When I asked Dan Paul the Mi’kmaq elder, historian and author about the "NS Needs Mills" graffiti that someone had scrawled across the sign near Amherst welcoming people to the land of the Mi'kmaq, I thought I could hear him sigh, in the manner of someone who had been asked a question one-too-many times.
“So what’s new,” he said over the phone.
And then he proceeded to tell me a few things that, sort of, were.
If, for example, a couple of decades ago, someone had told the author of We Were Not the Savages that Nova Scotia, in 2020, would have a Mi’kmaq senator, Dan Christmas, and an aboriginal member of Parliament, Jaime Battiste, he would have laughed and laughed.
As Paul would have if someone had predicted that the day would come when Edward Cornwallis’s name was no longer affixed to a school, or church in the city that he settled — and his statue, once heroically displayed in a downtown park, would sit in ignominious storage.
Today, furthermore, an arrangement like the one where Northern Pulp, for more than 50 years, was free to dump toxic waste into Boat Harbour beside Pictou Landing First Nation would be as unthinkable as it would be to surround a black community, like the former Africville, with a garbage dump, slaughterhouse, infectious-diseases hospital and a prison.
“Environmental racism like that just isn’t a fact of life around here like it once was,” Paul explained.
So, he conceded, things are “moving in the right direction,” even if they clearly aren’t there yet.
It is hard to argue with Paul when he says Nova Scotia still has “an underlying racism problem." Just as it was hard to argue with colleague Jim Vibert when he made much the same point in these pages about the lot of our African-Nova Scotian citizens after a woman alleged that she was discriminated against when some police took her down in a Halifax Walmart.
'No place for that'
There was a time, I think it's safe to say, when the defacing of a Mi'kmaq sign wouldn’t have caused such a stir in this province.
Back, for example, before the inquiry into the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Donald Marshall Jr., in which it was pointed out that a view existed amongst some in this province that aboriginal lives simply didn’t matter as much as white lives.
I think it is also worth pointing out that just a decade ago a Nova Scotia man was found guilty of inciting hatred in a cross-burning incident at the home of a black man and white woman who lived near Windsor.
We have to believe that bozo was a misguided one-off and that in this province the philosophy of mid-20th-century Alabama does not simmer.
Just as we must take some solace in the appalled tone of the response to the Mi'kmaq sign scribbler.
“There’s no place for that,” Ian Ripley, general manager of the Athol Forestry Co-operative told SaltWire’s Darrell Cole. “There was some discussion among our committee that what happened with Northern Pulp was going to set back relations between the industry and the First Nations community. This is very regrettable.”
In our chat Paul demonstrated remarkable restraint towards the unknown graffiti artist.
After all, the person apparently held the Mi’kmaq people, as a whole, responsible for the government’s decision not to let Northern Pulp continue to dump polluted waste into their traditional fishing grounds.
To them it didn’t matter that, for half a century, the Pictou Landing First Nation was the victim. Nor did they seem to care that it was Premier Stephen McNeil who announced that, as of Jan. 31, Northern Pulp could no longer dump contaminated wastewater in Boat Harbour.
The whole thing, Paul said of the graffiti, was “juvenile” and “ridiculous.” Yet he seemed to bear the perpetrator no malice.
“I think this person was probably more concerned with their livelihood than anything else,” said Paul. “Who can blame them?”
Calming words.
The words of a man who has seen things like this happen before. But also a man who takes the long view, and who would rather look towards a hopeful future than back at a grim past.
