Newfoundland Mi’kmaw Resistance and Vibrancy in a History of Erasure

Abstract

This article is one result of Indigenous-led collaboration that challenges the erasure of Indigenous people in the history of Newfoundland. It argues that, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mi’kmaw community members were historical actors living in relationship with the land and waters that sustained them. They challenged encroachments onto their territory and travellers’ ideas about the Mi’kmaq, and they lived their own lives in their own territory with dignity, knowledge, skills, and humour. It is possible to discern these characteristics of Mi’kmaw life even within the historical record, written almost exclusively by white men, that focuses mainly on non-Indigenous people’s experiences. The article examines both writing deemed literature and writing deemed non-fiction, demonstrating that both can interrupt the historical erasure of Indigenous peoples and relationships to territory. Historians can learn from, and be inspired by, writers and scholars in a number of disciplines who, like historians, grapple with how to be responsible storytellers in the present-day while offering insight into the past.