History month disappointing for Nova Scotia researcher

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It's hard to condense 10,000 years of Mi'kmaq history into a 45-minute speech. Just ask Don Julien, executive director of the Confederacy of Mainland Micmacs.

"You miss an awful lot of stuff," he sighed. "You have to summarize the key points."

For the past year, Julien has been re-educating the Nova Scotia public on Mi'kmaq history. He's been giving speeches to organizations such as school, rotary clubs, church groups, the police, Girls Guides and even visiting Mi'kmaq reserves.

However, Julien usually takes three hours to tell the history of his people, and it's usually in Micmac, he told an audience of around 30 non-Natives gathered at the Nova Scotia Museum.

Last year Nova Scotia Premier John Savage and Ben Sylliboy, Grand Chief of the Mi'kmaq Grand Council, signed a proclamation recognizing October as Mi'kmaq History Month. Events around the province included cultural awareness days, open houses, lectures at libraries, and museum and book displays.

But Julien was disappointed with events for this year's first-ever Mi'kmaq History Month because while many non-Native students did class projects on Mi'kmaq history, they rarely met Mi'kmaq people.

"I think there could have been more interaction in the schools across the province. They should have local people from the local reserves go in (to the schools) to talk," Julien said.

His history lesson touched on everything from Mi'kmaq inventions - for example, Indian football, a game played using a dried-out moose bladder - to atrocities committed by Europeans.

Between 1744 and 1749 the Gorham Rangers were sent from Boston "to annoy, distress and destroy" Mi'kmaq men. The rangers were paid 50 pounds for every Mi'kmaq scalp they produced.

But the situation became more terrifying when the infamous Nova Scotia Governor Lord Cornwallis commanded "all (in Nova Scotia) to take and destroy the Savages commonly called 'Micmacs'. In 1756 Governor Charles Lawrence offered a bounty for the scalps of Mi'kmaq men, women and children.

Learning about Mi'kmaq history is a difficult task for Natives since so much oral history has been lost through the loss of the language, Julien said. Most information comes from Jesuit writings and non-Native archaeologists - not from Mi'kmaq people themselves, he added. Treaty and government documents help flesh out archeological research, said Julien, who starting piecing together Mi'kmaq history 20 years ago.