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soup, very fat. It was this that made them live long and
multiply much. They often ate fish, especially seals to obtain the
oil, as much for greasing themselves as for drinking; and they ate
the whale which frequently came ashore on the coast, especially the
blubber on which they made good cheer. Their greatest liking is for
grease; they ate as one does bread and drink it in
liquid.”
        While that may not sound to modern ears like a totally
healthy diet, it was undoubtedly one that provided all the Mi’kmaq
needed to lead a healthy life until access to such rich resources
was cut off by the English.
        Traditionally, if a Mi’kmaq villager was not able to find his
own supply of fish, berries, moose meat and other staples, then a
kind of social safety net provided help. The sharing of food was a
vital and sacred principle of life.
        Among the early Native Nova Scotians were master canoe-makers
who produced both river and ocean-going craft. Europeans were
awestruck by the maritime abilities of canoeists who thought
nothing of paddling from Cape Breton to Newfoundland. In the 1700s
it was even recorded that one Cape Breton chief gathered some
Mi’kmaq leaders to paddle to St. Pierre to pay their respects to
the governor there. The ocean, like the earth itself, was more ally
than enemy. Mi’kmaq watermen had a great knowledge of coastlines,
tides, weather and navigation, all handed down in an oral
tradition, which made ocean travel possible. Father Lallement, in a
letter of 1659, spetaks of the “savage mariners [who] navigate so
far in little shallops, crossing vast seas without compass, and
often without sight of the sun,” implying that they could navigate
on cloudy and foggy days as well as in good
weather.
        Summer was the time to live by the sea as the Mi’kmaq did
here near my home at Lawrencetown. In winter, people would migrate
to a more hospitable inland site, maybe fifteen or thirty
kilometres from the sea. As Dan Paul suggests, “They invented the
summer cottage business.”
    A Savage Assault
    Life would change for the Mi’kmaq
forever once the Europeans began arriving. uThe French would get
along with the Mi’kmaq much better than the English. As early as
1605, when Port Royal was abandoned by the French settlers, the
site was left in the hands of Chief Membertou for safekeeping. Once
the French learned to be more civil around Mi’kmaq women,
intermarriage was accepted without much concern. Many young Mi’kmaq
men would even travel to F”rance for an education. Some stayed on
there and were assimilated into Parisian life.
        The English, however, arrived here with a preconceived fear
of the Native people. They were leery of the Mi’kmaq’s early
friendship with the French. The English military leaders also
mistrusted the democratic nature of the Mi’kmaq culture, which
stood in sharp contrast to their own style of keeping civil order
among the soldiers and settlers. The Mi’kmaq leaders ruled only at
the “pleasure of the people” and could thus be removed if they were
not doing their jobs adequately.
        Dan Paul argues that the alleged Mi’kmaq raids on white
settlements in the 1700s and 1800s were “mostly propaganda.” Some
can be attributed to Mohawks, who were enemies of the Mi’kmaq and
brought in by the English to help wipe out the local population.
The English, obsessed with being masters over the Mi’kmaq, forced
them to sign documents ensuring their own extinction. The English
used bounty hunters to kill the Mi’kmaq in the 1600s and 1700s.
Gorham’s Rangers were brought in from New England in the 1740s to
kill as many Mi’kmaq as they could find.
        There would be a long string of treaties designed to rob the
Mi’kmaq of their homes and to subjugate them. The Treaty of 1725
was signed by most of the tribes along the northern seaboard as a
working document to bring about peace. Unfortunately, most of the
Native leaders didn’t understand