Webanaki: from Odanak

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

As we travelled in eastern Canada we drove through many territories of various First Nations. I enjoyed that. It was part of my learning experience on our drive through eastern Canada.

The Webanaki people, another First Nation in Eastern Canada,  originally occupied a territory from land south of what is now Boston all the way to the St. Lawrence River. This was a vast territory. Christiane and I travelled through part of that territory on our trip to Eastern Canada in 2024. Specifically, we drove along the southern shore of the St. Lawrence after we crossed from the north shore near Quebec City and then through a large part of New Brunswick before we arrived in Prince Edward Island. The part we drove through is extremely well settled. In fact, as I said when we were driving, often it seemed like one very long town. While the north shore from Montreal to Quebec is more densely populated, there were a lot of people here too.

 

Historically, the Webanaki occupied all the land along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River from Levis to Rimouski and south to Maine. That was a huge territory. Currently the Webanaki occupy a mere 6 sq. kilometres in what they call Odanak. It is a tiny community hemmed in by Quebecois on all sides.  It is very close to the Wolastokuk. As Matthieu O’Bomsawin, who is Abenaki from Odanak said, “this makes it very difficult for us to access our traditional hunting grounds, which are almost non-existent. 98% of our territory has been privatized.”

 

As one member of the First Nation said, “When the Europeans arrived we occupied 100% of the territory. Today reserves [in Quebec] occupy only 0.06% of the entire Quebec territory.” Another member said, “constantly having to look at walls destroyed us.” This is understandable, as they were mainly a nomadic people. Another member said, “I saw the end of the nomadic life. I like living in a house, but the land is where my heart is.”

 

Wolastokuk or Wolastoqiyik

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Treaties

On our way to Prince Edward Island, Christiane and I traveled through the territory of another first nation. This was the territory of  the Wolastokuk or Wolastoqiyik who had ranged over much of Quebec and New Brunswick in around the neighbourhood of Rimouski where we had been in September and October of 2024. Their territory was huge. Yet the reservations they were “given” under the authority of the Indian Act were puny in comparison.

On the CBC show Telling Our Stories, which I had watched, one of them said it was equivalent to “my backyard.” According to Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Wolastoqew Wahssipekuk, the band council that was created under the scheme imposed by the Indian Act was not surrounded by a community that could stimulate the culture of her people. As she said, “the flag is there but we don’t have a community.”

 

One of them told the story of how members of her family each fall would gather into groups to disperse across their territory to hunt and when they returned they found the government had sold their land to European farmers. As one of them said, “They sold our land without our consent.” Is that not what theft is all about? This is not that uncommon. The same thing happened in Manitoba with indigenous people around Petersfield. In exchange they were given much poorer land. White farmers yearned for their land and persuaded the government to do their bidding.

This “Indian problem” is found on many all First Nations. It is not limited to Wolastokuk or Webanaki. It is part of Canadian history which lately Canadians have been celebrating.  This one is not so easy to celebrate.

Mi’Kmaq: A foundational disagreement

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

Chief Donnacona was the Iroquois Chief of the village of Stadacona when Jacques Cartier arrived on his second trip to Canada as it is now called. It was located at the site of what became Quebec City, which Christiane and I passed by on our way to the east coast of Canada on our own personal voyage of discovery in 2024.

In 1536 Cartier arrived a little deeper into Canada.  He arrived with a ship and landed in Île d’ Orléans, an island in what we now call Quebec. 11 of his men were very sick. They were basically dying of scurvy.

While Cartier and his men were in Canada, Chief Donnacona and his people prepared  tea for the Frenchmen who had landed on their shores from the leaves of 2 conifers that were rich in vitamins. That cured the men and they survived.

As so often happened in Canadian history, the First Nations of North America helped these Europeans survive in the Western hemisphere. They helped because that is what they did. They did not ask for payments.  But they did expect that if they were in need some day the newcomers would help them out if they could. Reciprocity was an important value among the First Nations of North America. This is how civilized people act.

Cartier, on the other hand, concluded that second voyage by kidnapping Donnacona along with 9 other Iroquois captives, and brought them all the way to France as curiosities for the people of France to see. That act showed the true meaning of European arrival in the so-called “New World.” That is not how civilized people act.

In the CBC story Telling our Stories, Edna Manitowabi an Anishinabe woman from Wiikwemkoong said, “We helped them. We were kind to them. We were generous and yes we agreed to share. We will share but we didn’t give up. We agreed to share.”

Those words tell us a lot about Indigenous philosophy. It was a profound way of thinking. The actions of Cartier tell us a lot about European philosophy.  Their philosophy embodied “taking” rather than sharing.

According to the doctrine of discovery, initiated by the Roman Catholic Popes, anyone who was not a Christian was a savage. And savages had few rights. And their land could be taken from them.

But I ask, “Who were the savages? And who was civilized?’

However, this fundamental misunderstanding between Indigenous people and the new arrivals from Europe proved very costly. As a result of that misunderstanding, Canada has suffered through decades of discontent by their partners who resented being treated as people who had sold off their inheritance to Canada.  While indigenous people remained unable to successfully assert their rights the newcomers enjoyed nearly a century of apparent quiet possession of Canada, but this fundamental misunderstanding still meant the “root of title” to use a concept of the common law of England which became part of the common law of Canada after Confederation was in doubt.  In time, the Supreme Court of Canada has turned back Canada’s easy assumptions that all of Canada had been ceded to Canada by Indigenous people.

Eventually, the Canadian courts kiboshed this idea. That does not mean the Canadian courts have accepted everything that Indigenous people argued, but it confirmed that Indigenous people had a lot more rights than Canada had believed. The extent of those aboriginal rights which have not been ceded is still being worked out by Canada’s courts and this has made law in Canada such an interesting thing. It is one of the reasons that an old teacher of real estate law in Canada—me—has had so much enjoyment out of practicing law.

What was once certain has become shaky.

 

Mi’Kmaq: The Doctrine of Discovery – A long-lasting Misunderstanding

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous People After Contact

 

The relationship between Indigenous people of Canada and the European powers who occupied parts of it has been checkered with misunderstandings.

The doctrine of discovery is the basis of a fundamental and long-lasting misunderstanding. Jacques Cartier from France arrived in Gaspe in 1534. Many Canadians see that date as the beginning of Canada.  Not many indigenous people see it quite that way.  Canada—the land of Canada and its native people—were of course around long before then.

Some Europeans had this notion that they had “discovered the New World” and this gave them the right to do whatever they wanted here. They owned it because they discovered it. Frankly, this is a very peculiar idea.  No Europeans would have accepted it if the Indigenous people of the western hemisphere had imposed such a doctrine on them. It was absurd. But sometimes Europeans were absurd.

The inhabitants of Canada had a very different view of nature and land than the incoming Europeans had. As Quenton Condo, a young Mi’Kmaq man, from the Gaspe Peninsula, said on the CBC series Telling Our Story, on Gem, “We understood that land was not something that we owned. Land was something that we shared and occupied.”

In eastern Canada the St. Lawrence River where Cartier landed in Gaspe, and which Christiane and I had just driven through, was a major river used by many different First Nations. Many of them wanted to reach the fishing resources beyond the mouth of the river.  Europeans when they “discovered” them realized how stunning they were. Some of the Europeans said you could fish by dropping a basket into the water and pulling out fish. Lots of fish. That may be legend, but has at least an element of truth, as legends often do. It was a bountiful resource. As Condo said, “It was a resource shared among many different nations.”

When Cartier landed and installed a large cross, the Iroquois Chief Donnacona quickly understand what Cartier was doing with that cross. He made it clear to Cartier and his sons that this was not acceptable. This land was not Cartier’s for the taking. It wasn’t anyone’s land for the taking.   Of course, to make matters even worse, Cartier showed him what Europeans were really like. Cartier and his 2 sons kidnapped him and took him to France as a captive souvenir. That was not very nice.

Cartier was not even the first European to arrive. Basque fishermen had been fishing in the area for year already, and centuries earlier Vikings visited. Cartier did not discover anything at all.

As Condo said,

“When Cartier arrived, he did not discover anything. We discovered a bunch of people on a boat starving and lost. We saved them, because that’s who we are. We are not savages. We saw other humans who were in a bad position. We took them in and fed them.”

 

This happened over and over again in Canada in many encounters between Indigenous People and different First Nations.  The newcomers had amazing technologies but they had a very poor understanding of what was needed to survive in Canada. First Nations, over and over again, rescued the newcomers from impending starvation. Added to that the newcomers failed to understand that the Indigenous people expected reciprocity. That was part of their spiritual lives, That was how they did things and it was what they expected of the people they helped.  They helped others and in turn expected to be helped when needed. Really, that w as not an unreasonable expectation. Who thinks otherwise?

Yet repeatedly the newcomers proved ungrateful and failed to reciprocate. Instead, they tried to take over.  I have heard this described like this: what would you think if a stranger appeared at your door in a winter storm and asked to sleep in your house for the night to save his life and then, after the storm was over, refused to leave. And not only that, the stranger then assumed control of your house and started to tell you what you had to do?  The answer is obvious. We would not tolerate that. We would certainly not consider the other civilized!

 

5,818 TV Channels

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Fat Opinions

I have created a new category for my blog: Fat Opinions. This is the first of them. Officially the first. Everyone who reads the blog knows there have been many of them already. This one is about the end of western civilization, which is nigh.

In the evening in Summerside P.E.I. we rested after many days of travelling. So we thought we would watch some TV.  We thought wrong. Our TV offers 5,818 channels. This is true.  How absurd can you get?  There were so many channels that even when we used the suggested IPRO App we found it impossible to find anything we wanted to watch. How is that possible? We were literally drowned in effervescent junk TV. This is what the world has come down to. Western civilization run amok!

 

Savage of North Cape, P.E.I.

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Our second major stop in Prince Edward Island was for the North Cape Lighthouse. This lighthouse can be found at the northern tip of P.E.I where a dangerous 2-mile reef can be found in the waters from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Northumberland Strait. It is found in an area where there has been extensive coastal erosion of Prince Edward Island. The lighthouse has already been moved back on the shoreline 6 times because of coastal erosion.

This lighthouse was really a disappointment. We made a long drive to see it, and frankly it was not great. To us it looked like a lighthouse in a prison camp.

Before I left on this journey, I watched an old CBC television program on Gem which consisted of a “Land and Sea” episode originally broadcast on February 19 2023. It revealed to me, what most people probably knew already, that the coast of P.E.I. is constantly eroding.  Erosion is relentless, inevitable, and irreversible. The only thing constant around the sea, is change. On the show, the CBC interviewed 2 locals from this area, Dan and Brian McCaskill, who owned property here  and they said their 3 acre property was now only 1.5 acres thanks to erosion. That is a pretty big loss. As well, 40% of other property they own is also under water. They lose more every year and acknowledge they cannot stop it. They are wistful but realize there is nothing they can do about it.

 

The ocean has immense power which is expanding with climate change as water levels rise. Added to the rise in levels, the storms being experienced around the world, including our precious Maritime provinces, are getting more severe. It is a shame that a lovely province like Prince Edward Island is slipping away.

 

The McCaskills have living in the region for more than 60 years. Their family has property in Savage Harbour—a fitting name perhaps. Actually, the harbour was not named after storms and had nothing to do with climate change. It was named after the savages who lived there, namely the Mi’kmaq who no longer take kindly to the name. That is hardly surprising since not many people like to be referred to as savages. They see it as an insult and have asked it be changed. Yet, of course, others consider this needless woke attitudes. It reminds me of the people who resist changing things named for our first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald who notoriously thought indigenous people were savages.  They are not to keen on seeing MacDonald honoured.

 

After one storm their sand dunes shockingly disappeared. Hurricane Fiona took 25 feet of their shoreline in 2022. As Dan McCaskill said, “the sea takes what it wants all we can do is try and slow it down a bit.”

The north Cape lighthouse warns mariners about a natural red rock reef that juts out for 2 km from the point. It is the longest natural reef composed of sedimentary rock in North America. At low tide I was told one could walk out to the reef and explore the tidal pools and watch seals relaxing. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. What else is new?

 

The First Nation community on a small nearby island is also worried about the erosion causing the loss of their land. The Chief Bernard of the First Nation said she recently saw “whitecaps” in her backyard.  They lost a causeway to their small island settlement in 2020. Needless to say, this woke up the First Nation to the reality of climate change. Something many American conservatives and their Canadian fellow travelers think is a hoax. The Indigenous people from the island don’t think that. They know better. They worry that a storm could destroy their oyster fishing off the island and cause the loss of their road access. Losing the link is a real possibility for them. They built an artificial reef to protect it as they feel preserving their ancestral homeland is important. It is their home.

 

Another lighthouse in the area that was standing for 180 years recently had to be moved in 2000. Scientists have said that 1,000 homes in the region are at risk of falling into the sea along with 45 sq. km. of roads. Even wind turbines are under threat. Climate change is promiscuous when it doles out damage.

 

That is a young woman from Steinbach on top of those red rocks. She kept following me around on this trip.

Erosion is a major problem on P.E.I. Some of the islanders want to haul huge slabs of concrete to hold back the sea, but this solution is controversial. One person spent $40,000 to armour her shoreline with concrete and rocks and 6 months later a storm blew the armour away.

This reminds me of Buffalo Point First Nation, where Christiane and I  have a cottage. Our local chief tried to armour the shore to protect his golf course and was stopped by Fisheries Canada because those actions were harming fish stocks. As well, we learned at Buffalo Point that arming one part of a shoreline can harm another part. In other parts of the shoreline erosion seems to be getting much worse. Though the golf course seems to be protected, at least for now. Mother Nature always bats last.

In P.E.I. people have learned to recognize that the shorelines are changing whether we like it or not. As Marcel Gallant said on the CBC program,  “We gotta enjoy it while we can.”

On the CBC show the host of the show said, “experts say it’s time to rethink our love affair with living right on the water.”  It doesn’t take an expert to understand that.  Brian McCaskill, who was losing his beloved homeland said, “You have to accept Mother Nature and what she can do.”

But us humans should not be making things worse, which is what we are doing.

 

West Point Lighthouse, P.E.I.

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Lighthouses

 

 

After we made an unplanned visit to Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick, which of course is permitted for meanderers, we took a drive to West Point Lighthouse which is an unusual lighthouse with black and white stripes amidst gray skies. It is the tallest Lighthouse in P.E.I. at 67’8”, made of cedar shingles painted black and white. It stands where the waters from the waters from the Northumberland Strait meet the waters of Egmont Bay.

 

This was the first lighthouse built by the Federal government of Canada in P.E.I. after confederation. It was built in 1875 and put into service in the following year. The original stripes were red and white but apparently black and white stands out better as offering more contrast, and the color black does not fade as fast as red. Who knew?

 

 

In 2020 a big storm caused severe damage to the trees, dunes and the boardwalk swept away from the front of the Lighthouse. Life in a lighthouse is never without its challenges. A protective seawall was built in 2011.

 

It opened on July 1, 1984 as Canada’s only Inn in an active Coast Guard Lighthouse.  In 1987 extensive renovations were made and a large dining room and kitchen were added and 6 bedrooms were created in a new wing on the northwest side of the light tower.  Needless to say, I would have loved to stay there. I wish I had known about that. I have stayed at lighthouses a few times and each was a bit of an adventure. Someday I must related those stories.  In 2009 to 2020 further renovations moved the rooms to the Harbourside Centre. After that there were a total of thirteen rooms. It is now a four-star inn. Wow I must go back.

Creation Stories: The Story of Mesh

Evolution, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

First Nations have an abundance of creation stories. Many of them are ancient stories. They have been passed down for thousands of years in the form of oral stories. One of the most famous stories, is the story of Mesh.

Innu are a First Nation in eastern Canada. The Innu are the indigenous people found in much of what we now refer to as Labrador and Quebec. At one time, they were to as the Montagnais-Naskapi Indians. They are not the Inuit (or formerly  ‘Eskimo’) who live further north.

The Innu have a creation story of Mesh (pronounced and often written ‘Mee’ in Innu). That story has passed down orally through many generations.  According to that story, two which  prehistoric fish, one male and one female, came out of the water. Eventually they grew legs which of course were much more useful on land.  Legs are often quite useless in water. This made them look like lizards, and together they climbed a tree. When they came down from the tree their bodies were covered in hair and they could walk like humans today. Some people believe, not entirely without some justification that this story told by Eruoma Awashish/Terre Innu  in the CBC series shows that Indigenous people understood the concept of evolution. Evolution is the story of change caused by organisms adapting to changed circumstances. Like the two fish.

Mi’Kmaq:  Cooperation or Competition

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Colonialism, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Treaties

 

As I said earlier, much of eastern Canada was Mi’Kmaq territory when Europeans first made contact.  And as I have already mentioned, the Indigenous people of North America have a deep attachment to the land they occupied. The attachment was so deep it is not an exaggeration to say it was, and is still, a spiritual connection. This is a critical difference between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. A friend of mine said the attachment of Mennonites was the same. I have not noticed such a strong connection, but try to keep an open mind on the issue. I invite people to correct me.

 

According to Quenton Condo, a Mi’Kmaq  member on that CBC Gem series I already blogged about, the treaty of 1752 negotiated by the Mi’Kmaq and the British Crown was by the Mi’Kmaq intended to make sure that no one would interfere with the Mi’Kmaq way of life. The problem is, according to the Mi’Kmaq, that the non-indigenous people were not taught about the treaties in Canada and now react in anger and hate when they learn what it means. This is a failure of the Canadian educational system, he says.

“After all, how much did any of us learn about treaties in school? Frankly, in my case, even in Law School, I learned almost nothing about treaties. Now I know that treaties are very important. They have constitutional significance. And treaties are fundamental to learning about Canada.”

If we know nothing about treaties, we know nothing about Canada!

 My goal on this jaunt across Canada is to learn more about Canada. Therefore I have to learn more about treaties and will blog about them.

Although, that is their [Mi’Kmaq] interpretation, it has the ring of truth as far as I am concerned. Those treaties did not give them the right to hunt. They already had those rights which they inherited from their ancestors. That of course, follows from them being part of the land, which is a fundamental principle to most indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere.

The Innu territory and Naskapi overlapped as well as Inuit and Cree. As one Innu woman said,

“At the time of our ancestors there were no borders. Our ancestors did not use measuring tapes to say, ‘This is yours,’ and ‘this is mine.’ The territory was shared amongst all the nations. And we shared it well.”

 

Indigenous people have always been willing to share.  Non-indigenous people were more aggressive. They started out willing to share, but then wanted to take over and impose their will. That is exactly what they did, and ever since Canada has had problems. The Innu woman also said that at one time there were plenty of caribou in their territory. Some said there were so many “it moved the mountain.” That would be a lot of caribou.

An unidentified woman on the CBC show said “Nations were intertwined in all aspect of our lives and in our approaches to sharing. This insured the survivals of our peoples.”

I don’t want to suggest that Indigenous People of the region were perfect. No one and no people are perfect. Not even Mennonites. Yet stories like this show the truth of those who say, people who live in places where survival is very difficult, like the Canadian north, have found that sharing works best for survival. This is what the traditional knowledge of the people of the region tells us. I can’t argue with this. This is a fundamental principle of survival.

As one Anishinabe man, Andrew “Stitch” Manitowabi, said about his people, “As an Anishinabe people we don’t go by boundaries. We use the language of speaking Anishinabe which extends into the United States in the Quebec area and northern Ontario.” This is a very different approach to determining territory.

The Anishinabe, like most Indigenous people used the language of sharing, not the language of boundaries. Non-Indigenous people did not always realize that, resulting, sometimes, in serious misunderstandings between the parties. In this country we still live difficultly with that misunderstanding. It has never gone aay.

Mi’Kmaq learned to cooperate.  Non-indigenous people must also learn.

 

 

Inch Aran Lighthouse, Dalhousie New Brunswick

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

After we left Percé, we travelled south around the Bay of Chaleur and into New Brunswick. We spent the night in the town of Dalhousie. In the morning after breakfast in an unlikely place, a Canadian Legion on the recommendation of someone in our hotel, we found another lighthouse. Again, I could not resist.

 

The Inch Arran Point Front Range Lighthouse in Dalhousie is what is called “square-tapered” and stands 11 metres (36 feet) tall. It was first built in 1870, but replaced in 1972 about a few hundred  metres to the west of where the current version stood. It is found on a flat tidal plain overlooking the famous Baie des Chaleur which played an important role in the history of Canada after settlement by the French.  This land is the most northern part of New Brunswick just south of the Restigouche River.

One of the locals insisting on taking our photograph.

 

Like so many lighthouses, it was built by Canada immediately after Confederation as the government wanted to expand the lighthouse system to improve navigation on Canada’s coasts to facilitate commerce. It was used to guide vessels into Dalhousie harbour.

Members of the Arsenault family kept the light here for sixty-five years, between 1870 and 1935.

According to real lighthouse afficionados, it stands out for its birdcage-style lantern gallery which consists of thin curved metal spars that arch around the lantern. Apparently, this feature is unique among extant lighthouses in Canada and this is the most distinctive character defining elements of this lighthouse.  To me its most important aspect on this day was how it stood out against the marvelous blue sky and water. I particularly loved its reflection in the water.  On the trip so far, I thought it was in the best light of any of the lighthouses I had seen so far on this trip.

The simplicity of the beauty without unnecessary embellishments became the favoured design for Canadian lighthouses.

 

I was also very fond of the small maple tree in the foreground. I think maples are a symbol of the beauty of Canada as are its lighthouses which, by definition, provide light into a dark and dangerous world. That’s what lighthouses do!

 

While admiring the view, we met someone from Manitoba who grew up here. often return to admire it just as I had. We agreed that if you don’t like lighthouses you don’t like life in Canada. According to Heritage Canada,

“the Inch Arran Lighthouse continues to serve regional and local shipping needs and, in clear weather, can be seen from a distance of more than 25 kilometres… [and] has an extremely high landmark value for Dalhousie and is a recognized symbol of the community. Residents have incorporated the lighthouse into their municipal identity and many think highly of the lighthouse’s services to the area.”

 

Gulls can be a pain, but they are undeniably beautiful birds.

We spent an enjoyable hour here on our journey across the country.