Bear River
Travelling in Mi’kmaw land, you hear different stories about Nova Scotia: people surviving 400 years of physical and cultural genocide, unmarked mass graves and schools designed to destroy knowledge. You also hear about a futuristic way of life almost lost in the past: protect the environment, honour your elders and welcome strangers.
Bear River First Nation has converted its gym into a heritage centre. It’s entered through a big teepee just up the road from the artsy village-on-stilts of Bear River. Displays show the history of the people and offer furs to feel, musical instruments to play and, out back, a medicine trail.
Bear River has long been a centre of Mi’kmaw culture. In the olden days, the land of Membertou welcomed thousands of people for the Mawiomi, a regular, UN-style gathering of the district chiefs from what are now called the Maritimes.
Wanda Joudry-Finigan, a heritage interpreter at the centre, tells me it’s astonishing the Mi’kmaw flame is still flickering after centuries of determined efforts to extinguish it. Once numbering perhaps 200,000, the Mi’kmaq people were fought, hunted and starved almost to extinction in mid-1800s.
“A lot of things that happened to our people, and the ways of our people, are not written in history books,” says Joudry-Finigan. “We get a lot of schools here that know absolutely nothing about First Nations people. They just want to come because ‘it’s a place where all the Indians live.’”
Education is critical to keeping the culture alive, Joudry-Finigan says. It’s ironic, as “education” programs did so much to destroy her people. The local residential school opened in 1929 and operated into the 1960s. RCMP officers and Indian agents abducted children from their families and forced them into self-hating assimilation.
“A lot of people assume they were just private schools. They didn’t know what really went on behind the doors,” Joudry-Finigan says. “The way that I saw the residential schools was a cultural genocide.”
Families like hers went on the run, dodging the Indian agents. “Only the
strong ones, the strong Mi’kmaq people, they never gave up, they still did it, and I come from a strong line,” she smiles. But the multi-generational fallout from the residential schools is “almost unrepairable.” For example, parents and grandparents taught boys to respect females, be they human, plant or tree.
“The residential schools didn’t teach that, so when the young boys left there, they didn’t have any respect, especially for females, and they still don’t have any. It’s the ripple effect: how could they teach what was never taught to them?”
That respect was also offered to the environment. “When we moved from campsite to campsite, when we left, no one ever knew we were there. We instill that in our children if we take them down to the beach to roast wieners. When you leave, no one is supposed to know you’ve been there. They think it’s really cool to be able to do that.”
In the forest behind the centre, Louise Wood guides me through the medicine trail. Before we enter, she stops to say hello and ask permission. Inside, she greets the trees and birds like old friends, pausing to check on their health.
The forest was a “grocery store and pharmacy” she explains, showing me which plants provide an energizing snack, which sap is good for an upset stomach and which trees can be turned into pots, baskets and canoes.
Wood points out a gigantically beautiful “grandmother” tree that has acted as a natural Stonehenge for 600 years, a tree with a bear claw mark preserved in it and an old wigwam. She knows the woods like an dear friend, leaving a “spiritual offering” each time she removes something. Mi’kmaq people tended to leave other things behind: snowshoes, hunting tools and wigwam structures, so they’d be there when they returned. If you glance up in the trees, you might just spot a 300-year-old canoe, still waiting for the next traveller.
Back in the centre, Joudry-Finigan told me, “The old ones said years ago the seventh generation of people will bring back the culture, and that’s us. We’re bringing it back.”
First published in the Chronicle-Herald July 19 2009