Blood in the Water

by Silver Donald Cameron

  The strategy makes sense: try your strongest case first, and use the result against the secondary defendants. But James’s trial won’t begin till mid-November of 2014, which creates a fifteen-month pause in the legal process. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what just happened with Dwayne, and to view the hearing and the whole legal apparatus in its local context.

  As Nash Brogan reminded the court, there are only three reasons to deny bail, and two of them clearly did not apply to Dwayne Samson, who was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the public. The only legitimate reason to deny him bail was the need to preserve “public confidence in the administration of justice”—which assumes that the public actually does have confidence in the administration of justice in the first place.

  Is that true?

  Laws are made by those who have the power to enforce them. It is impossible to understand Cape Bretoners’ attitudes to the law without some understanding of the interplay of power and law in the long, violent history of Cape Breton Island. Since this is an Acadian story, we can start with the Acadians.

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  “Noah à Gilles à Henry à Simide à Henri à Georges à René à René à René à Louis,” said ten-year-old Noah Saulnier.

  “Bon! And that’s who you are,” said his father, Gilles.

  Noah is a tenth-generation Acadian, descended ultimately from Louis Sonier. Louis was a sailor, born about 1663 in Vitre, Brittany. In 1684 he married Louise Bastineau in Grand Pré, in what is now Nova Scotia. The couple had ten children, and every Saulnier (or Sonier, or Sonnier) in North America descends from their union.

  In Acadia, the same name may have morphed into numerous spellings over the centuries. I am a member by marriage of the Thériault family; my late wife, Lulu, was a Terrio. That’s how her family spells their surname, but I can provide you with sixty-one different spellings. That’s right: sixty-one variants. Voici: the Terrieux all derive from a plowman named Jehan Terriau, born in Poitou, France, in 1601, when Queen Elizabeth I ruled England and the hottest ticket on the London stage was a new play called Hamlet. Jehan married Perrine Rau around 1635, and in 1637 the couple were living in Port Royal, in what later became Nova Scotia, where she gave birth to Claude Terriot, the first of their eight children. Marie-Louise Terrio—Lulu—arrived after eleven more generations. When we married, her son Mark became my beloved son Mark Terrio-Cameron. He belongs to the thirteenth generation of Tereyaus in Nova Scotia: Mark à Lulu à Arthur à Miller à Aimé à Honoré à Louis à Simon à René à Joseph à Germain à Claude à Jehan.

  The very approximate boundaries of “Acadia” expanded, shifted, and shrank repeatedly during the turbulent early period of European settlement in northeastern North America. At their greatest extent, they roughly matched the boundaries of Mi’kma’ki, the territory of the Mi’kmaw people which includes all three Maritime provinces, plus portions of Quebec and Maine. Today there is no territory of “Acadia” at all; the term refers to all the areas once occupied by Acadians and particularly to regions still characterized by Acadian history, language, and culture.

  The story of Acadia begins in 1604, when Samuel de Champlain and his crew spent a terrible winter on an island in New Brunswick’s Schoodiac River, which Champlain blithely renamed the St. Croix. After nearly half the party died, the settlement moved across the Bay of Fundy to Nme’juaqnek, the place of bountiful fish, which was renamed Port Royal. Building productive farms by diking the tidal meadows, cultivating the rich bottomland of the Annapolis Valley, remaining on cordial terms with the Mi’kmaw people—the Acadian settlers seem to have lived prosperous and happy lives. At the time of Acadia’s first census, in 1671, Port Royal boasted 392 people, 482 cattle, and 524 sheep. The forty-seven family names in that first census included Babin, Richard, Petitpas, Gaudet, and Poirier—names of my neighbours today. They also included Boudreau and Landry, the distant ancestors of Phillip, James, Craig, and Carla.

  From Port Royal, the Acadians slowly expanded along the Bay of Fundy and beyond, establishing settlements along the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and as far afield as Epekwitk and Unama’ki—which the French called Île Saint-Jean and Île Royale, respectively, and which are now known as Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. Throughout this time France and England battled continually for control of North America. The British seized Acadia in 1654 but returned it in the Treaty of Breda in 1667. In all, the British made six attempts to take Acadia before they finally captured and kept it in 1710. Over the next fifty years, the French made six attempts to take it back.

  Despite this clash of empires, during their first century the Acadians prospered under a benign canopy of neglect. Acadia was a long way from Europe, and neither France nor England paid much attention to its people, no matter which monarch ostensibly ruled them. As the nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman says, in his patrician manner,

  They were contented with their lot, and asked only to be let alone. Their intercourse was unceremonious to such a point that they never addressed each other, or, it is said, even strangers, as monsieur. They had the social equality which can exist only in the humblest conditions of society, and presented the phenomenon of a primitive little democracy, hatched under the wing of an absolute monarchy.

  These qualities characterize the Acadians to this day. Egalitarian and democratic to the bone, they also treat one another like members of one immense family—because, to a large extent, they are. Most belong to the same few dozen families that arrived before 1700, although that fact is sometimes disguised by names resulting from intermarriage (Bond, Skinner, Dingwall, McDonald) and anglicization (White, Gould, and Perry for LeBlanc, Doiron, and Poirier). In addition, different Acadian communities often have quite different clusters of family names. Chéticamp, for example, in northwestern Cape Breton, boasts scores of Aucoins, Larades, and Cormiers, but those names don’t even appear in the telephone directory of Isle Madame, 160 kilometres away. Climb back up the family tree far enough, however, and almost any Acadian can uncover a relationship with almost any other Acadian.

  So Acadians still do not call one another “monsieur.” In fact, they almost invariably call one another by the familial pronoun “tu” rather than the more formal “vous.”

  Parkman further notes that, “while one observer represents them as living in a state of primeval innocence, another describes both men and women as extremely foul of speech.” And that’s still true, too. I think of Acadian cussing as a form of bilingual folk poetry. I take a powerless battery from my boat to the local garage, and Claude Poirier shakes his head sadly as he announces his diagnosis: “C’est tout fucké, ça.”

  “He’s so goddamn cute!” says an Acadian grandmother adoringly, cradling her baby grandson. “I could just squeeze the fuckin’ shit right outta him.” Perhaps my favourite line of all is a disgusted Acadian’s declaration that “That fuckin’ t’ing is fuckin’ well fucked.”

  But the fact that the European governments ostensibly ruling Acadia were barely aware of its existence doesn’t mean the Acadians were without law. English-speaking Canadians tend to think of “law” in the form of British common law—as a set of written requirements, permits, and prohibitions embodied in a complex apparatus of statutes, police, lawyers, courts, and prisons and deriving its authority from the Crown. Common law, however, is only one of three great legal traditions in Canada, the others being French civil law, which applies in Quebec, and the many legal traditions of the First Nations. All three are recognized in the Canadian constitution.

  So what do these traditions have in common? What is law, in its essence? The brilliant Indigenous legal scholar John Borrows says that law is that which guides our behaviour and directs our interaction with one another and with the world around us. Sometimes these laws are sacred in character, like dietary rules, prescribed ceremonies, or the Ten Commandments. Sometimes they are rooted in biology, like the obliga
tion of parents to care for their offspring. Sometimes they are bodies of written statutes and regulations. Sometimes they are customary, or symbolic—unwritten conventions understood by all who use them, like the long-standing tradition whereby a government that loses a confidence motion in Parliament must resign.

  When disputes arose in the rustic democracy of the early Acadians, writes journalist and author John Demont, “they worked them out themselves, often with the clergy serving as unofficial judges.” Community rules and decisions were often made by a vote of the heads of the local households and enforced by consensus. Specific legal practices varied from place to place and from one period to another, notes Stephen White, the legendary Acadian genealogist at the Université de Moncton. Procedures also varied according to the seriousness of the issue. Major crimes—matters of “high justice”—might be referred to the formal colonial government, but “low justice” issues might be decided by the local seigneur or by a council of elders.

  “In a colony of 450 people, very little could be done without everyone knowing about it,” White tells me, smiling. “So you couldn’t get away with much, or there’d be serious consequences.” That’s still true; when I comment on the Acadian habit of leaving the doors unlocked, White reminds me that it’s not very risky because “you know the old lady across the street is always watching.” And he tells me a story about the Forgeron family of Isle Madame.

  The original Forgeron lived in eighteenth-century Louisbourg when Cape Breton was still Île Royale, a French colony. His name was Thomas Lesauvage, a medieval French name meaning “wild” or “native” more than “savage.” “Bleuets sauvages” are wild blueberries, for instance, but native people were also “sauvages.” Thomas, a locksmith, made most of the locks in Louisbourg; he shrewdly kept copies of the keys, which he later used in a series of robberies. He was caught and jailed—but, says White, “he had also made the locks for the jail, so he picked the locks, let himself out, and fled to Acadia.”

  At this point, “Acadia” was the mainland of Nova Scotia, which was in British hands, so Thomas was safe. But there were always plenty of Mi’kmaq in and around the Acadian communities, so “Thomas Lesauvage” fell on Acadian ears as “Thomas the Native,” which was confusing. In addition—note this—the Acadians even then had no locks, so Thomas’s trade was worthless. Instead, he became a blacksmith, a “forgeron,” and his original surname gradually atrophied. His descendants were Forgerons, and many of them eventually moved to Isle Madame, where they became a distinguished family of sea captains and traders.

  In matters of “low justice,” the Acadians typically relied less on written rules than on shared understanding of what was proper and fair, and good for the community. Their attitude, says White, was “ ‘If that young man is stealing, there’s something wrong in our community. We need to do something, find something to occupy his time. How can we fix the problem?’ The approach was never destructive; it was always constructive.”

  One deeply respected Acadian law says—silently—that since we all rely on one another for our well-being, everyone must do what he or she can for the general welfare of the community. You come out to work at the village hall, provide meals for the sick and transportation for the elderly. You volunteer at community functions such as dances, assist at Mass, serve on the cemetery committee and on the board of the co-op or credit union. The economy of an Acadian community is commonly dominated by co-ops; visiting Tignish, PEI, one time, I was amused to discover that every single business in town, including the gas station, the fish plant, and the funeral parlour, was a co-op.

  In goods, cash, or time, you give what you can to help others through life’s inevitable emergencies. By the same token, when your own time of need arrives, you have the support of your whole community. One example: when a home burns down, or a family faces a serious illness or loses its breadwinner, the community often organizes a “day” for the family. From morning to night, the community hall hosts bake sales and raffles, games and silent auctions. At suppertime volunteers provide a meal, and in the evening there’s a dance with a well-patronized bar. Everything is donated by community members and delivered by volunteers—the pies and cakes, the pots of stew and chowder, the door prizes, the tools and teapots and CDs, the live music. The proceeds, including admission to the dance and the earnings from the bar, are simply given to the afflicted family.

  In a parish of 1500 people, on an island of only 4300, such a “day” routinely raises $5000 to $15,000. After the death of one particularly beloved volunteer, the community of Louisdale, just off Isle Madame, raised $50,000—enough to send the deceased woman’s daughter to university.

  This is a system of mutual aid that’s been operating long before the phrase “social safety net” was coined. It also represents the deepest level of security you can have: a web of community relations that ensures you won’t be hurt because nobody wants to hurt you. This is the close mesh of civility that makes Acadians—and Maritimers in general—so reluctant to move away, and so homesick when they do.

  But mark this: the amount that will be raised in a “day” closely reflects the support you’ve provided to others. On one such occasion, I found the hall virtually deserted; the day’s proceeds couldn’t have amounted to more than a couple of hundred dollars. I asked someone why.

  “Well, look who it’s for,” he said. “What’d that guy ever do for the community?”

  That’s the nature of Acadian law: the Golden Rule, with teeth. It’s a system of rewards and responsibilities, developed by the community, that shapes individual behaviour.

  Customary practices governed the Acadians for a century or more. And although the imperial struggle between French and English went on like a thunderstorm over their heads, they generally strove, with considerable success, to remain neutral. Some joined in sorties with the Mi’kmaq against the English. Most, however, resisted their French priests’ pressure to take up arms against the English, just as they made it clear to the English that they would affirm allegiance to the British Crown only if they would not be required to take up arms against the French. That policy served them well for 150 years, during which, writes Isle Madame historian Don Boudrot, “new customs and traditions arose, a distinct culture emerged, and these people came to consider themselves Acadians, not Frenchmen.” By then, even their language had become distinctive, preserving medieval words and expressions that had disappeared in France and incorporating English and Mi’kmaw terms to describe North American realities. Quite recently my friend Edwin DeWolf and I were stripping shingles off my old house. Underneath we found not tarpaper but birchbark.

  “Ah,” said Edwin. “Muskwee!” That’s the pronunciation of “maskwi”—the Mik’maw word for birchbark.

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  By the 1750s, the British, now firmly in control of Acadia, were mobilizing for the final assault against the remaining French colonies in Île Royale and Quebec—and were demanding that the Acadians swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown. When the Acadians adamantly refused, the British commenced the brutal process of ethnic cleansing known as the Expulsion of the Acadians—in French, Le Grand Dérangement, the Great Disruption. In September 1755, after seizing the Acadians’ boats and weapons, British troops herded the men of Grand Pré into their church and read out a royal proclamation declaring that all the Acadians’ possessions, including lands, homes, and livestock, were “forfeited to the Crown, except for money and household goods, and that you yourselves are to be removed from this his province.”

  This was a legal proclamation, issued by the British colonial government, no doubt designed to strengthen public confidence in the administration of justice.

  At the end of October a fleet of four decrepit ships carried eleven hundred Acadians away to the Thirteen Colonies. After clearing the Annapolis Valley and the isthmus of Chignecto, British troops marched into what is now New Brunswick
, destroying Acadian communities on the St. John River and along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wherever they went families were separated, farms and villages burned, wells poisoned, livestock slaughtered. Families were deliberately divided; this is the background to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous epic poem, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. One shipload after another carried deportees to the English colonies all down the Atlantic seaboard, where they were entirely unwelcome and often treated with astonishing contempt and cruelty. Eventually the English colonists refused to accept any more detested and destitute French Catholics, so later waves of deportees were sent to France and England. Many later made their way to Louisiana, becoming the Cajuns of today.

  During the first few years of the Expulsion, numerous Acadians eluded the troops by hiding in the woods, often with their Mi’kmaw allies, or by escaping to Île Royale or Île Saint-Jean, which were still in French hands. Some fought back, notably Joseph Broussard, or “Beausoleil,” whom John Demont calls “the Acadian Ché Guevara” (and who is, Demont notes, an ancestor of the pop singer Beyoncé). But in 1756 the Seven Years’ War broke out, and two years later the English captured the massive French fortress at Louisbourg. Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean passed into English hands, and the Expulsion continued in the newly ceded territories. Once again, disease and malnutrition killed hundreds, while innumerable others drowned. Don Boudrot reports that in Île Saint-Jean, 3450 Acadians were put aboard nine leaky ships, several of which sank; in the end, only 700 arrived in England. Overall, between 10,000 and 18,000 Acadians were deported. Thousands more died or were killed.

  Stories of the Expulsion remain part of Acadian family lore and legend. For example, because there are so few Acadian family names, Acadian families are often subdivided into clans with nicknames. In Petit de Grat, the descendants of a prosperous man named Sylvère Samson are known as “Catou,” a distillation of “qui a tout,” meaning “who have everything.” One family of Landrys (or Landries, or Londerees) are the “Ouiskins” (pronounced Wishkin), the “Chinwhiskers.” Another Landry family descends from three brothers who played cards at a local store and had to take their winnings in groceries; the brothers chose lard, and their descendants are known as the Landrys Saindoux—the Lard Landrys. One of these is Thilmond Landry, Phillip Boudreau’s neighbour; another is James Landry, Phillip’s nemesis.