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The City of Saint John was Not Meant to be Shared. Are We Sharing Now?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Julia Wright on CBC’s Information Morning about how the city of Saint John was not meant to be shared. I explained that the 1785 city charter was designed, at least in part, to cut Wabanaki people off from the harbour (in violation of Treaty) and to restrict all the “liberties and privileges of freemen” to “the American and European white inhabitants” of the city.1

On Twitter, my friend Daniel Samson, an historian at Brock, shared this 1797 map of the area that very clearly highlights authorized Black settlement spaces well outside of the city limits. Daniel discusses these exclusions as part of a much larger heritage of systemic racism in the Maritime Provinces, powerfully concluding that “our communities are material legacies of 18th-century strategies of inclusion, denial, and removal.”

Source

You can listen to my discussion with Julia, which engages some of my current research about Saint John, here on the CBC website. In addition to the city charter, I spoke about the Bentley Street portage route and the former Wolastoqey village that is now a fenced-off part of the city Port and a footing for the Harbour Bridge. Before the bridge was constructed in 1968, a ferry bearing the name of the Wolastoqey village — Ouangondy — connected west Saint John with the city’s uptown.

Source: New Brunswick Museum, The Ouangondy, Saint John Harbour Ferry Boat, docking at the Rodney Wharf, West Saint John, New Brunswick, c.1910. 

One thing that I didn’t have time to talk about in the radio piece was Fort Frederick. Near the Wolastoqey village site, in front of what is now the Carleton Community Centre, there is a marker for Fort Frederick, a site with its own fraught and complex colonial history. But something that is forgotten in the current commemoration material around that site is that there was a truck house at this location prior to the arrival of the Loyalists.

I like to remember the truck house because it helps me reflect on those agreements that my ancestors made to live in this territory alongside their Wabanaki partners in Treaty. In the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the British promised to establish truck houses in and amongst their settlements where Wabanaki people could freely and easily sell and trade their goods. Continuously facilitating Wabanaki access and economic participation in this way was just one specific condition that the British agreed to – in exchange for the amazing right to live here in this beautiful place at all.

And so a truck house master named John Green was stationed at Fort Frederick to ensure this access and to tend to this one aspect of the Treaty relationship. Tending to this relationship is something that my ancestors decided we didn’t have to do anymore once the Loyalists arrived and gave us a majority status in the region. When I remember that there was a truck house in this location, it helps me assess whether we are, as a city, continuing to operate in violation of those historic agreements — continuing to consolidate ourselves against a space that we are still not willing to share.

Yesterday, the Green Paper on Local Governance Reform was released by the Province of New Brunswick to great interest and fanfare. The document contains one instance of the word “Indigenous” (in a demographics chart) and one instance of the word “treaty” (in a reference to western Canada). And so are we acting as partners or as rulers? Are we ensuring Wabanaki access or economic activity and participation in a manner that is consistent with agreements that were made on our behalf many years before spaces like Saint John were chartered — or are we continuing to ignore our responsibilities under Treaty and to represent the structures of our cities and municipalities, the “material legacies of 18th-century strategies of inclusion, denial, and removal,” as the primary conditions of belonging and participation in this territory?

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Notes:

1 The argument that the city charter cut off Wolastoqiyik access to the harbour salmon fishery comes to me, as noted in the radio interview, from Jason Hall, Ethnohistorian for WNNB.

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“The Frontier on Film” and “Rediscovering the Brothers Islands”

In the fall of 2020, I was invited to share some of my research on John Smith and Pocahontas with the historian Erin Isaac, who was producing a video miniseries on Jamestown for her wonderful new YouTube channel Historia Nostra, which examines how history is produced and shared. Erin has since partnered with Active History for this project, and you can view the entire Jamestown miniseries on that website with this link.

A little later in the fall, I had the great pleasure of meeting the Wolastoqi journalist Logan Perley, who was already deep in the archives and working on a CBC story about the Brothers Islands when I wrote about the islands in August. It was great to meet Logan for the first time, to hear about his work, and to contribute to his story, which you can check out in print, radio, or video form.

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More cultural storytelling in Peskotomuhkatik

This morning brought a new piece by one of my favourite local authors, Julia Wright — one about Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Testaments, which apparently concludes with a scene on Campobello Island, a Canadian island that is connected by bridge to the state of Maine at the entrance of the Passamaquoddy Bay.

From Wright’s piece:

Kate Johnston, manager of marketing and visitor services at Roosevelt Campobello International Park, which preserves the summer home of late U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family, called the literary salute “pretty cool.”

. . .

“Margaret Atwood has been pretty upfront about the fact that she is inspired by the events that have been happening in the United States.”

“Campobello is such an interesting place — so Canadian, but at the same time it has such a tie to the United States.”

McLean said that in the context of the plot, Campobello Island is the “perfect” setting for the novel’s conclusion.

The Testaments is not on my immediate to-read list, but I find these ideas very interesting, and I can’t help but wonder whether Atwood’s plot, and the mythologies upon which it presumably rests, engages or further obscures the actual place currently called Campobello.

Campobello is home to Friar’s Rock (or Skitap Man Rock), a “rock formation” on the sea coast that has “a Romeo and Juliet style story attached to it.” This story is from Passamaquoddy oral tradition, and you can read a version of it, as told by Donald Soctomah, in Siobhan Senier’s Dawnland Voices anthology. I am currently teaching an Indigenous Literatures course at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, and I carefully walked my students through this story in class just last week.

In Soctomah’s telling, Campobello is not a fragment of New Brunswick or an island on the margin of Canada but rather a Passamaquoddy summer village where Passamaquoddy people have been gathering for thousands of years. Over the course of some of these summers, a young girl named Sipsis and a boy named Posu fall in love, but each winter they retreat to their respective families’ hunting camps. As Sipsis and Posu grow older, their families begin to notice and disapprove of their summer bond, and Sipsis is sent to live on an island across the bay. For every year after, Sipsis and Posu gaze longingly across the water, dreaming of one another.

Soctomah writes:

Years passed and time flew by; they each called to Gloscap to grant them a wish, and both asked that their love would last through eternity. He heard their songs of love and felt their passion, but their families did all they could to prevent this. One day Posu was walking along the shore and suddenly his wish was granted: he had become a large rock in the shape of a man looking across the Bay, and Sipsis on the shore of the other island at the same instant also became a large rock in the shape of a woman; she too was looking across the Bay to her love. Forever they would look across the Bay to each other as symbols of true love. (p. 179)

The Sipsis rock is on what some today call Moose Island, Maine; the rock is called Pilsqehsis Woman Rock. Here is a Google map image of how Campobello and Moose islands are situated in the bay:

Screen Shot 2019-09-21 at 11.59.39 AM.png

 

One island in Maine, another in New Brunswick. One rock formation in Gilead, one in Canada. But both islands are actually in Peskotomuhkatik, which is Passamaquoddy territory, home of the Passamaquoddy tribal nation. I have written elsewhere about how Canada and the United States (or northern Maine and southwestern New Brunswick) are violent impositions on Peskotomuhkatik. The borderline that non-Indigenous people drew through this territory after the American Revolution effectively clarified the spheres of dominance for two resource-hungry settler colonial societies but it failed to actually rupture this territory, where Passamaquoddy people have lived for centuries, where the rocks tell their own love stories, and where people and place are inseparable despite any and all artificially imposed divisions.

And so we, Settler people, are again telling stories about Peskotomuhkatik.

But what stories are we telling about this land and what it represents, and who are we to tell them? Do our stories actually have anything to do with Peskotomuhkatik, a place where Indigenous people have an average life expectancy of forty-eight years, or are we once again using Passamaquoddy land to tell our own stories about settler colonial political culture or about the supposed differences between Canadians and Americans? Historically, the stories that we have told about this place have been much louder in our shared public discourse than the stories of this place itself. I hope questions of Passamaquoddy cultural and territorial sovereignty do not get lost in conversations about Atwood’s widely anticipated new novel.