One of the problems of evaluating the history of the
mixed-blood Acadien is the contradiction between the colonial, Land of
Evangeline myth and the conventionalized history of Mi’kmaw interaction with
the colonizing whites in the 18th century. Today the dominant
Mi’kmaw ideology is the non-traditional Turtle Island perspective which holds
all white people are bad and carry historic guilt, in contrast to indigenous peoples
who are good, blameless and bearers of historic grievances. This paradigm is
remarkably like the a-historical colonized Acadian picture of good, passive Acadians being subjugated by evil designing, British.
In popular white middle class media like the CBC,
white and racially diverse commentators present themselves as allies to
indigenous speakers who in turn exploit middle class sentiment to assert their
moral authority to seek various remedies and compensations. Seeking
compensation for historic wrongs like the residential schools and Indian Act abuse
is very appropriate. The moral prefiguring is wrong, not helpful and usually
historically inaccurate.
The general discourse around Edward Cornwallis and the
scalping bounty is presented in white middle class media entirely out of
context with the struggles of the French and Indian Wars and reduced to a good guy/bad
guy dichotomy, which, through the magic of adherence to an abstract moral polemic,
if you are prefigured as a white oppressor, you have only to shed a few tears
and call for the removal of a statue or change a street name to absolve your historic
crimes. This attitude is so general among the middle class, that even Acadians
pay lip service to the idea, but history shows our mixed blood Acadien people were
victims of Cornwallis’ bounty and nothing is said, particularly in concerned white
media, No one dares to challenge the indigenous moral paradigm.
To illustrate our invisibility in the face of recorded
history we can look to a popular historical work, Cornwallis The Violent Birth
of Halifax, by Jon Tattrie, 2016. Seemingly as a side note, Tattrie plainly
with archival documents proves mixed blood Acadien were victims of Cornwallis’
scalping bounty and yet in all the editorial reportage I’ve heard or read on
the subject in the white middle-class media particularly the CBC, I’ve never heard
this truth spoken.
From Cornwallis The Violent Birth of Halifax, pg. 99
…Throughout the winter, the rangers, volunteers and
adventurers combed the woods of Nova Scotia in hopes of finding small groups of
undefended Mi’kmaq. While no accurate records were kept for how many bounties where
paid, some individual accounts give a sense of the scale of the raids. In one
incident, a party of Gorham’s Rangers brought in twenty-five scalps, claiming a
bounty of 250 pounds. The paymaster protested some of the scalps were likely
Acadian, but he was ordered to pay the full amount…This was a recurring problem,
what constituted a Mi’kmaq person? What if someone was mixed race, with Mi’kmaq
mother and an Acadian father? What if the Mi’kmaq blood was a grandparent?
Cornwallis did not spell it out in his bounty. Previous bounties from Massachusetts
government had decided that if someone was of a mixed race and living in an
Acadian village, they were exempt from the bounty, but that was not addressed
in Nova Scotia.…The scalping bounty effectively removed all people classified
as Mi’kmaq from the law…Countless Acadians died and in some cases it is
reported rangers turned on each other, or made most of Mi’kmaq attacks, and
sold the scalps of dead rangers (some being mix blood American’s, my note)…
to the British government.
How does it forward Truth and Reconciliation to
deliberately ignore our mixed blood history as an inconvenient contradiction to
the indigenous victim paradigm?
