Rural Colonial Nova Scotia

One of my favourite novels is Iain Banks’s 1994 cyber-punk classic Feersum Endjinn. Set in a fully-wired future, it tells of a world where the real and the virtual are indistinguishable, and where many people’s consciousness exist within a crumbing digital architecture. Characters move through a landscape of decaying partial data, their experiences increasingly unintelligible.

It’s not unlike how , in the very near future, we’ll need to experience heritage sites in Nova Scotia.

“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here” certainly captures where we seem to be going. Heritage sites are being closed; dead links pretend they never existed. Of course, the sites are still there, under that dead link. We can see a snapshot of the site in the Wayback Machine – though a snapshot is just that – there’s no functionality, just some pictures and some text. It’s not yet crumbling like Banks’s “cryptosphere”, but it will. It may be virtual, but it’s just like the real-world Sutherland Steam Museum: not yet crumbling under a lack of maintenance, but it will.

The Government of Nova Scotia announced a series of cutbacks in its February 2026 budget. Heritage, and arts and culture more generally, appear to have been the low-hanging fruit as their cuts were massive. Conservative ministers popped into town for a very short legislative session to announce a series of slashed budgets lines across almost all programs in the arts sector. Most cuts ranged from 30 to 50 per cent, and some entire programs were cancelled. Programs that had existed on shoestring budgets for years are again being asked to do more with less, and this time, more with much less. Several museum sites are simply being shuttered.

The Sutherland Steam Museum is a case in point. It’s a small museum, with a suitably small staff, in the small rural community of New Denmark, Colchester County. It’s a source of pride for that community, a modest generator of tourist traffic, and moreover a reminder of how their community forebears made their way in a dynamic, ever-changing capitalist world. It will be shut down, permanently.

I’m a historian, not an accountant or a finance guy, so I can’t profess great knowledge on this, but I am genuinely mystified by the calculations. We speak of ourselves as proud purveyors of culture and history. We even wish to sell some of that to tourists. We love when someone notices one of our writers or musicians. But developing that kind of culture is not organic, it does not simply emerge from our stoney soils – it’s certainly something in which this government seems unwilling to invest. The Houston government made choices, as all leaders must. But rather than looking to build new sources of revenue, they decided to reduce it by cutting bridge tolls, taxes on non-resident homes and shave a point off the HST. No doubt this has put additional cash in people’s pockets, but it does not come cheap. Oh look, the Province can now claim, we’re in an even tougher budget situation; we’ll need to cut more services. Fiscal policy via self-inflicting wounds appear to be the method of choice.

Heritage sites can’t be understood as sources of revenue, and they aren’t primarily for sale to tourists – they’re for the people of Nova Scotia. These sites are [were!] intended more for education in local history than for drawing off a bit more cash from New York golfers. This is where the greatest loss comes: at the expense of knowing less of ourselves, less of how we adapted to a changing world, less of how we were modern, progressive actors willing to make our place in the emerging industrial world. Do the folks who walk the greens of Cabot Links know they walk over mines that were the livelihoods, and death sentences, for thousands of miners and their families? How will Nova Scotians understand how their province came to be when the choice is between 18th-century fortifications or a millionaires’ yacht race? I hope they enjoy the race; it’s a great event; people should enjoy such events. But they shouldn’t come at the expense of who we are, and where we came from. Of finding resources of hope, not spectacle. All that is solid does seem to melt into air.

The great irony of the Sutherland Steam Museum example is that it offers [offered!] a clear example of exactly what conservatives so frequently laud: hard work, an innovative business strategy, and bourgeois aspirations. The Sutherland mill was the creation of a family that understood change, and responded creatively to its possibilities. Steam engines and a railway meant a Nova Scotia producer need not be tied to the coast, that fossil fuels and steel rails, not river currents, were the energy that could drive the future. Heritage sites like the Sutherland museum give us access to important elements of that dynamic past, of a people who made their way in the modern world.

Heritage is not a frill. It’s something necessary to our sense of self, to our sense of community, to our shared sense of identity. When we visit historic sites, when we see well-chosen elements of our past, speak with knowledgeable guides, and when we see and feel the connectedness of our lives to a distant past, we can build social cohesion and a sense of self-esteem in our communities. And at the same time, we can explore our past mistakes, our shortcomings, and better understand why less effective decisions were made, and how the threads of history formed our cultural cloth. We can see how social solidarities were sometimes acts of exclusion. We can see our virtues, and our failings, and better understand where we are today. Heritage sites provide entrées to history, and self-aware communities. They are the critical infrastructure around which community history can be organised and made real.

Heritage is more than heritage sites. But they’re important. Such sites are material reminders of important aspects of that past. They can be touched, viewed, and walked through. They can be a places of dialogue and understanding. We’ll find little of that on YouTube, and still less in the future portended by the devastating cuts in this budget.

Written for the Acadiensis Blog.

An excerpt from a paper presented at the conference Material Culture of the Atlantic Region, Dalhousie University, 14-16 May 2025. A heavily revised version will appear in a collection from McGill-Queen’s UP in the spring of 2027.

“When I get down in my shop amongst my books and materials of various kinds I feel it to be a great happiness indeed”. 30 May 1880

My project is not a material culture project, but it has a dimension of the field that I think worth exploring. I’m writing a biography of a very ordinary, but highly literate man, a miller, a printer, and a curmudgeon – a man who lived in a small rural community in Nova Scotia but who wished to live a modern life. Objects – both ones still available in museums and archives, or ones described in the diary – offer additional and sometimes powerful evidence that can help us interpret James Barry’s life. Often historians turn to material forms of evidence – things – when their textual sources are weak. But I have LOTS of textual sources – notably, a five volume, 56-year-long daily diary, an account book (not nearly as complete as the diaries, but still useful), two books of transcribed fiddle music, and a small cache of documents across several archives – but I have very few objects. What we do have is Barry’s library, and so this essay explores books as sources for understanding Barry, and more particularly for understanding his volatile moods, that is, how objects (and the making of objects) offer interpretative ground for understanding emotion in his world.

The diary suggests to us many objects that might help us. Most of these are missing but many offer suggestive possibilities for analysis. While in the act of writing that diary, for example, we might consider his pen – what did it mean, every night, when in his strict disciplined manner, he sat down, picked up that steel-tipped pen, dipped it in ink, and began to write? Did the day shape how he held the pen, how the pen then eased or scribbled its way across the page? Or, did the pen and its associated disciplined routine, offer comfort, remedy, control, to his busy, complicated and often painful days? That pen produced text but it also produced distinctive design elements such as we saw in the opening slide, playfulness with the print stylings he used to head pages, some poetry, and some art, some of which is suggestive of a world view, some of which spells out an emotional state. The diaries are, properly speaking, not part of his book collection, but he referred to them as “my book”, and he bound the five volumes as carefully as any other. To him, the diaries were books.

While today I’m focussing on his books and his role as a printer, he was a miller by trade. So, also among the missing objects is the mill itself– where he spent at least some time almost every day for the vast majority of his life; here we find numerous expressions of pride in his skilled work and the difficulties he encountered, entries which often cross the line between craft pride and arrogance – as well as occasional narratives of workplace dangers:

“The two kilns going steady, and my poor self doing the whole thing! What do you think of that?! I think you are a clever fellow indeed”, 22 Dec 1877

To be clear, Barry did a truly impressive amount of work, and most of it required skill, strength and endurance – if he occasionally seems defensive or conceited, I am continually amazed at just how much he accomplished in the run of a day. This narration of skill, of his self, of boasting of his superior ways, is telling. Here the diary serves as a tool of self-fashioning, offering explanations of his actions, his “way of being” (as he said on one occasion) to the diary’s imagined, sympathetic audience to whom he could detail his triumphs and difficulties. In many ways, skilled work and its associated tactile experiences defined his world, and his self.

The diary offers several key clues how books acted in this context. One relates to community: In Six Mile Brook, Barry was an outsider, an irreligious freethinking and often difficult figure, an exile within his own world. As a miller, he was a hub of the community, but also one who was sometimes mistrusted – a person who personally profited from the labour of farmers. Paid in toll – that is, in taking a cut of the flour he ground – millers were sometimes suspected of having a thumb on the scales. He also antagonised many of his neighbours by refusing to attend church, and by his poor relations with the McLennans, the family into which he had married. With such an unwelcoming community against which to situate his self, he created one in his diary – a community for whom he could narrate his life, and in so doing create/fashion, his self. This part of the argument is premised on evidence developed elsewhere in the book manuscript that he lived what I’m calling “a textual life” – that is, a life where his desired community was elsewhere, and so where books and magazines (i.e. textual engagements) formed that community, and his diary (and his imagined audience) offered itself as a mirror for his self-fashioning exercises.

The core of my biography presents Barry as a man striving to be a part of the liberal-secular world of modernity that he saw emerging around him. That world, however, was emerging elsewhere, in London and New York much more so than in Six Mile Brook. But books, widely disseminated in the circuits of trade and empire across the north Atlantic world, meant that Barry lived on a brook, off a river, that flowed into a harbour, then a gulf, and then only an ocean away from those centres of modernity. Early in the diary – when he’s in his 30s and 40s – his local community and his textual community was composed of varying degrees of dissenting Presbyterians. Later in life, and more powerfully, most of his community (that textual community) were liberal-secularists, Free-thought writers and activists, people who lived in places like New York, Boston and Toronto. Reading Charles Watts’s critique of the fall and redemption in 1883, Barry celebrated the Toronto-based writer’s dismantling of Christian orthodoxy as a “whole jumble of incoherent nonsense … [a view that] that ordinary people are coming fast to see”. Few of those “ordinary people” lived in Six Mile Brook – though there were some, and several more in the County, particularly among the craft/skilled workers of Westville and New Glasgow. But most of Barry’s experience with that Freethought community was through reading.

By 1883, he was doing his part in spreading the word, in this case reprinting Watt’s essay in his first collection of free-thought pamphlets. Barry printed three collections of free-thought writers, an edition of Ingersoll’s short book, A Lecture on Orthodoxy (1885) plus the uncompleted edition of Paine’s Age of Reason, plus two other titles. Books then provided Barry with a connection to, and an immersion in, an emergent modernity, and moreover to a community of like-minded liberals and secularists. Books brought the intellectual content [that is, a meeting of the dissenting/Infidel minds] and their materiality [his making and holding of the objects of that community in his hands] – and this allowed him proximity, allowed him what Gillian Silverman terms a “fantasy of communion”, the shared experience of holding and indeed producing those works with his hands, forming a connection to a world quite unlike the one of the mill and his superstitious Highland neighbours.

The extant library, also housed at the Nova Scotia Archives, gives us a good sense of the books he owned and the range of his reading. We know there was more because the diary mentions purchases that we don’t see in what remains. There’s also the books he printed himself, with a press he built himself. The press is housed at the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry in Stellarton, if somewhat hidden ignominiously in the warehouse. Barry loved books and so for him, as an artisan, as a craftsperson, making books – typesetting them, even casting his own type, printing them, binding – the planning of the book, its symmetries and dissymmetries, was a completely satisfying exercise. If we think of the tactile experience of printing – the hands-on multiple actions of laying out the type, of inking, of pressing, of lifting and cutting and reassembling, before eventually binding it into that final form – we can see the disciplined pursuit of achievement.

“I was extremely busy in my shop all day setting type and many other things that no one knows anything about but myself”. 7 May 1882

“When in my shop I feel great contentment”, 9 March 1884 

In his “little shop” [the print shop], as he explained in his diary several times, in this place, in the actions of making something he believed powerful and meaningful, was the place he was happiest. The press, then, was not simply a hobby, or an object that fulfilled a need or performed a function. It was something that offered satisfaction, accomplishment and self-esteem. The mill was his livelihood, and he was certainly fond of the money it brought in and he was proud of that skilled work. But in Barry’s mind, the press, the printing of intellectual books, the connection it gave him to the dynamic modern world which he saw emerging around him – of science, liberalism and societal improvement, of important writers he was reading like Darwin, Huxley, and American free thinkers like Robert Ingersoll and Annie Bessant. Others might read such works, but he was producing such works, making them available for his neighbours – most of whom he had little patience for, but some (again in his estimation) were eager to learn more than what the “lying preachers” told them. Much more so than the mill, which made food and money, the press made ideas and marked Barry as a skilled knowledge worker, a prophet of modernity among his superstitious Highland neighbors.

As a printer – that is, as a manufacturer of books – Barry’s relationship with those books was intellectual (most of the books he chose were because of his own interest in the subjects, most evident in the freethought books, but also the two medical books), aesthetic (the choice of fonts, of decorative elements, binding cloth, the gold foil for spines), and tactile (the actual printing, cutting, and binding of the book). Even the fonts – the types for which he sometimes cast himself – came in for aesthetic assessment.

“I was in my shop all day casting type  – Borgeoise [sic] … but it does not please me, and I am manufacturing a new fount [sic]”. 21 December 1884

We don’t know why this “Bourgeois” font did not please Barry, but whether it was a pure aesthetic [he didn’t like the form] or an assessment of its suitability [that it not suit the book’s content], we see a clear sense of purposeful design, as well as pleasure in its successful accomplishment, or displeasure when not.

Look too at his name-plates, the many experiments with fonts, colours and forms, and look especially at the clear efforts at projecting something both refined and aesthetically pleasing. Look at his use of gold foil on his books’ spines, and the numerous decorative printed illustrations. This is design, and while it may not be “art” it is creative, aesthetically thoughtful, playful and rooted in craft and his experience. It’s impossible (I think) to imagine that crafting these insentient objects didn’t give him pleasure, or somehow eased pain, loneliness, or social isolation. And in that sense, these were objects that talked, objects made by human hands which articulated emotions ranging from pleasure to pain, and from satisfied achievement to frustrated failures.

If we treat seriously Barry’s designed books, we can see that he thought aesthetically, and that the proper book was a beautiful book. Perhaps he understood Rousseau’s Aristotelian emphasis that “the beautiful” was also “the good” (and this is not entirely far-fetched – he owned a copy of Emile). Here the tactile, even sensual, role of books seems understood: that the feel of the cloth, the firm yet pliable structure of the binding, the awareness of the gold-foil letters on the spine, that all of these create a “wordless intimacy” between book and reader, an intimacy underlaid with emotion that helps shape meaning. Of course, Barry also wished to sell these books, and attractive packaging was undoubtedly helpful there. But given his intellectual bent, and his aesthetic sensibilities, perhaps too we can see a realisation on Barry’s part that book design enhanced the book’s content – that the feel of a book [and here I mean both tactile and emotional] shapes the reader’s understanding of the content.

In thinking about this issue of the tactile place of the book, we (and I’m looking at you room!) we know we have a close, familiar relationship with the form of a book (of how print is presented, the columns, the margins, the front matter), and with the feel of a book (of turning pages, of the texture of pages, of the feeling of high-quality [and poor quality!] binding). When we read, we touch, and we feel, and thus through the materiality of the book reading creates an intimacy, and an imagined bond or communion in which fuller relationships with other people, communities, and ideas can be felt. In reading, Barry felt and thus experienced alternatives to the lived social relations of his day-to-day life. In reading about books in Barry’s diary, in handling these books myself in the reading room of the Nova Scotia Archives, I felt a fuller picture of his aspirations to freedom and modernity, and of how the combinations of aesthetic pleasures, craft pride, intellectual stirrings, and (ultimately) emotion shaped the life of this obscure man who lived at the centre of modernity on Six Mile Brook, Pictou County, Nova Scotia.

– – – – – –

In lieu of notes, I’ll mention two books I found helpful in writing this, Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-century America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012; and Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Ingrid Makus taught me everything I know about Rousseau.

A little digression on when the circus comes to town.

James Barry often lamented the lack of fun in the community. Unlike “the old days”, he’d write, this Christmas, or New Years, there were no balls, sprees or shooting matches, as there had been when he was young. Thank goodness, he must have thought, when a circus came to town.

He noted attending five circuses over the course of the diary, two were apparently unimpressive – so unimpressive he didn’t even bother to name them. “The Great Stone & Murray Circus” arrived in Pictou in the summer of 1872. As is so often the case, Barry didn’t give much detail – and misreported the name as “Murray & Stone” – only letting us know that he and 11-year-old daughter Josephine “spent a lot of money”, concluding that it was “pretty good”.

The poster I’m drawing on above is from Old Town Maine, for the previous year, 1871. If not perfectly accurate, it gives is a good sense of what James and the other Pictou County folk saw that night. As the poster makes clear, Stone and Murray’s show was largely an equestrian company. They featured members of the Cooke family, husband and wife John Henry and Henrietta Cooke, as well as John Henry’s sister Rosina – “Mlle. Rosina”, she was Scottish but the billing lent some exoticism. The Cookes were the American branch of a British equestrian show, Cooke’s Royal Circus, who had been touring since 1780. Other performers had a briefer pedigree. The Snow Brothers, an acrobatics team, were younger, but they knew the Maritimes; they had been in Charlottetown in September 1864 (when across town Canadian and Maritime politicians met to discuss federating). They were still performing a decade later with W. C. Coup’s “United Monster Shows”, but they didn’t tour the Maritimes.

Did Barry laugh, or grimace, at Tom Barry, the Hibernian Clown, or C. H. Munroe, the Grotesque Clown? Did he marvel at the ascending balloon? Or the “spectacle” of the twenty horse parade? We don’t know. But if the clowns resembled the often mean-spirited humour of T. C. Haliburton, he’d have had a chuckle. Why, Josephine might have wondered, is Daddy laughing at this ugly man?

Barry also saw P. T. Barnum’s circus twice, once travelling to Truro in 1876 and then again in New Glasgow in 1879. He was certainly more enthusiastic about Barnum: “I went over to Johnny McLeod’s this morning quite early, and him and his three sons and daughter, and George Walsh, in one wagon, Drawn by 2 horses, went over to [New] Glasgow to see Barnum’s ‘greatest Show on Earth’ and sure enough it was the ‘greatest'”. Again, as usual, Barry offered us few details, but he was seldom so effusive.

Barnum toured the Maritimes semi-regularly, part of a typical route that took them from their base in Connecticut through New England, New York and “British Canada” [which in 1879 meant two stops in New Brunswick and two in Nova Scotia]. Also primarily an equestrian show, Barnum’s however was more adventuresome, and it’s fair to say nothing like it had been seen before in Pictou County.

One wonders why Johnny McLeod’s children attended when neither Bess nor Josephine came along this time. Barry doted on Josephine, and even though she’d no longer be a child (she’d have been 16 in 1876) it’s hard to imagine her not wanting to attend. Bess would have been 9, a prime age for the circus. But, in Bess’s case, it’s not that surprising as Barry rarely took her anywhere, perhaps as I speculate elsewhere because in his eyes she remained tainted.

The last circus Barry noted was “P. Ryan’s and Robinson’s CIRCUS”, in August 1882. But they were late arriving, and slow setting up. Barry sold his ticket and went home. Not a man to sit around and wait. But even in the 1890s, they had the most circus-y poster.

————–

My brief circus research drew from the the sources noted above, as well as William E. Stout, Olympians of the Sawdust Circle: A Biographical Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century American Circus (San Bernardino, CA : Borgo Press, 1998); Sarah Hovde, “A nineteenth-century family circus“, The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library September 2017; and Thomas Frost, Circus life and circus celebrities (London, Chatto and Windus, 1881) – notes the Cookes – Henrietta and John Henry (husband and wife) as “prominent members of Stone and Murray’s company” (p.225) Barnum images from Connecticut Digital Archive, https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/node/57684#page/1/mode/2up.

I met Bill Parenteau thirty-seven years ago. He’d arrived from America, a seemingly unnatural blend of Rhode Island, NYC, and Maine. He seemed very American. Intellectually exotic and pugnacious, he told tales of then young hotshot historians, Greer and Judd, New York delis, the Red Sox, real punks and historical materialism.

The short-form conventional wisdom on Bill is that he was smart and funny. The slightly longer version is that he was that and that he was a truly decent guy who never lost sight of his New England, working-class sensibilities, an ethic rooted in fairness. His work centred on the simple premise that there were good ways and bad ways to treat people. The job of the historian was to document this and to advocate for the good; it was to shine a light into corners deliberately darkened by those who were enriched and empowered on the backs of the poor. He carried that ethic of right and wrong, of fairness, into everything he did: as a historian to Canada, a partner to Helen, a parent to Mia, and a friend to me and many others.

In the Venn diagram of our lives and interests, Bill and I intersected solidly but nowhere near 50 per cent. Obviously both being historians of the rural poor, the Maritimes and the pernicious effects of capitalism on the region took up a lot of space. So too did our fondness for punk, but even there were limits. I like the Ramones, but lord there’s lots to take a pass on; he thought Sonic Youth had crossed a line into a baleful dissonance, which is what I thought made them great; we agreed the Pixies were sent by God (though we disagreed on the existence of God, but we’ll save that for another time). But art – that is, art-gallery art, not Black-Francis art – was not a world we shared.

Thus, it may seem strange that the last time I saw Bill, our last long conversation, was in an art gallery.

Until that day, I don’t think we’d ever gone to an art gallery together. But last March there we were. I’d been to the Beaverbrook several times, but this was my first visit since its expansion. Bill and Helen, I learned that day, went often, and were members. The Beaverbrook had always punched above its provincial weight, if in a decidedly modernist European manner – like a (not quite) greatest hits package from my mid-80s modern art history class. The changes impressed. If there’s still more Krieghoffs than anyone needs to see, walking among contemporary, often activist, Wolastoqey, Mi’kmaw, and queer works was revelatory: Salvadore Dali and Mary Pratt meet Attila Lukacs and Shirley Bear. And Bill’s commentary on how Fredericton had, and hadn’t, changed in the past thirty years was instructive, an alternative guide to the gallery. The excitement of the newer works partly muted in halls sponsored by McCains and Irvings was enlivened by Bill’s fuller narrative.

We spoke that day of meaning: in our lives, our partners, our work; that powerful mixture of pride and anxiety for our children; of work and knowledge that could be useful to others. We spoke of how the Irvings could be so generous; how forestry trapped poor rural New Brunswickers, how New Brunswick was a captive neo-liberal state; and how Shirley Bear and Jordan Bonnett both disrupted and enhanced the beauty contained in that building.  

Of knowledge, and skills, useful to others, Bill had plenty. Most will know of his important publications on New Brunswick environmental history, particularly the uneven development and application of state-led “conservation” programs. Sold as progressive measures to protect the environment and conserve resources, natural resource laws effectively dispossessed the rural poor and Indigenous people of forest and fishery resources, conserving them for capital and state interests.[1]

Fewer know of his much less public work on Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) land claims. Together with Elizabeth Mancke and others, their research, armed with Bill’s completely unparalleled knowledge of the Public Archives of New Brunswick, undergirded a powerful and successful case compensating the Madawaska Wolastoqey. Active in specific claims from the mid-90s, he had conducted research on several Wabanaki claims before working on the successful Madawaska claim, research highly praised by Chief Patricia Bernard as critical to the success of that claim.[2] Writing a year later about the importance such work held for him, he described the experience as a highlight of his career, noting the great pride he had in contributing to “meaningful acts of reconciliation”.[3]

That day in the Beaverbrook, as we walked among the works of Jordan Bennett and Shirley Bear, Bill reiterated the great pride he’d taken in being useful in the Madawaska case, that ethic of fairness, of supporting the historically wronged with research that could help revise the record. And because he knew those archives so well, he returned to a theme he’d emphasised in every public presentation he made on Indigenous issues: that such cases represented only a tiny piece of the story. As he wrote after the Madawaska decision, the focus on specific cases:

creates the false impression of the ‘native rights’ movement being occasional and fragmented. It is only through more detailed study that a fuller picture emerges. In fact, administration of Native land and resources that has changed fundamentally over time, while the Native position has been characterized by a core set of beliefs and principles. Those core values have been sustained by unflappable leaders like Chief Patricia Bernard who fought for the Madawaska claim for 20 years despite enduring repeated setbacks along the way.[4]

This sense of service, graciousness, and generosity was part of every professional action Bill undertook. He was unfailingly generous with his time, as editor of Acadiensis, with his graduate students, with his family, and with his friends. Though perhaps the Irvings and a few bureaucrats in Ottawa and Fredericton saw him differently, everyone who knew Bill, who worked and played with him, knew him to be equal measures funny and smart, gracious and generous, that he knew right from wrong, and that social justice was achievable, if hard work. In some ways our day in the Beaverbrook was unusual; it none the less captured much of what made Bill one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known. I’ll miss him very much.

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[1] Bill Parenteau, Parenteau, Bill. “A ‘Very Determined Opposition to the Law’: Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1914.” Environmental history 9, 3 (2004), 436–463; and “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1900.” Canadian Historical Review 79, 1 (1998), 1–35; and with Jim Kenny, “‘Each Year the Indians Flexed Their Muscles a Little More’: The Maliseet Defence of Aboriginal Fishing Rights on the St. John River, 1945–1990.” Canadian Historical Review 95, 2 (2014), 187–216; and “Survival, Resistance, and the Canadian State: The Transformation of New Brunswick’s Native Economy, 1867-1930.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 13, 1 (2002), 49–71.

[2] Madawaska Maliseet First Nation v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, 28 Nov 2017; and “Trio of Scholars in landmark First Nations case die”, NB Media Co-op 26 October 2023.

[3] Madawaska Maliseet First Nation, Wolastoqiyik: People of the Beautiful River, Land Claim Report (Madawaska, 2018), 21.

[4] “Trio of Scholars in landmark First Nations case die”, NB Media Co-op, 26 October 2023.

Well, perhaps a misleading subject line, but (kinda) relates to my point.

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and toying with ideas for how to use it in teaching (both constructively, as a way to learn with it, and defensively, to let the students know I’m paying attention). I played with some documents from my upcoming Acadie/Mi’kma’ki course and it was very clear that it struggled with (a) a fairly obscure topic, and (b) one where context really mattered. For example, it discussed Mi’kmaq treaties with the British, but blurred that into negotiations for the treaties of Utrecht (1714) and Paris (1763) and discussed Mi’kmaw roles at Paris, when they were not even there (and we should note that it will actually make things up – last week, I asked it to review a book and when I told them its review bore no resemblance to the book I’d read, it responded by telling me that it wasn’t a review of the book, but what a review of the book might look like! Honest if not not at all transparent). 

For teaching we can’t always find obscure things (well, some of us more than others, but …), so the most obvious idea is to make the assignment very specific as a way to get around AI’s tendency to offer not much more than reworked Wikipedia pages (that’s an exaggeration – it’s better than that, but not much better).

So, just now, I followed up on an exercise from the Atlantic World course I teach with Mike Driedger and Trudy Tattersall where we ask students to read an excerpt from Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and then compare with Voyant visualisations for the entire text. In Voyant, the main (Cirrus) output highlights some obvious key terms:

And the “Links” output shows the most common thematic associations (where a political philosopher (and even a student) might see an outline of her thinking). You can see the live output here.

These outputs clearly highlight some important terms: (1) mind/reason, (2) education, and (3) it then moves onto slipperier, more complex, words like virtue, nature, children, heart, and so on. Thus, a good student using Voyant would emphasise two themes – the intellect and education – and a better student will get those and then sort through the other terms where they might arrive at gender/gender norms.

How does ChatGPT deal with Wollstonecraft? I asked it to write a short essay identifying three key themes and it did so, choosing education, gender roles, and rationality (it didn’t rank them – each is “a theme”). That’s all predictable – Wikipedia-esque, but turned into an essay – and so I then sought a way to get it to do something less obvious. I asked it to include “property” as a theme.

The link is below, and if you look you’ll see that it added a discussion of property, but just tacked it onto the end as a fourth theme. So I then asked it to integrate “property” into its analysis. I had to take two tries at that, but it eventually came up with an essay that says Wollstonecraft argued that the limits of wealth/property were limits on education (and not just as a class element but women’s restrictions on property were a particular limit on most women’s capacity to learn), and so on.

In other words, it wrote a Marxist analysis of Wollestonecraft! Ok, yes, I’m still exaggerating – Marxism-very-lite! – but it did write an analysis that put property at the centre of its analysis.

So, it was better than I’d hoped – that my channeling the assignment into some particular dimension of analysis still produced a pretty good result. There’s still plenty of tell-tale signs – its voice/style is very recognisable, it still sucks at context – but the lesson for me is that even this entry-level AI it does a pretty good job of following your lead and adapting what it says to the criteria you give it. I’d hoped that that might produce bad results (like my Mi’kmaw example above), but it’s actually pretty good.

Of course this is a but a few months into this technology, and I’m using the cheap-o free version. The results are probably better in the pay-walled versions, and they’ll no doubt be improving rapidly. Our ability to keep up will be limited. Seminars, and just talking to students may become our best guides to teaching and assessing student progress. I keep thinking of the near moral panics around calculators and Wikipedia, but this is very different. There’s no need for panic, and certainly not the kind of moral panics we’ve seen, but our teaching will require a lot of rethinking – and a lot more talking. I think much of that conversation will lead us to the simple fact that we need to work with AI, not against it. Working with students, engaging with the tool, discussing its ethical use and their own learning promises greater returns than trying to circumvent these new technologies.

The entire ChatGPT conversation can be read here: https://chat.openai.com/share/f5b884c2-8004-4d71-8590-f6961bfe76af

This term my fourth-year students will be building a website examining 300 years of land use in what is today east-central Prince Edward Island. We’re focussing mostly on lands that in the 1780s become the estate of Captain John MacDonald on lots 36 and 37 near the head of what is today called the Hillsborough River. The project aims to get at land-use by the three cultures we know utilised the land in that era – Mi’kmaw, Acadian, and British – as a way of assessing the productivity and sustainability of the area for human use. We will be assisted in this by Josh MacFadyen, the Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities at the University of Prince Edward Island, who will join us for a class next week. Josh is conducting a series of energy profiles of 19th-century farms. Our task in this blog will be to identify and map some 18th-century Acadian farms that after their expulsion became some of those 19th-century British-era farms.

Before the expulsion of the Acadian population in 1758 during the Seven Years War, Prince Edward Island was Ile Saint-Jean, part of the remnants of Acadie after the British conquest of the peninsula. The island was also called Epekwitk, the land lying in the water, the largest of the islands of Mi’kmaw territory. Epekwitk’s history spanned millennia. Ile Saint-Jean’s settler history is short, really only less than forty years between 1720 and 1758. And even for much of that period, there was little settlement. Until 1748, and the peace following King George’s War and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle, the French population consisted of only about 800 people. The peace treaty, however, did not bring stability and British pressure on peninsular Acadians and Mi’kmaq, compelled many settlers to flee across what is today the Northumberland Strait to the relative security of French-controlled areas on Ile-Saint-Jean. By 1752, when Sieur La Roque, a French military official from Louisbourg, took a full census, the population had climbed to over 2600. The flood of refugees intensified and while we have no exact numbers the population may have been over 5000 by the time the British began expelling the entire population in 1758. This potted history goes a long way to explaining why so many of the settlers we’re about to examine had only been in the colony for two or three years, where some others had been there for decades.

La Roque’s census is an exceptionally rich document of life on Ile-Saint-Jean just a few years before the expulsion. It’s a narrative census, not tabular, and the officer from Louisbourg appears to have been both very careful in counting livestock and crops and yet also happy to wander from his narrow mission to occasionally extemporise on other issues: problems related to defenses, economic/trade policies that he noted hurt the settlers, and the suitability of lands for additional agricultural settlement. We’ll work from the transcribed and translated version published by the Public Archives of Canada in 1905 (volume 2).

Though not tabular, La Roque’s data is consistent, noting the [usually] male heads of household, their age, place of birth and how long they had been “in the country”. This was followed by the same information for the wife, and then the names and ages of the children, and servants if there were any. He then described the land, their livestock and what (and to some extent how much) they were planting. The following is typical entry:

Pierre Boudrot, ploughman [habitant laboureur], native of l’Acadie, aged 40 years, he has been two years in the country. Married to Marie Duaron, native of l’Acadie, aged 36 years.
They have two sons and seven daughters :
Firmain Boudrot, aged 7 years;
Jacques, aged 4 years;
Marie Blanche, aged 18 years;
Anne, aged 1 6 years;
Marie, aged 14 years;
Magdeleine, aged 12 years;
Marie, aged 10 years;
Nastazie, aged 8 years;
Ufrozinne, aged 6 years;
Judict, aged 12 days.

In live stock they have four oxen, three cows, three heifers, five ewes, two calves, one sow, six pigs, and ten fowls.

The land on which they are settled is situated on the Riviere des Blancs, it was given to them verbally by Monsieur de Bonnaventure. On it they have made a clearing of eight arpents in extent and have sown five bushels of wheat, eight bushels of oats and one bushel of peas.

So, that’s very good data: location (riviere de Blancs – today’s Johnston’s River), names, ages, how long settled (not long!), where born (“L’Acadie”, thus their brief tenure is likely because they’d fled peninsular Acadie/Nova Scotia), some sense of their legal standing (land was “given to them verbally”), the extent of their land and improvements (arpents), and numbers on their crops and livestock.

Mapping that specific site, however, is tricky. We can offer a pretty good guess – the river is only a few km long and there were only about ten households on it – but it would be quite general. Moreover, we’re much less sure of their suitability for comparison as the family were only on the land for a few years. As we can see from this Google satellite image, the land is heavily farmed today, and no doubt was in 1861 too, but we don’t have a good sense of this as a functioning farm in 1752.

But we can find some families that had been on the island much longer and there we can get a much better sense of a functioning farm. And, we even have a fabulous map that indicates the locations of farm families on the la rivière du Nord Est. Though not from 1752 (it’s from 1730), judging by ages and times they were in the colony it seems at least some of the families from 1752 can be located on the 1730 map. Thus we have a very good sense that these families probably had farmed those sites for over 20 years – a much better sense of such farms existing as a kind of agro-system that we might compare to a later, also longer-standing farm.

Even in this low-res version, you can see several clusters of settlers: one at Port La Joye (across from present-day Charlottetown, on the left of this west-oriented map), and two further up the river (near what is today Mount Stewart). We can match several of those names with entries on the 1752 census. Here I’ll simply note two from the northeastern clusters. I could trace only one name from the Port la Joye cluster, Joseph Pretieux and his family, and they appear to have relocated to riviere du Ouest. Speaking of that point of land, Louis de Franquet, a French engineer reporting on Ile Saint-Jean in 1751, noted “avant la dernière guerre toute la partie défrichée était en culture” , but now “ils soient dans l’appréhension qu’à la moindre rupture avec les Anglais, leurs travaux ne deviennent infructueux”. Pretieux and his family found a better location.

Up the river, we find other possibilties, such as Bathelemy Martin:

Barthelemy Martin, ploughman, native of l’Acadie, aged 42 years; has been in the country 30 years. Married to Magdeleine Garret, native of l’Acadie, aged 38 years.

They have six sons and four daughters : —
Pierre Paul Martin, aged 20 years.
Charles Michel, aged 18 years.
Francois, aged 16 years.
Jacques Christophe, aged 14 years.
Joseph, aged 12 years.
Jean Felix, aged one year.
Marie Joseph Martin, aged 13 years.
Euphrosinne, aged 9 years.
Marie Joseph, aged 7 years.
Jeanne, aged 3 years.

They have the following live stock : four oxen, four cows, four heifers, nine wethers, eleven ewes, five pigs, nine fowls.

The land on which they are settled is situated as in the preceding cases and was given to them by grant from Messieurs Duvivier and Degoutin. They have made a clearing on it where they have sown forty bushels of wheat, fifteen bushels of oats, and half a bushel of peas, and made fallow land for the sowing of twenty bushels more.

And on the 1730 map we find a Barthelemy Martin, just past the fork of the riviere Pegiguit [today’s Pisquid River]. Barthelemy and his wife Magdeleine were 20 and 16 when the map was made and two years after would have a son, Pierre Paul, 20 in the 1752 census. They seem a good match, and their land is easily located just north of the fork in the river.

This bend looks consistent with a Google map of today:

Zooming in closer, the little stream indicated just below Barthelemy’s name maybe this small inlet (a). In which case his land would be approximately the block at (b).

Evidently the marshland so sought after by the Acadian families is much less prized now as none of it is farmed.

And, if we’re right in all this, we can then go to Samuel Holland’s 1765 map, the first British map of the island. Exceptionally well-crafted and made just seven years after the French population was removed, we can point to this red square as likely representing the remains of Martin’s farm house on what was now designated Lot 37. We don’t know for certain that Holland mapped houses/remains so closely – or as precisely as we’re assuming – but we know that in general he was careful and commented on remaining buildings.

LaRoque’s account suggests Barthelemy and Madeleine had one of the more productive farms on the river. They held four oxen, four cows, four heifers, nine wethers, eleven ewes, five pigs, and nine fowls. They were settled on the south side of the river with a grant from Messieurs Duvivier and Degoutin. They had made a clearing on it where they had sown forty bushels of wheat, fifteen bushels of oats, and half a bushel of peas, and made fallow land for the sowing of twenty bushels more. After more than twenty years on that land they had a substantial farm. Walking the fields on that section of the river one year earlier, Louis de Franquet was certainly impressed: “que tous les terrains que nous avons été à portée de voir et de parcourir promettaient une récolte en froment, avoine, pois et autres denrées, aussi abondante et de la même beauté et qualité qu’en France”.

The windmill Holland depicts just up the river from Martin may be Jacques LeBlanc, 57, native of l’Acadie, and his wife Cecil le Dupuis, native of l’Acadie, aged 55 years:

Their live stock consists of eight oxen, six cows, one heifer, three calves, two bulls, two horses, five ewes, three sows, three pigs and twenty-five fowls.

The land on which they are settled is situated on the south side of the River du Nord-Est of Port La Joye. They have sown on it ten bushels of wheat, one bushel of oats and seven bushels of peas, and they have fallow land sufficient to sow twelve bushels of seed; they also have a saw mill.

LeBlanc was noted at Riviere du Moulin-a-scie [Sawmill River], situated on the south side of the Riviere du Nord-Est. Presumably the windmill icon is a standard “mill” symbol, not specifically representing a windmill.

The hope here is to carry this work forward into the British era. That bend on the river corresponds to what will become lots 36 and 37. They came to be owned by Captain John MacDonald of Glenaladale (and managed by his sister Helen). They settled Highland Catholics (the irony of the displaced Scottish Catholics replacing not Mi’kmaw people but displaced Acadian Catholics!) in the 1770s and Loyalists in the 1780s and 90s. The intensification of land-use beginning at this point is tremendous. The marshlands that attracted the Acadians to that area was also valuable to the British-era settlers, and we can see commons-based approaches to its use well into the 19th century. At the same time, the demographic surge we see after 1770 points to much more extensive holdings where upland sites became predominant. Through historical maps and the census, we can trace those holdings and their shifting approaches to land-use.

We can see these locations quite clearly on Lake’s 1863 Topographical Map of Prince Edward Island .

We might possibly carry this into the 1920s with the 1921 census and Cumming Map Co, Atlas of Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada and the world Toronto (Toronto, Cumming, 1924).

Finally, there is a small Mi’kmaw reserve at Scotchfort, across the river and a few hundred metres southwest of the these farm lots. Such salt marshes were important resource centres for Mi’kmaw peoples across the region. The Scotchfort reserve, created in 1879, was described as being “near the usual Mi’kmaq place for fishing and shooting”, and thus seems to have been a traditional hunting location. There’s a very good chance that this exact site was once a marsh utilised by the Mi’kmaq and that the presence of those Acadian farms represents some accommodation they’d made on dividing access to the river’s resources. Franquet’s 1751 report tells us that such agreement existed west of this location on what is today the Wilmot River, near Bedeque. Though with slightly less precision, it seems clear we can still describe this bend on the river as almost certainly a long-term Mi’kmaw site. That’s at least three hundred years of continuous occupation and use, by different peoples. Exploring that comparative possibility looks entirely possible.

We’ll leave this later work to the students in Josh’s lab, but the possibility of identifying some individual farms whose production we can trace across 300 years is an exciting prospect. Adding to the statistical possibilities with some softer data – such as Franquet’s observation (in the very same section of the river) that “nous parcourûmes ces différents champs et, au vrai, jamais récolte dans les meilleurs cantons de la France ne promit davantage” – might allow us an assessment of an “agrosystem” that was efficient and sustainable. It was a very particular agrosystem, to be sure, but not one imagined merely from a utopian vision.

I always tell students that as historians we very often study ourselves – that is, that we pursue topics not just that interest us, but that speak to us about who we are, how we view the world and sometimes even where we came from. My earlier work on rural Nova Scotia was very much driven by my own family background. None of it was genealogical in any way – despite spending a fair amount of time in several large 19th-century Inverness County archival collections I don’t think I even stumbled upon any relations – but I always somehow knew I was studying “my people”.

Much of that conception revolved around three things: that my family were Acadians and Highland Scots, that they were poor, and that they were Catholic. These don’t provide me any essential features of identity – I grew up a middle-class suburban boomer and nominal Catholic – but it offers a framework for situating myself in the past. That my ancestors suffered at the hands of the British – Jacobites driven out of Scotland, Acadians driven out of Acadie/Nova Scotia – offered me a sense of my family’s place in the broader history of the Atlantic world.

Of course I didn’t know any of this growing up, and only put it together piecemeal as I both dabbled in some genealogy and taught the Atlantic world with a centre on Acadie. And over the past ten years I’ve dabbled more in the genealogy. I’ve found the first settler Samsons on the Lauzon seigneury across from Quebec, and one sons’s movement to Port Royal; I traced the MacInnis family from the Jacobite stronghold of Glenfinnan through the British army’s preemptive strikes against Jacobite villages during the Napoleonic wars to the backland farms behind Port Hood.

But I’d never found the time to explore my paternal grandmother’s side. That’s perhaps not surprising as I barely knew her. She died when I was 6, and my grandfather when I was 10. So all I knew of Katie George was what I was told: she was Irish and from Halfway Cove, Guysborough County. And that made sense. There are lots of Irish settlers in that are. And as a story – Irish girl meets Acadian boy, perhaps at a shared Catholic church in Halifax where they had both moved in the 1920s – fit a common pattern of the era.

Last fall, while in PEI waiting for a plumber, I saw tweets by Stephen Archibald about a weekend tour of the eastern shore of Nova Scotia and that prodded me to begin a quick look at my own eastern shore background. I had my grandparent’s wedding certificate and so I had the names of her parents: Thomas George and Mary Boudreau. (Oh look, I thought, her parents were another Irish-Acadian match. How very poor-Catholic-fisherfolk of them!) Both 29, Katie and Joseph married at St Mary’s Basilica in Halifax in 1925. Fancier digs than they knew growing up the children of fishers from L’Ardoise and Halfway Cove.

I began in the 1901 census. I found only one good match, a Thomas and Maggie George, with a daughter Katherine, 7 (about the right age) in Crow Harbour. Crow Harbour is no longer a registered place in Nova Scotia, but in the 1901 census it included a section of shore that included Halfway Cove. Close, I thought, but they were listed as German Anglicans, and with no other good matches I moved on to 1911, when Katie would have been around 15.

Same thing: really only one good match, and it was clearly the same family. The entry, however, was slightly different; they were “Dutch” – no doubt Deutsch, but still wrong, right? And, for that matter, I’d never heard of German settlements at this end of the province. Google, however, found an online Guysborough County gazetteer. And lo’ and behold, Germans in Halfway Cove:

Germans in Halfway Cove! Who knew? Well, obviously some people did, but I didn’t. And so I tried one more census, 1921, and it’s the same thing – the same family, though they’re finally “German” [including formerly French Maggie] – and now all Catholic – did the “Dutch” chapel close, and so they shifted to the the wife’s Catholic tradition? Or just errors?

But, as I’m bumbling about here, I’m also beginning to think, ok, so there’s less than 200 people in Halfway Cove, and that location is one of the few things I know for sure about her, and I keep finding this same near matching family and … and … my goodness yes, she was German! Or least her male lineage was German. And of course that means I’m part German (and not even part Irish! – well, actually a tiny bit – as I discovered later, Katie’s grandfather, Valentine, married an Irish woman, so I’m still one sixteenth Irish!). I continued on. I pursued Valentine, and discovered another Thomas and a Ludwig, and other new non-French, non-Scots names; I discovered a new dimension of me!

I take great delight in this, particularly as my partner Ingrid’s first-language is German, and I can now toss this around in conversation with her Germanophilic mother, Lilli. And I love, as a historian, being linked into another set of stories, ones that I’d not imagined to be part of my past. And I love that my past has this messier dimension. “My people” is seldom what we imagine.

But of course I also wondered, why did people describe Katie as Irish? Did she describe herself as Irish? Her mother was a Boudreau, so she was at least partly Acadian, and one grandmother was Irish, but that’s a slim claim. Maybe confused family lore (she died a long time ago [1967] and I have few known relations on that side of my family) – or perhaps it was a way to make her Catholic for a Catholic wedding?

Or maybe it was about World War 1? Maybe this young woman with a German name (if a German-Acadian family) felt she needed to hide that. It’s the angle that makes the most sense, and it’s the angle that most makes me wish I could ask her questions. Did she experience hostility in Halifax during the war? I know my military-aged Acadian grandfather did. Was this an extension of the same idea that prompted Berlin, Ontario to change its name to Kitchener, that prompted a wave of anti-German sentiment across the country? Lunenburg was not immune to this pressure (see Gerry Hallowell’s book “As British as the King”). We know many German-Canadians altered their names/associations, though “George” is not obviously German – and she’d have been fourth of fifth generation in British Canada. Of course, in Halfway Cove, that identity was well known, and maybe she carried that taint with her to Halifax. Maybe she carried it with her for the rest of her life.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day