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was
inhabited by tribes of hunters even then. Mastodons became extinct
here about 10,000 years ago.
        The ice may have been disastrous to plants and animals, but
it allowed for an ice bridge to form across the Bering Strait, far
away from Nova Scotia on the western fringe of Alaska. Migrating
across this bridge came bison, moose, caribou and musk oxen,
creatures most suited to cold climates who tended to continue
moving east instead of south to warmer climes. Eventually they
found their way to this far coast.
        Other animals found here after the ice ages included
white-tailed deer, black bear, beavers and ermine, to name a few.
All still exist here today.
        Humans had also crossed the Bering ice bridge, travelling
throughout North America, retreating southward as the glaciers
advanced, but moving back north when the land opened up. These
peoples crossed over from Asia 13,000 years ago and their children
began to move south along a kind of corridor that led them onto the
Great Plains. Within 2,000 years they had settled all over North
America, including as far away as Nova Scotia. They travelled by
land and when possible by water. The fragmented remains of a very
early settlement is located near Debert. There, these early Nova
Scotians sustained themselves on caribou herds. Debert, the site of
one of the earliest human settlements here, seemed destined to be
the location of a final enclave of humanity had we not all survived
the Cold War. In the 1960s, the Nova Scotia government built a
massive underground bunker ethere to shelter the premier and a
select band of men and women to keep civilization going should
there be an all-out nuclear war. Had the bunker ever been put to
use, the surviving politicians and bureaucrats would have emerged
into a decimated Debert landscape, harsher than anything known by
the Paleo-Indians who first came here.
        Those earliest of settlers would have lived in animal-skin
tents upon a tundra in a climate still chilled by receding
glaciers. They hunted the mastodon and caribou with sharp
stone-tipped spears. Other stone tools were used for preparing
hides and chipping away at bone and wood.
        Traces of human presence are absent between 10,000 and 5,000
years ago, probably due to rising sea levels and an unkind
environment. For the following thousand or so years, human
settlement again appeared along the coas ts, where people fished
from the sea and the rivers and hunted beaver, moose and deer. We
don’t know a lot about these times, but spears and grooved axes,
scrapers and knives have been found. In the period between 3,500
and 2,500 years ago, tools must have been very important not only
for a livelihood but as part of one’s identity. When you died, you
were buried with your tools and painted in red ochre as part of
your preparation to enter the spirit world.
     

Chapter 4
    Chapter 4

     
    Ten Thousand Years of
Civilization
    In
his book We Were Not the
Savages , Mi’kmaq historian
Dan Paul writes eloquently about the history of his people, for the
first time documenting the story of the Europeans’ arrival and
settlement of Nova Scotia from the Native North American point of
view. So much of what is recorded by the European invaders is so
slanted by Eurocentric, and ultimately racist, attitudes that it
may be unreasonable to accept any of the early written accounts
about the Mi’kmaq as fact. Like me, Dan has an inherent mistrust of
history as it is reported to us. White heroes of yore now appear
more like villains of monumenral proportions. If Dan and other
living Mi’kmaq leaders suggest that towns named for the likes of
Amherst, Cornwallis and Lawrence be changed, it is not a simple
complaint against nomenclature. It is a protest against the power
of a dominating culture to distort what really happened. In a
modern tribunal, all of the above would be rightfully convicted of
not only murder but genocide.
        The story of the Nova Scotian Mi’kmaq people