From the Missiguash River to the Mackenzie Delta, breathtaking, raw beauty

This is a land bigger than the imagination – for all of us. In the Northwest Territories, the Akaitcho say, “‘Denech’anie,’ meaning ‘the path the people walk’ and that ‘we will live on the land as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows.”

I’ve driven across the Western Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta; summer at 68 degrees latitude and the vast, open land at the top of the world, listening to Robin Mark’s “Revival In Belfast (Hope In The City)” and Susan Aglukark’s powerfully haunting song, “E186,” about what it meant to be an “Eskimo” with a number and no name, cranked up to full volume. With its raw power, it served as a defining moment in helping me to understand, if imperfectly and incompletely, the difference in what it meant to be Inuit rather than qallunaat (which, loosely translated from Inuktitut, is not terribly flattering, as it translates a bit closer to honky than white) North of 60 in the 1940s and 1950s.

Inuvik lives for me as a kaleidoscope of snapshots. One of the most vivid standing on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River watching a flotilla of small boats head out in miserable weather for Aklavik.

The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit were gathering to bury three of their own: Doug Irish, Larry Semmler and Charlie Meyook. Northerners, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, look after their own.

Hundreds of Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and white men travelled by river and by air from Inuvik, from McPherson, from Tsiigehtchic, from the Yukon, from Alaska and from the South for the funerals at All Saints Anglican Church in Aklavik, on the site of the original Anglican Cathedral of the Arctic. The women volunteered to cook the community feast; the men hunted caribou and dug graves, all giving aid and comfort to their brothers and sister in Aklavik.

The Northwest Territories is a vast and open land, where two of the highest virtues practiced are tolerance and respect. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

One dark December day, l got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

I remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” performed in the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, with seemingly everyone in the audience in a school auditorium raising their voices in unison to join in. One of those moments that still send chills up your spine years later. I’ve long forgotten who performed it that night some 20 years ago almost now, but I haven’t forgotten it was a Stan Rogers song, and thinking the Bard of Guysborough County was truly one of Canada’s poets, a coast-to-coast-to-coast national treasure.

We are a country blessed with national treasures. Rhonda Payne, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – was a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999. Rhonda was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough, Ontario on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River).

From Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve had the chance to sail a beluga-populated Hudson Bay, across the invisible maritime boundary that divides Manitoba from Nunavut, and share the Seal River with polar bears. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I remember the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

I spent a balmy Maritime spring evening reporting from Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, while I’ve travelled deep in the woods near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains, searching for Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police. In the same area, I later returned to Sugar Moon Farm, also near Earltown, in search of maple syrup stories, while travelling the back roads of Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still.

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Fête nationale: Long live Acadie, long live the Tintamarre

My name likely doesn’t immediately point to my Acadian ancestry. But indeed my birth mother came from a long line of LeBlancs and Cormiers, who settled on both sides of the saltwater Tantramar Marsh straddling the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provincial boundary at the Missiguash River. This is the soil of Acadie where my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured near Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar Marsh on the Isthmus of Chignecto, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy. It also from Acadie that more than two-thirds of the Acadian population was expelled by the British between 1755 and 1764 during Le Grand Dérangement.

My mother, who lived for many years in Southern Ontario, returned to live on the Tantramar Marsh between Sackville, New Brunswick and Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, in the early 1990s. She spent the last 15 years or so of her life living just a couple of kilometres away from the modest two-storey house she had grown up in at the corner of Cornwall and Cordova streets in Amherst. The home remained in the family for generations until the last family resident, my uncle Harold Cecil Hicks, who spent most of his life living there, died in September 2013.

My mother didn’t talk much about her ancestry, although she acknowledged it in that way Nova Scotians have of accepting something but stopping somewhat short of perhaps fully embracing it, leaving room for lots of ambiguity. My family is big on ambiguity. When I first saw a photograph of my maternal grandmother, Adeline LeBlanc, who I never met, and mentioned to my mother how aboriginal she appeared to be to me, my mother told me she was “part Mi’kmaq.” Somehow that just hadn’t come up before my observation.  The Acadian side of our ancestry didn’t get stressed a whole lot more, truth be told, although my mother seemed to be more conversant in French than I’ve ever been.

People are products of their times. I could hardly expect my mother, who grew up in rural Nova Scotia in the 1940s and 1950s, to be trumpeting her Acadian or Mi’kmaq ancestral heritage.

Still, I saw the momentary anxiety show on her face, quickly followed by a look of pride, when she came home one day and “Nita’s boy” as my Nova Scotia relatives call me, abbreviating her name Juanita, had affixed outside her house the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. It wasn’t lost on my mother, living on a road named Fort Lawrence, that we were standing on some of the most contested land in North America, where New France made its last stand some 250 years earlier against British North America, and even some American colonists from New England came up for a bit of skirmishing from time-to-time. The Acadian pennant flew outside of her house, faded after a few years in the sun and saltwater breeze off Cumberland Basin, for the rest of her life.

All of this comes to mind perhaps because Fête nationale nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes will be marked by annual celebrations again Saturday.

After a full two weeks of its own special brand of joie de vivre, marked by the “clangour” or “din” of musical merriment known as the Tintamarre, the 53rd annual Festival acadien de Caraquet on Nouveau-Brunswick’s Péninsule acadienne wraps up Saturday with revelers making as much noise as they can to celebrate Fête nationale, or more formally, nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes on 15 Août.

First held in 1955 to commemorate the bicentenary of  Le Grand Dérangement of the Acadians from the Maritime provinces, the Tintamarre takes its inspiration from a medieval French custom during which a crowd makes as much noise as possible in order to mark a sad or a joyful event.

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