Opening of Film: Place names flashing on screen: Maliaq, Qamsoq, Mskikue’katik, E’se’katik

RL:       You look at Mi’kmaw place names, they’re talking about fishing, they’re talking about hunting, they’re talking about gathering. They’re talking portage routes, and you look at them, they’re mental maps. There’s so much you can learn by looking at those names and examining those names. Resource areas, camping areas, you look at the word ‘Tracadie’ (Tlaqatik)for instance, which means basically encampment, and you see a lot of tracadies on river systems. Places of encampment, places to fish eels (Kate’katik) , places to catch salmon (Plamue’katik) Sackville River (Kwipew), Saint Margaret’s Bay (Kjipanu’pek), Ingram River, the Lahave (Pijinuiskaq), you just, you look at that you understand how Mi’kmaw interpreted that landscape and how they saw that in their own mind. It’s very intimate and it’s reflected in those names.

            As an archeologist, when I look at pre-contact shell midden sites, one’s amazed at the diet and the diversity of that, that diet and the foods that were available. They actually had very healthy, a healthy lifestyle–fish, aquatic food, avian, terrestrial, things such as caribou, rabbit. Things stayed quite the same when the French were here, the initial French contact. That was kind of a period of, for a lack of better word, accommodation, and there was more an economic relationship because of the fur trade. Mi’kmaq weren’t displaced from a lot of these river systems.

 It was in the middle of that English French conflict that we start to see some change, then we see the British coming here, now there’s a demand for land, to make land available for settlers. It pushes Mi’kmaq, somewhat displaces them somewhat from the lands.

Then we see the establishment of Indian Reserves as we know them today, there was a significant, real significant, drastic shift in that connection with land, and the ability to use resources like they had done traditionally. The number one complaint throughout the colonial period was that the construction of mills and dams on rivers that impede the migration of fish up a river, the fact that the colonial government introduces now statutes that control fishing; there’s regulations that had a bearing on obstructions that are in the river, such as a fish weir that have been used for thousands of years by Mi’kmaw people. Hunting now is regulated, instead of hunting for need as need be, they’re now only allowed to one, to hunt for the one moose or one caribou. So, it has a real drastic effect on Mi’kmaw people.

            Indian commissioner reports, they’re talking about the destitution; that’s really hard to understand and fathom. Mi’kmaw people are really in a terrible state at that time, and people are starving. Grand Councils and Chiefs are, again, like I say, petition colonial government, petition the Father over (?), the king, who they called ‘the Father’, the queen, who they called ‘the Mother’, and they’re saying, “Okay our people are starving, and I have no ability to feed them.” They’re given small little allotments of seed; farm implements to farm on some of these acres. Some of the lands are really not suitable for agriculture. The disconnect from those resources are from that land and how negatively that impacted Mi’kmaw people here.

When you talk about the resilience, I’m just incredibly amazed how close these people, early people, our ancestors, came to the numbers drastically, were drastically reduced here in the province and for them to have survived that is, I think, testimony to their resilience. There’s a cultural memory I think and a connection to the land that never disappears. That connection to the resources, that connection to the whole cultural past is, like I say, inherent—it’s imbedded in, in the soul of these people.

The urban population here in a place like Halifax, Dartmouth, don’t understand that places like Bedford and Dartmouth were critical to the survival of Mi’kmaw people and they were rich in resources here. Where we walk to a superstore today, this was the Mi’kmaw people’s, and I think we tend to lose sight of that. It’s so easy for us to go to a grocery store and get what we need, and we forget the landscape which is kind of covered with concrete and buildings and stuff was one time very important, very critical to early populations here in Nova Scotia.

Quote from Nicholas Deny, 1692:

The law which they observed was this… to do on to another only that which they wished to be done to them. They refused nothing to one another, if one wigwam or family had not provisions enough, the neighbours supplied them.

End Credits

            An Excerpt from Wi’kulpaltimk: Feast of Forgiveness with Roger Lewis talking about Mi’kmaw place names and cultural landscapes created for Trudy Sable (TGS Research Management and Educational Consultants) by Kent Martin (Unceasing Productions) for the Nova Scotia Museum exhibit, “This is What I Wish you Knew” 2017 with funding through the Nova Scotia Museum.

            Original Film Directors: Salina Kemp and Kent Martin

            Original Film Producers: Trudy Sable and Pam Glode-Desrocher

            Narrator and Researcher: Salina Kemp

            Cinematography and Editing: Kent Martin

            Music: Ko’jua, Lee Cremo; David R. Maracle, The Long Journey, Rattlesnake Initiation; A Tribe Called Red

Funding: Urban Aboriginal Research Network, Urban Legacy Project Fund, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Original film produced in Partnership by: Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre and the Office of Aboriginal and Northern Research, Gorsebrook Research Institute, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Excerpt funded through the Nova Scotia Museum.

Note: All spellings are in the Smith/Francis orthography and taken from the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek: Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas and Website  (mikmawplacenames.ca)