The Georgian Bay Métis Community’s distinct way of life, grounded in the region’s abundant lands and waters, has faced numerous threats by settlers from the south for generations.
The 1885 Ontario Fisheries Act, for example, attempted to place restrictions on some of the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s most culturally and economically important practices. In response, Métis fishermen, such as William Dusome, organized acts of resistance.
By the turn of the twentieth century, government-sponsored tourism became a growing threat to the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s way of life. An 1889 story in the Buffalo Courier Express described the region’s pre-tourism characteristics and predicted the changes that were to come:
“The waters heretofore traversed only by the birch canoe of the Indian, the fisherman’s red-sailed smack or the little boats of the half-breed berry pickers, will in a year or two give passage-way to gaily-ornamented steam launches and trim sailing craft, the air the while resonant with caroled song of pleasure-seekers. As for the fishing, for a long time yet… will yield satisfactory enjoyment for anglers.”
The article also advocated for further restriction of fishing regulations that were already attempting to suppress the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s way of life that had been practiced for generations:
“With the advent of this new era, additional benefits will accrue also from carrying out of the law forbidding the wholesale slaughter of fish by nets among the islands in spring and fall. Effective government supervision over the game law has, as yet, not gone so far north.”
In the coming decades, Georgian Bay would become the jewel of Ontario’s cottage country.
Métis commercial fishing, while still regularly documented into the 1930s and practiced today, declined alongside the ever-rising tide of cottages appearing on Georgian Bay’s southern shore.