🌊 Ancestral Right to the Land and Waters

Many Tribal Nations hold treaty-protected fishing rights that predate the United States.  These rights were guaranteed in exchange for land cessions and should not be taxed or restricted.

Many Black families, especially descendants of the enslaved, have fished these waters for generations when land ownership and formal economies were denied to us.

For both peoples, fishing was a means of survival under colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow.  Being forced to pay to fish is seen as a continuation of systems that once stole land, labor, life and now continue to extract.

🪶 Fishing Is a Cultural and Spiritual Practice

For Black families, fishing trips are a way to pass down stories, skills and survival knowledge.  This is a sacred tradition born of resilience.

For Native communities, fishing is cultural, spiritual and deeply tied to the land and water.

Imposing fees commodifies these ancestral practices.  It disrespects the spiritual and cultural memory that fishing carries for both communities.

🏞️ It Perpetuates Colonial and White Supremacist Jurisdiction

Requiring fishing licenses assumes that settler states have the right to regulate access to lands and waters they stole or that remain contested.

It asserts settler law over Indigenous sovereignty and over the Black descendants of those whose stolen labor helped build this nation’s economy.

Purchasing a license is seen as forced consent to illegitimate authority, a state that still owes land back to Native nations and reparations to Black communities.

🍲 It Undermines Food Sovereignty and Survival

For many Black and Native families, especially in rural or low-income communities, fishing is an essential way to access healthy, traditional, affordable food.

License fees create financial barriers to subsistence, forcing poor people to either pay or risk criminalization.

This disproportionately impacts Black and Native communities already targeted by poverty and systemic racism.

It is part of a long history of policies designed to sever our peoples from land-based lifeways and self-sufficiency.

🪤 Criminalization and Policing

The fishing license system feeds broader patterns of surveillance and over-policing of Black and Native peoples in public spaces.

A Black or Native person fishing without a license may face harsher penalties, harassment or even violence compared to white counterparts.

The licensing system provides one more pretext for law enforcement to stop, question, fine, or arrest us particularly in the South and in regions with legacies of violent policing.

💰 It Forces Us to Pay to Practice What Was Stolen

Many Black people view license fees as yet another forced payment to a government that owes us reparations, not another bill for rights their ancestors never surrendered.

Many Native people see fishing fees as being forced to pay to exist as Indigenous peoples on our own ancestral lands.

The license system itself is part of an ongoing colonial and white supremacist economy that extracts wealth from our communities while denying justice and repair.

🕊️ Our Rights Are Not For Sale

This is not just about fishing.  It is about land.  It is about water.  It is about food.  It is about memory.  It is about sovereignty and survival.

Our ancestors fished these waters long before licenses existed and often in defiance of systems built to erase us.

We will not pay to practice what was stolen.  We will not ask permission to honor our peoples.

Fishing is our right and our birthright.