Blood in the Water

by Silver Donald Cameron

  The large numbers of Boudreaus (or Boudrots, or Budros) are also divided into clans, including the Tucks, the Gurlins, the Cakes (who took their winnings in cake instead of lard), the Tocs (whose fishing boat engine went “toc-toc-toc”), and les Oiseaux (the Birds, descendants of Zéphyre Boudreau, an extraordinarily proficient duck hunter). The Bowsers—Phillip’s family—are Boudraults Oiseau.

  Another clan of Boudreaults are les Madouesses, the Porcupines, whose nickname goes right back to the Expulsion, when Charles Boudreau was hiding out in the woods, feeding his family by trapping animals for the pot. One day, says Stephen White, he’d caught a porcupine—a “madouesse,” a Mi’kmaw word adopted by the Acadians—and was removing it from the trap when he heard someone coming. Fearing it might be an English soldier, he hid. He had no weapon, so when the man came close, he smacked him in the face with the porcupine. But the man was an Acadian, a friend, who ever afterwards called him “mon maudit madouesse”—my goddamn porcupine.

  The Seven Years’ War ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and by 1764 the Acadians were gradually returning from exile. In 1766, says Don Boudrot, 800 Acadians gathered in Boston and began the journey home—on foot. After sixteen weeks they arrived at the St. John River, and many weeks later they reached the Acadian homelands in and around the Annapolis Valley. By now their farms had been “granted” to English-speaking settlers, chiefly from New England, but the following year the returnees were awarded a large wooded area on St. Mary’s Bay. They’d walked a thousand miles—and 250 years later, they’re still there. That’s the home of Noah Saulnier—Noah à Gilles à Henry à Simide…

  This is the stuff of myth and legend, with which the Acadians were very familiar. A similar walk back to Acadia, but starting in Georgia, is the narrative core of the internationally celebrated novel Pélagie-la-Charrette. As its brilliant Acadian author Antonine Maillet once told me, few Acadians were literate, but they had—and have—a phenomenal storehouse of oral history and literature. Maillet herself once interviewed a very old woman named Primeau who lived far up a Louisiana bayou and spoke only French. She asked Madame Primeau to tell her an old story. Madame Primeau promptly recited a version of a medieval French poem called the Roman de Renart, the Fable of Reynard—but she was delivering a version earlier than the first written version, which itself dates from 1174 AD. The Roman is full of classical references—Homer, Ulysses, Hector, Helen—all of which are common first names on Isle Madame. Indeed, the very rocks in the sea nearby have classical names: Castor, Pollux, Cerberus. The Acadians may not have been literate, but they were neither uncultured nor unsophisticated.

  The returned Acadians were not allowed to create large towns, but instead were settled in widely scattered and somewhat inhospitable spots around the coast—Chéticamp, Chezzetcook, Pubnico, Bouctouche, Escuminac, Caraquet, Tignish. They had been farmers, but henceforth they would be fishermen and, later, shipwrights and traders. For the next 200 years they would be second-class citizens—but after 1967 they’d share in the general resurgence of French language and culture in Canada. Fifty years later, in 2017, Nova Scotia welcomed its first Acadian lieutenant governor. The Queen’s new representative in what was once Acadia was former Supreme Court Justice Arthur LeBlanc, an Acadian from West Arichat, Isle Madame. In 1971, when I first bought property in Isle Madame, Arthur LeBlanc managed the transaction for me.

  * * *

  —

  The Expulsion and return constitute the national saga of the Acadians, probably the greatest national story in all of Canada. It’s a story of blood, treachery, and endurance that continues to shape Acadian families and communities today. It’s a story about British law and government and the vigorous administration of injustice. I recount it here partly because it is such a fascinating and dramatic epic, but also to bring home the point that for Acadians, the story is more like memory than history.

  And now, I hope, you will feel the weight of a few simple sentences:

  “Every Acadian sleeps with a suitcase packed.”

  “People in Petit de Grat really don’t like to call the cops.”

  “To an Acadian, the phrase ‘English justice’ is an oxymoron.”

  “I was gonna kill Phillip Boudreau. I mean it, I was gonna kill that son of a bitch. It wouldn’t have mattered to me about the Queen or King George or the cops, not one bit.”

  King George? King George? Maybe George VI, who died in 1952—or might this be an echo of George II, in whose name the Acadians were deported?

  In the clash of the empires, the Mi’kmaq were closely aligned with the Acadians; both were Catholic, both were deeply rooted in the territory, and neither was happy about the incursions of the British. More importantly, as Mi’kmaw historian Daniel Paul notes, the Mi’kmaq and the Acadians shared a whole suite of values, including “mutual respect for neighbours, democratic practices, welfare of the community before oneself, and a desire to be left in peace, to name a few.” The Acadian practice of a fundraising “day,” for example, closely resembles the Mi’kmaw custom of “salite,” an auction to raise money at a funeral.

  And if Acadian and Mi’kmaw values were similar, so too was their attitude to law. Mi’kmaw law reflects the Mi’kmaw view of the world, Mi’kmaw spirituality, and the Mi’kmaw language, all of which derive from deep consideration of the natural world. For the Mi’kmaq, say Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis in their stunning little book Mi’kma’ki, The Language of This Land, the landscape is “sentient, ever-changing, and in a continual process of becoming.” Because reality is in constant flux, the Mi’kmaw language, unlike English, is centred on verbs—actions, relationships, states of being. Mi’kmaw legal principles, writes John Borrows in Canada’s Indigenous Constitution, are similarly dynamic, customary, and deliberative; they require extensive consultations so as to reflect the people’s changing experiences and evolving understanding of the world. All of which seems deeply sane, profound, and responsive to reality.

  And the Mi’kmaq, too, have no reason to feel confidence in the administration of British justice. For the Mi’kmaq, British legal practices include signing treaties that you flagrantly disregard, appropriating land that was never yours, “granting” it to your own people, generously giving blankets infected with smallpox to the real owners and stewards of the territory, and herding them into “reserves” which cut them off from the resources of land and sea that have always sustained them. These “reserves” become steadily smaller as your “Indian agents” slice off pieces and sell them. You deny the residents adequate sanitation, housing, and water. Then you seize their children and hold them captive in schools where they’re beaten and raped and forbidden to speak their own language. All this is done under the cover of “laws” the Mi’kmaq played no role in creating and to which they have never consented.

  To an Acadian or a Mi’kmaw, then, English common law presents itself as rigid, insensitive, hostile, and unrealistic—an artificial set of rules that don’t resonate with the nature of reality, or with authentic lived experience, or even with basic principles of equity and fairness.

  Highland Scots are the other large group of European settlers in Cape Breton—and their experience of the administration of British justice is no sweeter. After defeating the Scottish Jacobite army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the English did to the Highlanders exactly what they would do to the Acadians ten years later: hunted them down and murdered them, burned their houses and expelled them from their territories, drove them onto leaky ships bound for America and Australia, and “granted” their clan land to English noble families, whose descendants and successors own it to this day.

  The grand tradition of British justice in Cape Breton continued right into the early twentieth century, when heavy industry was establishing itself 130 kilometres away from Petit de Grat around the harbour of L’sipuktuk—renamed Sydney in honour of a British baron. American interests established a steel mill there in 1901,
fed by iron ore from the mines of Bell Island, Newfoundland, and fuelled by local coal from the vast coal fields around Sydney Harbour. These coal fields, which extend under the sea all the way to Newfoundland, were owned by the Dominion Coal Company, which by 1912 was operating sixteen collieries and producing 40 percent of Canada’s coal. A decade later, Sydney—which had previously been much smaller than Arichat—had surpassed it to become a city of about twenty thousand, ringed by mining towns clustered around the pitheads.

  Coal and steel ultimately employed more than sixteen thousand men in Cape Breton. They came from all over the world—from the British Isles, of course, but also from European countries like Poland, Ukraine, Italy, and Greece and from the West Indies, the Middle East, East Asia, and elsewhere. Many of them came from Cape Breton’s scattered Acadian villages and other rural communities. The miners and steelworkers made industrial Cape Breton the only multicultural community in the Maritimes—but they were little better than slaves. They worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week; at shift changes they worked twenty-four hours straight. And when the demand for coal or steel slackened, the workers’ hours were cut or they were laid off completely. They rented their houses from the company, bought their supplies at “pluck-me stores” owned by the company, had their illnesses treated by company doctors. The prices of these services were set by the companies, and the costs were deducted from the workers’ paycheques. By the time the amounts were totted up, a miner or steelworker might find he owed money to the company. One miner named MacDonald once opened a pay envelope to find just a single penny inside. His family is known to this day as the “Big-Pay MacDonalds.”

  The exploitation was all perfectly legal; laws are made by those who have the power to enforce them, after all. The workers’ only effective defence was union organization and mass action—strikes and slowdowns, demonstrations and picket lines. And since all of that was perfectly illegal, it was met with armed resistance by the companies, abetted by government. When the miners went on strike in 1922 the provincial government called out the militia, dispatching twelve hundred cavalrymen to the coal fields, erecting machine-gun nests with searchlights and barbed-wire barriers at the pitheads, and placing bombing planes on the alert. During the steelworkers’ strike of 1923, a force of mounted company police armed with baseball bats and whips rode into a Sunday morning crowd in Whitney Pier, indiscriminately beating everyone within reach. One policeman rode his horse up three flights of stairs in a boarding house, doing his best to fortify public confidence in the administration of justice by clubbing everyone he met.

  In the great miners’ strike of 1925, the company’s negotiating techniques included cutting off credit at the company store and then, three months later, cutting off electricity and drinking water from the miners’ houses in New Waterford. On June 11 thousands of miners, determined to restore the water, marched on the pumping station at Waterford Lake. The company police charged the crowd, firing more than three hundred shots. One of them went through the heart of a miner named Bill Davis, a father of ten. The crowd captured the policemen but didn’t harm them; instead, it jailed the officers. Bill Davis had the largest funeral in the history of Nova Scotia. June 11 is still a public holiday in Cape Breton.

  The administration of justice was equally robust in the outports, where the fishermen were economic vassals of the fish plant owners, who sold them food and supplies and then bought their fish, unilaterally setting the prices for both transactions. Later, when the offshore fishery adopted big steel draggers, the crews were forbidden to form unions. The law regarded them as “co-adventurers,” working not as employees but as partners in the fishing voyages. That made some sense when the fishermen owned their own boats, or built big offshore schooners together and operated them on shares. By the 1960s, however, catches were declining, the inshore fleet was shrinking, and the offshore fleet was owned by transnational corporations whose draggers went to sea for twelve days at a time, summer and winter, in blizzards, in hurricanes, in howling gales with mountainous seas. When they were bringing in a lot of fish, the draggermen often worked twenty hours straight. Plenty of them died.

  Working as much as five thousand hours a year, triple the hours of the average industrial worker, the draggermen were lucky to average a dollar an hour. It was, of course, the company that did the calculations. On one bitter midwinter trip in 1959, a fisherman named Everett Richardson and his mates sailed January 17, landed February 4, and made $2.01 each.

  “And the one cent was in the envelope too,” Everett grunted, “just with the two dollars.”

  Everett Richardson was a leader in the landmark fishermen’s strike of 1970–71, the story that first brought me to Isle Madame. Two hundred and fifty fishermen had gone on strike, not for better pay or working conditions, but simply for the right to form a union. I eventually wrote a book about the strike, The Education of Everett Richardson. The striking fishermen were from Petit de Grat and Canso, which face each other across Chedabucto Bay. They found themselves confronting not only the companies and the government but also the police, the clergy, the media, and the courts—the whole ruling elite of the province.

  At one point the administration of justice required that Everett Richardson be sentenced to nine months in jail for picketing in defiance of an anti-picketing injunction. The labour movement exploded right across the province, shutting down shops and job sites everywhere. The court backed down. Ultimately, the fishermen won the right to unionize.

  And now, I hope, you will feel the weight of a few more simple sentences:

  “In the war, Lefty and me, we were in the trenches in Italy, and then we realized who the regiment next to us was. ‘Jesus, Lefty,’ I says, ‘these are the same bastards that had the machine-gun nest on top of the nail mill in Sydney during the big steel strike. Keep facin’ ’em. You don’t want them sons of bitches behind you.’ ”

  —World War II veteran in Isle Madame

  “CONTEMPT FOR THE LAW: WHAT ELSE COULD AN HONEST MAN HAVE?”

  —Headline in The Fourth Estate, Halifax,

  after Everett Richardson’s sentencing

  “[The courts] can send free men to jail for refusing to allow the law-machine to rob them of their natural and constitutional rights, but they cannot make justice out of injustice.”

  —Editorial in The Cape Breton Highlander,

  Sydney, on the same occasion

  “DOWN WITH CAPITALISM!”

  —Sign in the May Day parade in Glace Bay in the 1920s

  “When justice is not seen to be done by the public,” read Diane McGrath, opposing bail for Dwayne Samson, “confidence in the bail system and more generally the entire justice system may falter.”

  Confidence in the justice system. Really? Among the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq and the Scots, the miners and steelworkers and fishermen of Cape Breton Island? Really?

  * * *

  —

  The world economy changed. Users of coal switched to natural gas and oil. An increasingly global economy made it cheaper to buy railway track from Asia than from Sydney. Cape Breton’s steel mill and its only remaining colliery were closed in 2001. The pulp and paper industry shrank and the fishery all but vanished. The codfish, once so numerous that John Cabot said they “stayed the passage” of his ships, were becoming small and scarce. By the early 1990s one of the world’s greatest food resources had become commercially extinct, and the federal government—having regulated it into oblivion—declared a moratorium on the cod fishery. A quarter of a century later, the stocks have still not recovered. The cod collapse was an ecological and economic catastrophe that cost forty thousand jobs and gutted entire communities. A disaster of these proportions in Ontario would have been considered a national trauma. But there was no soul-searching about the cod. No heads rolled. There was no Royal Commission.

  The animals at the bottom of the ocean food chain are crustacean
s: shrimp, crab, lobster. That is mainly what is left in the sea. A few communities survive and even thrive on these fisheries. A licence to fish lobsters now sells for the best part of a million dollars, and a lobster fisher’s annual earnings are well into six figures. One of the communities still thriving is Petit de Grat, now almost the only active fishing village in southeastern Cape Breton. Its prosperity is a testament to the shrewdness and energy of its people.

  Overall, however, the communities of Cape Breton are shrinking as the young people emigrate. The children of the miners, the papermakers, the fishermen, and the steelworkers are in Ontario, on the West Coast, and, above all, in Alberta. Those who remain have had to find other work to do.

  Stephen Drake was the last president of the once-powerful District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America. He had grown up in the coal town of New Waterford and had become a miner, like his father and both his grandfathers. In 2000, the mines closed and union laid him off. He wrote a graceful elegy for the brave men who had shared his vocation.

  “There is no finer person on this planet than the working man who carries his lunch can deep into the bowels of the earth,” Drake wrote. “Far beneath the ocean he works the black seam; an endless ribbon of steel his only link to the fresh air and blue skies. The steel rails symbolize a miner’s life, half buried underground, half reaching toward his final reward.”