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Labours Lost: the forgotten history of the Mi’kmaq

During the mid-19th century the Mi’kmaq were perilously close to dying out — yet against all odds they managed to preserve and enrich their heritage for future generations. Labour historian Dr. Andy Parnaby is uncovering the inspirational message they left us.

After the fur trade ended with the white settlers, what did the Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton do?

It might sound like a simple question — but until Andy Parnaby looked into it, there was surprisingly little written about the matter.

“The indigenous people traded fish and fur with Europeans; but after that stopped, it was almost as if they stopped working too,” says the associate professor of history at Cape Breton University. “It’s an interesting area, but there’s not a lot of scholarship. So my basic research question was: What did they do for a living? What sort of jobs did they have? And how much money did they make?”

There’s no shortage of academic works about the Mi’kmaq First Nation. Sociologists monitor and measure their contemporary culture. Legal experts examine and review their ancient rights and treaties. And historians reconstruct how they lived before the Europeans arrived in North America. But the period from the 1840s to the 1870s remains curiously neglected, despite the fact that it was a pivotal time for the Mi’kmaq — spanning the last days of the fur trade, mass immigration from Europe, and the creation of the Indian reserve system.

Why is so little known about this period? Parnaby identifies two main reasons. First, scholarly agendas tend to be influenced by political issues such as traditional hunting or fishing rights, or government policy toward First Nations. Second, until fairly recently, “Labour historians have really only been interested in European workers; the aboriginal worker fell through the cracks.”

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Nova Scotia and Cape Breton filled up with immigrants from New England and Scotland, the Mi’kmaq found themselves increasingly sidelined. Their lands were occupied; their access to hunting and fishing grounds severely restricted. As their population waned, so too did their political clout. Under the French, they had enjoyed a guaranteed sovereignty of territory ratified by the ultimate authority, the Pope. But all that changed under British rule. Unlike the French, the British were unwavering in their determination to claim and parcel up the land, and they were content to let the native population dwindle into irrelevance. “By the 1800s,” says Parnaby, “they’re seen as a social problem that needs to be solved, administered, placed on reserves, gotten out of the way. They’re no longer a threat.”

The government did not disregard the Mi’kmaq’s plight completely — a degree of assistance was given to those too sick or too old to provide for themselves. Nonetheless, it looked entirely possible that the Mi’kmaq nation would dwindle to nothing. What intrigues Parnaby is that not only did the Mi’kmaq not die out; they steadfastly preserved and enriched their heritage throughout these hard times.

Before the Europeans arrived, and for nearly two centuries afterwards, the Mi’kmaq moved around Cape Breton according to the seasonal availability of foods. In the early-to-mid-19th century, with their rights of access and traditional means of sustenance all but gone, they turned to alternative means of survival — including a move toward subsistence farming. After planting their plots with potatoes and cereals, they would take whatever seasonal work they could find on the island, and return to gather in the crops at the onset of fall.

The practice of doing different jobs at different times is known as occupational pluralism, says Parnaby: “The baskets they would have used for domestic or ceremonial purposes, they are now making and selling them to white settlers. We find that women are following indigenous men to work in the commercial fishery [or] to sell other things to European fishermen.”

A few Mi’kmaq continued to trap animals for fur, competing directly with poor European immigrants. Competition for resources meant that even basic agriculture was not always an option: sometimes Scottish squatters might take up residence on land set aside for the local aboriginal population — and neither violent clashes nor government proclamations would succeed in shifting them.

However hard existence was for the Mi’kmaq, Parnaby found that they consistently overcame: “Some people have argued that as indigenous people move more and more into this wage labour/entrepreneur economy, they become less like Indians, and more like Europeans — they start to assimilate. But what I discovered was actually something quite different. Outwardly they started to dress like Europeans. But that meagre income they’re deriving from these rounds of resource-gathering and basket-selling and fishery work — they’re actually taking some of that money and are plugging it back into older customary celebrations and rituals...”

Far from fading away, the Mi’kmaq customs grew stronger. Parnaby says the feast of St Anne at Chapel Island each July proved particularly significant for both religious and cultural reasons: “We see the celebration of St Anne start to get larger throughout this period. St Anne’s Day is an important day for bringing people together, for reaffirming bonds, for strengthening language, for having a lot of fun, for gambling and games, for marriages, for visiting with the priest. And all that, I think, helps stabilize a people as they face pretty dim economic prospects.”

Parnaby looked high and low for material to document this history. Sources included several petitions from aggrieved Mi’kmaq to British officialdom, government reports and censuses, reminiscences from old copies of Cape Breton’s Magazine, photographs, and artifacts. He even gleaned valuable snippets from travel writers of the day, wherever they described their transactions with native people. One passage applauds their acumen during a visit by the Prince of Wales in July 1860: “There’s a great story of a group of Mi’kmaq women who are at a seasonal camp over by North Sydney. They know that the royal party is there, and they get together all their baskets and quill boxes and go and basically push their way into the royal family and try to sell this stuff — and it survives in some of the press reporting of the time — so they’re actually pretty tenacious and hard bargainers.” Evidently the women would not take no for an answer: according to news reports of the day, they managed to secure some “fabulous prices” for their wares.

“Another good source turns out to be contemporary Mi’kmaq poetry,” says Parnaby. “Rita Joe wrote all kinds of poems; she’s got lots of peoms about baskets and about making baskets, and learning that craft from her mother, who learned it from her great grandmother. Now clearly she’s evoking a spiritual quality that goes with the generations, and the basketmaking, and women and so on — but as a labour historian I would read that as work poetry, in the same category as people who wrote and sang songs about working in the mines. It’s the same thing: work is a big part of people’s lives.”

Parnaby feels that this knowledge has the potential to inform decisions faced by First Nations communities today: “It resonated with some of my Mi’kmaq students ... because they’re on the other side of a series of government programs that never worked. Before all those programs there was actually a long tradition of community, entrepreneurialism and support. So maybe what needs to be done is to reach back to that history and say: ‘We’ve been in worse circumstances and we survived — and one of the ways we did it was because we all acted.’”

For more information contact:
Dr. Andrew Parnaby
Cape Breton University
P.O. Box 5300
Sydney, NS B1P 6L2
Tel: (902) 563-1286
Fax: (902) 563-1894