The following is a segment of an interview with Dr. Bernie Francis of the Maupeltu (Membertou) First Nation on January 5, 1992 at his home in Coxheath/Sydney, Nova Scotia. The interview was conducted by Trudy Sable as part of a Canadian Parks Service, Atlantic Region Traditional Sources Study to document and develop themes relating to Mi’kmaw historical presence in federal parks throughout the Maritimes. This research was written up in a report entitled Traditional Sources Study and submitted to Canadian Parks Service, Atlantic Region, February 28, 1992. The archiving of this and other interviews was sponsored by the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Center, Halifax, Nova Scotia with funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage, Aboriginal Language Initiatives Program, awarded in 2018.  

TS:       Why I called you is because Parks Canada hired me for three months to research how different parks can broaden their interpretation programs to include much more Aboriginal perspective, and to start to identify potential sites or themes of national significance that they could recommend for representation within the park system, you know…

BG:      Sites?

TS:       Sites or special people, historic events, things like that. And they particularly were interested in understanding traditional use practices and how they can be used within the parks interpretation programing and in their management policy. Is there any sense of the parks in this area that you or anybody you know would like to see more done in terms of representing Native history, I mean say at Louisburg or at Port Royal where you have done work?

BF:       I have been involved in the two of them. (Laughter) One time, I mean this is not even related to what you’re asking but, one time, you know, there was a, we had a mock take-over of Louisburg and I organized that thing that time (laughter) because (laughter) there were five million bucks or something like that a year, spent in Louisburg.  There was twenty-five million dollars allotted for Louisburg for three years, and this was to recreate, you know, history. And there wasn’t a single Mi’kmaw working there at the time, and our feeling at the time, as a result of the data that we collected, that there were at least six hundred Mi’kmaq in and around the Fort.

TS:       Now that is exactly what I am talking about.

BF:       Yeah, all the time. Anyway, we just felt it strange that there was no Mi’kmaw animators, you know?  But they wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t do anything, so…So, myself and another guy decided we were going to organize, but of course he sort of opted out of it a bit, but I kept at it. And I took people from Membertou and brought in guys from Chapel Island and Eskasoni, and we got a great big school bus and we left…we stayed up all night in Membertou in the Hall and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken (Laughter) and I think it was 4:30 in the morning we left. I took my car and everybody was on the bus and we headed for Louisburg on Thanksgiving weekend, which is the last weekend that they are open and we went through the back and we, as we called, ‘a band of Indians’ got off the bus. (Laughter). We weren’t seen at all, we went right around the back until finally we reached the King’s Bastion and when we came along, I sort of stood there and waited there for everybody to run along the sort of high wall.  And these two guys, I guess they were workers, you know, he saw one guy run by and he said, “Sorry sir we don’t open until 8:00 in the morning.” This is 6:00 a.m.  Who the hell would visit a fortress at 6:00 a.m.?  He was so very polite, “Sorry sir we don’t open till 8:00.” Anyway, he saw one guy and as he was talking to him, and he caught another guy going by, and then all of a sudden there was another guy and you know he looked at the little (inaudible windows?) and he said, “Holy Jesus, the Indians! (Laughter) Close the windows.” (Laughter).

TS:       Were you dressed like this? 

BF:       No, some of them were dressed in, you know, but holy he couldn’t believe it. Anyways, he closed the windows, and you could see him getting on the phone, frantically, oh you know, getting a hold of somebody. Anyways there was a bit schmazel and it made it on the national news and oh God you know. But anyway, we reached our objective, they hired a couple of Mi’kmaq for all our trouble. Oh my God, that’s all I know about that. Yeah that was hilarious. And the other part, the only other way I was involved with Parks Canada was actually we did a film at Annapolis Royal called Rendezvous Canada.

TS:       Right, that’s, we were just watching that.

BF:       Yeah, we did that and then we did another one just recently for Parks Canada, that’s the one I was talking about.

TS:       With Dennis Pearson and Michael Wood.

BF:       Oh yeah, I would love to see that.

TS:       Yeah

BF:      It’s only a short little thing, it’s probably no more than about ten or fifteen minutes. It’s an advertisement kind of thing to draw people to come to, you know, to the Fort, to the Annapolis Royal. But I was thinking, you know, they might have been cheaper to do vignettes you know, but anyway, they filmed it and I think really worked hard to do a good job for that ten minutes so I am really excited to see, you know, what happened.