*Sorry for the gap in postings. This one took a while*
I always start thinking about next week’s post right after I submit one. I decide what I want to talk about, educate cyclists about, jokes and stories I want to tell. I gather up a few reference items.
Then around halfway through the week, I find another story is demanding to be told. So – here’s this story about a place my bicycles have been: Shubenacadie.
We moved to Shubenacadie in the summer of 1970. About a half a kilometre from our house was a large brick building on a hill. It dominated the landscape. I asked my mother what that building was. “The Indian school”, she replied.
The Indian school? So scroll back a bit and know that my knowledge of “Indians” was formed entirely from Disney shows and Hollywood westerns. I was disappointed to learn that the Indians in our new community did not ride horses and shoot arrows, at least not as a homogeneous group. There were some people who had horses, and no doubt some were into archery.
So fast forward to the fall and the beginning of school. Turns out the “Indian school” had closed in 1967, and the Mi’kmaq children attended the elementary school in the village of Shubenacadie, and the high school in Milford. I rode my bicycle to school sometimes, but most of the time I walked. The children from the Mi’kmaq community were bussed in from their homes, which were in a place somewhere back in the forest, as far as I knew, that they called “Micmac”. Today we know it as Sipekne’katik. I never heard one of them ever speak a word of Mi’kmaq. With a few exceptions, they had Catholic English or French surnames and English first names. The nuns who had taught at the residential school, and at a day school on the reserve, taught all of us in elementary school. They were without exception strict, unapproachable, and usually angry. Sorry if you’re a nun. This is my real experience from which I speak.
Fast way forward to 2006. I applied for and got a job in Eskasoni at the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources. I felt as if I’d gone to work in a different country. Most of the people I worked with looked somewhat different from me, spoke a different language, and practiced a different religion. For the most part, my new work community was welcoming. I noticed some Elders and even young people were suspicious of me and it took some time to win some people’s trust and acceptance. At one meeting, one of my colleagues said an Elder had told her in Mi’kmaq that I looked like a nun! As a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist growing up and then Marxist/evolutionary ecologist, this was a bit hard to take. Yet I couldn’t deny the understandable response of a residential school survivor to a White lady in a position of authority.
Many of my non-Native associates made comments about the special treatment from government that First Nations people were accorded. I wasn’t working in Eskasoni very long before it was clear that all the tax breaks and university support in the world did not make up for the effects of a lost culture and institutionalized racism and having normal life events like buying a house made absurdly complicated by an antiquated piece of legislation laid out to control your community.
In the hallway at UINR, there was a laminated poster celebrating the Treaty of 1752 between the Mi’kmaq and the British. On it are listed the names of the Mi’kmaq signatories. Those names are all gone, so many of the people did not survive the disease brought by settlers, then the poverty imposed on them by restrictive colonial policies, and finally residential school abuses. The L’nu, the People, do not know their own names.
I’ve never thought of myself as a privileged person, and I know a lot of settler people take umbrage at being told they are privileged. It’s not about what you’ve been through – it’s about the barriers you didn’t have to face that First Nations people do, that they have to deal with every day of their lives. Let me put it this way: if you’ve never had to tell your daughter to “use your White girl voice” when she was speaking to a store manager, or a teacher, or a doctor, or a university administrator . . . you have privilege. Don’t feel guilty about it. Use it. Use it to help end racism.
In the late 18th and even into the 19th century, some settlers in Nova Scotia were petitioning the government for help for the Mi’kmaq people, who were marginalized, removed from their traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and struggling to survive diseases brought to them by contact with Europeans. One petition stated “What you are doing is not Christian”. I know via historical records that at least some of my ancestors had cordial relationships with First Nations people: Anne Hutchinson, and Amos and Caleb Babcock, who spoke the language of the indigenous people in their new home. Amos Porter put his signature on a petition demanding help for the Mi’kmaq near his community of Bear River. It was such a relief to me to learn that at least some of my ancestors took what little moral stand they could, even though they were poor and struggling to survive themselves.
Thousands of indigenous children are lying in unmarked graves on “Christian” residential school grounds in this country - unknown, unmourned, unnamed. People of conscience with privilege in our past did not stand by - they tried to do something. Do something. Do something, so we can all know them and say their names.
Names changed in residential schools https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-residential-schools-name-change-fees-waived-1.5200504
Mi’kmaq culture http://www.danielnpaul.com/Mi'kmaqCulture.html
Bernie Francis https://nimbus.ca/authors/bio/bernie-francis
Anne Hutchinson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson
Reclaiming My Name
Daniel Paul. We Were Not the Savages 3rd edition. 2006. Fernwood Publishing
Jaime Battiste. Honouring 400 Years – Kepnite’tmnej. 2010. Eskasoni Band Council
Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis. The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki. 2012. Cape Breton University Press.
Amos Babcock https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2013/06/hellfire-in-shediac/
Land Acknowledgement
https://oncanadaproject.ca/settlerstakeaction