Destroying, recreating. It’s hard for me to see the big geological picture, but I guess it’s like what I see each year along the shoreline. In the summer the sand is deposited at the beach where I surf. In the winter it’s washed away. Then it comes back. But the beach keeps changing as well. Destroying, recreating. That’s what the natural forces have been doing to coastal Nova Scotia for a long time and will continue to do. Maybe humans have done the same thing here. As the current fish crisis illustrates, however, we’ve put too much effort into the first half of the cycle and it’s time to shift to the re-creation mode.
Land of the Mini-dinosaurs
The oldest dinosaur fossils in Canada have been found along the Fundy Shore, near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. They date back 240 million years. The tides continually erode the shorelines of this part of the province and have allowed for wonderful discoveries of fragments from this distant, but certainly not lifeless, past. Two American researchers, Paul Olsen and Neil Shubin, made one of the largest finds ever for this time period in 1986 when they unearthed more than a hundred pieces of fossil bone. Along with Olsen and Shubin, scientists who have studied the fossils from this area are convinced that something catastrophic occurred way back then, causing a mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
Most Nova Scotia dinosaurs were not massive. They grew to be in the range of one to seventeen feet in length. The Otozoam, which slinked around the mud flats, was something like a contemporary crocodile. A lot of the creatures who ran around on the land were the size of turkeys or ostriches. At least one mini-dinosaur had a footprint of one centimetre, no larger than that of a robin.
Keep in mind that back then, well before the ice ages, Nova Scotia was located near the equator and covered in rain forests. Known as the Coal Age, this period of time 300-500 million years ago allowed for the build-up of organic materials that would eventually be crushed and formed into coal.
A million years ago, the ice that crept down from the poles to cover all of Nova Scotia was a kilometre and a half thick. The glaciers advanced and retreated five or six times and between these colder spells, animal and plant life would re-emerge. Right now, we may well be living in one of those benevolent periods of time between glaciers, some experts suggest.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Heavy Ice Gives Way to Glacial Rebound
Not long after all the depositing of materials from the collision and separation, Nova Scotia began to erode. Glaciers, in their advances and retreats, destroyed a lot of geological evidence. Ice ages came and went. Global temperatures went down, then up. Seas rose and fell, all affecting the shape of this coast. The most recent retreat of major ice was a mere 10,000 years ago.
If you fly over Nova Scotia, you can readily see what the scouring and grinding of glaciers has done to us. Sediment has been pushed off the land, leaving bare rock in many places. The lakes tend to run north and south. Glacial action has left drumlins, moraines and piles of till and kettle holes. Four-kilometre-thick ice sitting on the land squeezed it and made it bulge outward into the sea. You could have walked all the way to Sable Island on the ice that sat on dry land in those days.
Periods of glacial rebound followed those frosty times when the unweighted continents could push up as the land recovered. But the water along the coastline would also rise as the ice melted, drowning the coast again. Even now, we are seeing the results of glacial melting as the sea intrudes further into the land. As salt-water levels get higher, lakes will end up being inlets as the salt water connects to the fresh.
The lake in front of my house, Lawrencetown Lake, seems to be going in the opposite direction. It’s filling up with sediment and has been for a long time. This body of water is shielded from the sea by a wide low marsh and a set of sand dunes ravaged by sand and gravel excavators of the 1950s. The sea will eventually have its way here, sediment notwithstanding. It will break through. The beach will retreat and then disappear altogether and if my 200-year-old house continues to stand, the waves will lap at my driveway and a new breed of surfers will be riding waves where I once gardened Swiss chard and peas. o
Here, drumlins, those whale-shaped hills of glacial debris, elongated and cigar-like, are abbreviated now along the Eastern Shore. Half of each of these soft-shouldered hills at Lawrencetown, Seaforth and East Chezzetcook are chewed off. The land has been gobbled, digested and is silting off toward the deeper sea bottom. Citadel Hill in Halifax is primarily a drumlin and it too may one day feel salt water slapping at its base. Barrie Clarke says jovially, “I already have the concession for gondolas in Halifax; as the city goes down, it will become the Venice of North America. You’ll be able to cruise down Hollis Street in a boat.” When all the ice melts, the sea level can go up as much as 150 metres. “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” the chorus sings, saying goodbye to a sizeable chunk of the most populated city of this fair province.
A Paradise for Fish
The riches of the sea were once our greatest resource. Through four ice ages, mud and sand were scraped from the land here and dumped off the coast, creating a fertile series of “banks.” The soils that could have supported good farming were stolen from us and given to the fish. As the ice melted, the sea rose over the banks of soil left out there, creating a great place for minute life to develop, leading to higher forms who fed on the lower ones until a massive population of fish cruised around the Grand Banks and George’s Bank. It was here that the collision of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream took place, a fortuitous combination that enhanced the production of teeming sea life. The great Arctic current of the Labrador, 400 metres deep and 350 kilometres wide, is packed with rich minerals and tiny northern sea creatures. The Gulf Stream, which is positioned 400 to 800 kilometres off the coast of Halifax, mixes with the cold water here. The mineral-rich northern waters and the warmer southern waters provide perfect conditions for the breeding of plankton which are fed on Pby small fish such as capelin and small cod. They, in turn, feed the bigger fish that are harvested by people. Then we overfish without regard to the future and suddenly something goes wrong. The cycle ends. Given time, the planet may repair itself. No one knows how much time this can take.
In the heyday of the Grand Banks, cod was harvested by the ton. A codfish can grow to noinety-six kilograms if left to survive into old age. A female codfish is (or was) enormously fecund, carrying as many as nine million eggs at once. Cod are omnivorous and have been known to eat seabirds, bars of soap, metal, whole scallops, lobsters or nearly anything. But drag the ocean floor for decades destroying the habitat and even they cannot continue to survive. Spawning must take place between 1.5 and 7°C. As global temperatures change, that too may make successful breeding impossible for the cod. And once the cod disappear, other ispecies will not be far behind. The recent disaster in the fishery of the Atlantic suggests that we may not see the recovery in our lifetime. Perhaps it will take longer than our children’s lifetime. As the history of Nova Scotia unfolds, the logic of this result seems all too, well, logical. The British and the French first came here to carry off whatever they could that was of value. They came to exploit and that destiny has been fulfilled for these several centuries in the fishery and to a lesser degree in the forests. Once the exploitation is over, it will be time, we hope, for repair and recovery.
Mastodons, Moose and Men
Before the ages of ice, Nova Scotia had a rich diversity of animal and plant life. No major mountain ranges impeded the traffic of wandering creatures or emigrating plant life in any direction. Each interglacial period, however, saw less variety and intensity of life. There were times of tundra and vast fields of northern grasses with shrubs and sedge growing from the moraines and the glacial till. In the valleys grew sugar maple and hemlock, balsam fir, white spruce and white pine. The landscape of much of Nova Scotia six thousand years ago may have looked a lot like the barrens of Peggy’s Cove today. Sable Island, however, probably has the same vegetation today as existed there 11,000 years ago. It wasn�
�t until as recently as 5,000 to 3,500 years ago that the mixed forests of the province developed.
Well after the dinosaurs romped around, the mighty and hairy mastodon could be found here. In the early 1990s, workers at the National Gypsum quarry near Stewiacke (previous claim to fame: “Halfway from the North Pole to the Equator!”) uncovered not one but two mastodons that were about 70,000 years old. Mastodons, like the modern moose, preferred to hang out in lakes and swamps. Near Middle River, Cape Breton, an even “younger” mastodon from 30,000 years ago was unearthed. Cuts and scrapings on the bones imply that the beast was hunted down by men, suggesting that Nova Scotia was inhabited by tribes of hunters even then. Mastodons became extinct here about 10,000 years ago.
The ice may have been disastrous to plants and animals, but it allowed for an ice bridge to form across the Bering Strait, far away from Nova Scotia on the western fringe of Alaska. Migrating across this bridge came bison, moose, caribou and musk oxen, creatures most suited to cold climates who tended to continue moving east instead of south to warmer climes. Eventually they found their way to this far coast.
Other animals found here after the ice ages included white-tailed deer, black bear, beavers and ermine, to name a few. All still exist here today.
Humans had also crossed the Bering ice bridge, travelling throughout North America, retreating southward as the glaciers advanced, but moving back north when the land opened up. These peoples crossed over from Asia 13,000 years ago and their children began to move south along a kind of corridor that led them onto the Great Plains. Within 2,000 years they had settled all over North America, including as far away as Nova Scotia. They travelled by land and when possible by water. The fragmented remains of a very early settlement is located near Debert. There, these early Nova Scotians sustained themselves on caribou herds. Debert, the site of one of the earliest human settlements here, seemed destined to be the location of a final enclave of humanity had we not all survived the Cold War. In the 1960s, the Nova Scotia government built a massive underground bunker ethere to shelter the premier and a select band of men and women to keep civilization going should there be an all-out nuclear war. Had the bunker ever been put to use, the surviving politicians and bureaucrats would have emerged into a decimated Debert landscape, harsher than anything known by the Paleo-Indians who first came here.
Those earliest of settlers would have lived in animal-skin tents upon a tundra in a climate still chilled by receding glaciers. They hunted the mastodon and caribou with sharp stone-tipped spears. Other stone tools were used for preparing hides and chipping away at bone and wood.
Traces of human presence are absent between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, probably due to rising sea levels and an unkind environment. For the following thousand or so years, human settlement again appeared along the coas ts, where people fished from the sea and the rivers and hunted beaver, moose and deer. We don’t know a lot about these times, but spears and grooved axes, scrapers and knives have been found. In the period between 3,500 and 2,500 years ago, tools must have been very important not only for a livelihood but as part of one’s identity. When you died, you were buried with your tools and painted in red ochre as part of your preparation to enter the spirit world.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Ten Thousand Years of Civilization
In his book We Were Not the Savages, Mi’kmaq historian Dan Paul writes eloquently about the history of his people, for the first time documenting the story of the Europeans’ arrival and settlement of Nova Scotia from the Native North American point of view. So much of what is recorded by the European invaders is so slanted by Eurocentric, and ultimately racist, attitudes that it may be unreasonable to accept any of the early written accounts about the Mi’kmaq as fact. Like me, Dan has an inherent mistrust of history as it is reported to us. White heroes of yore now appear more like villains of monumenral proportions. If Dan and other living Mi’kmaq leaders suggest that towns named for the likes of Amherst, Cornwallis and Lawrence be changed, it is not a simple complaint against nomenclature. It is a protest against the power of a dominating culture to distort what really happened. In a modern tribunal, all of the above would be rightfully convicted of not only murder but genocide.
The story of the Nova Scotian Mi’kmaq people and the arrival of white settlers is a tragic tale of the degradation of an entire society. As Dan Paul points out, the European arrival was nothing short of a “total disaster” for his people.
It was 10,000 years ago the first Mi’kmaq settled in Nova Scotia. Having descended from other tribes which crossed the Bering Strait and spread out across North America, they had probably retreated south once or several times as the climate dictated. Now they were here to stay and prosper until their land was invaded by Europeans in the seventeenth century. Each Native culture evolved as it separated from the rest into a unique pattern of lifestyle, language and government. While Mi’kmaq and Maliseet bore strong similarities, for example, the Mi’kmaq and the Mohawk would be radically different. *
Mi’kmaq culture was of a highly organized and civilized nature. It is reputed to have been an open and accepting society with no degree of racial elitism. Early French officers would worry about this openness, because it led to “reverse assimilation” as French soldiers became part of Mi’kmaq communities and families. Much earlier, it is suggested that even the notorious Vikings had been welcomed into Mi’kmaq culture, accounting for the presence of some very white Native people on hand to greet the English and French when they arrived.
Mi’kmaq villages were democratic, with an established legal system for resolving grievances. There were seven defined Mi’kmaq districts in the region and most people lived in communities of 50 to 500. By the seventeentht century, the Mi’kmaq population in Atlantic Canada stood at about 100,000. By 1843, this number had diminished to a mere 1,300 survivors of the disease, malnutrition and mistreatment that befell the people whose homeland was overtaken by men from across the sea.
According to Dan Paul, the Mi’kmaq were far too accommodating to the intrusive Europeans. The English really had little to fear from the Mi’kmaq until they began to outrage the local population with vicious acts against these people they viewed as “savages.” The resulting Mi’kmaq backlash would be an effort of simple self-defence, a matter of survival against the militant British .
Mi’kmaq society was not warlike by nature. Men were competitive but it was a kind of contest to be the best provider for the community, not a competition for the greatest personal profit. The English leaders could not cdomprehend this principle. While the British notion of leadership hinged on enforced respect and punishment, Mi’kmaq leadership was based on hunting skills and character strengths. k
Religion revolved around a personal and spiritual relationship to the earth and the inherent spirit in all things of the earth – from the rocks to trees and bears. The Mi’kmaq have always believed in an afterlife and the morality of the community was based upon religious beliefs embracing the interrelationship of all things of the human world, the natural world and the spiritual world. Monogamy was dominant in the culture, although polygamy was permitted. Chrestian LeClercq, one of the first Europeans to document the Mi’kmaq way of life, notes that they were a very emotional people. Principles of honour played an important role in their lives, as did romantic love and a sense of duty to family and community. The attitude toward sex was very open and while premarital sex was not encouraged, no stigma was attached to someone born out of wedlock.
When Port Royal’s first French settlers made unwelcome advances against Mi’kmaq women, however, word was quickly returned to the French leaders that such actions were offensive. Any white man who attempted to repeat the offence might be severely punished by the Mi’kmaq chief.
Of their dietary habits, explorer Nicholas Denys wrote: “They lived without care, and never ate either salt or spice. They drank only good soup, very fat. It was this that made them live long and multiply much. Th
ey 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.
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