VANCOUVER—A B.C. woman is alleging she and her family were harassed Saturday evening by a group of sport fishermen in an incident she says has left her and her children shaken.

Stacy McNeil was cleaning fish after a harvest, with her sons and cousins along the Fraser River between Hope and Yale, when a boat with five men out fishing dropped anchor a few dozen metres off shore.

“They were talking very loudly, and there were a lot of curse words coming out of their mouths, so the other mother that was with me eventually asked if they could please stop, because we had three kids (with us),” McNeil said in an interview.

The men responded by telling McNeil’s cousin to shut her mouth, McNeil said. Both she and her cousin were stunned, she added, since their request had been made respectfully. The men, however, amped up their foul language, McNeil said, and several of them exposed themselves and urinated over the side of their boat while shouting insults at her family on the shore.

McNeil said she turned away with her sons, ages six and nine, to prevent them from seeing the men’s exposed genitals, as did her cousin and her cousin’s 15-year-old son, who has a developmental disability. At this point, McNeil said, a number of the men yelled “suck my (expletive)” at the two families.

For a time, she and her family tried to continue their work, but the barrage of insults continued, making it impossible for them to pretend they weren’t being verbally attacked, she said.

“It kept escalating, so my cousin again said, ‘OK just stop it. You guys are getting ridiculous here.’”

At that point, the men began to hurl a very offensive racial slur at the family, targeting them for being Indigenous, she said. They also called the group “dumb Indians,” saying, “All you Indians are stealing all the fish,” and accusing them of being ungrateful for the “free gas and free food” they get from the government, she said.

McNeil is a registered member of the Seabird Island Band. The Seabird Island community is located near Agassiz, B.C., in the Upper Fraser Valley.

She then left the beach, she said, walking up the hill to where her husband, father and stepmother were tending camp, in order to find her phone and call the police. The men’s taunts, however, were still clearly audible from up the hill, she said. Her eldest son followed her.

“He just started shaking uncontrollably and bawling his eyes out,” she said. “He was so scared. He didn’t know what they were going to do.”

An RCMP dispatcher told her a female constable was on her way, McNeil said, but would need help finding them since their location was off the road. And while she was on the phone, other people from further along the shoreline took to their boats, she said, having heard the men’s verbal attack carry across the water.

Three boats, which belong to people known to McNeil and her family, surrounded the men in their boat and told them they were no longer welcome, she said.

From shore it appeared as though two of the men were spoiling for a fight, McNeil said, making movements as though they were trying to spring from their boat over to the boats of the men who’d surrounded them. But one of the men was more level-headed, said McNeil, reportedly saying he didn’t want to cause any trouble before drawing anchor and idling downriver away from the families on shore.

But in a final act of hostility, McNeil said, one of the men dropped his pants as the boat was disappearing around the river bend and waved his genitals at the men who had gathered to send them on their way.

The men had been drinking from what appeared to be cans of beer, she added.

McNeil said her great-grandmother raised her entire family along the exact stretch of river where the incident took place, and that her family has fished there for generations. The site is still where the family comes to catch and dry salmon and other fish, she said. And while they have become accustomed to vandals damaging their structures and the occasional, low-key conflict with drunken boaters, this latest confrontation was of an entirely different order, she said.

“My sons were terrified,” McNeil said. “We had to have a chat with them, because they didn’t understand why it was happening.”

The boys were asking what they could have done wrong, she said, feeling as though they’d simply been helping their mother work.

And unfortunately, McNeil said, the RCMP never arrived. Instead, she said, an RCMP corporal text messaged her to request that she send any pictures she might have to his email. He told her he was off for the week, she said, but would try to find out more the following weekend.

Cpl. Mike Rail, media liaison officer for the Upper Fraser Valley Regional RCMP Detachment, confirmed the incident had been reported and is currently under investigation. Rail urged anyone with information to reach out to Hope RCMP. He was unable to answer questions regarding whether an officer had been dispatched to the scene, or how long the investigation would take.

In the meantime, McNeil said, her children were too shaken to remain at the camp.

“They were too scared, so we went home,” she said. “So my older father and his spouse are up there alone. And those guys know where the camp is, so I was just really worried about what could happen.”

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McNeil said that since posting an account of the incident on Facebook, she’s been subject to more vitriol and racism online. Some of the nearly 2,000 comments on the post suggest she is lying, while others have used her post as an opportunity to broadcast their disdain for First Nations fishing rights.

And while her Facebook post has also helped her gather leads regarding the identities of the men, McNeil said she hadn’t meant for the conflict to continue or become amplified on the internet.

“My intent was just to let people know that this kind of behaviour happens and it needs to stop,” she said. “People need to be aware that this happens all the time and to be careful when they’re alone.”

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