While Mi’kmaw treaty rights have long been asserted in the fisheries, most prominently in the Nova Scotia lobster industry and increasingly with lucrative baby eels, cannabis is emerging as a contentious new legal and social battleground.

It’s no mistake that Thomas Durfee calls his cannabis and cultural arts store in north-end Dartmouth, N.S., a “truckhouse,” a reference to trading posts outlined in a 1752 treaty signed between a Mi’…