Mi’kma’ki mourns a literary legend
From Atlantic Books Today #98 fall 2023
Mi’kmaw Elder Daniel Paul died in 2023, bringing to an end a memorable literary life in Mi’kma’ki. Patiently, persistently, and often with a wry smile, he showed Atlantic Canadians the truth about our collective history.
When We Were Not the Savages was first published 31 years ago, it shook the world. (It’s now also available en français) The title alone challenged people raised on a Euro-centric view of Atlantic Canada to ask, Who were the savages?
Danny himself slyly suggested an answer in selecting his keynote speaker for the 1993 launch: the premier of Nova Scotia, a British-born white man by the name of John Savage. I suspect a similar playful sense of irony was at work when he asked me in 2017 to write his biography. My settler last name isn’t quite as fitting, but my last book was: a biography of Edward Cornwallis, founder of Halifax and permanent enemy of Dan Paul and the Mi’kmaq nation.
But he didn’t write it for me, or for the premier. His dedication reveals his motivation: “To the memory of my ancestors, who managed to ensure the survival of the Mi’kmaw People by their awe-inspiring tenacity and valour in the face of virtually insurmountable odds! For more than four centuries these courageous, dignified and heroic people displayed a determination to survive the various hells on earth created for them by Europeans with a tenacity that equals any displayed in the history of humankind.”
He returned to his seminal work and rewrote it as a second edition in 2000, a third edition in 2006, and the fourth and final edition in 2022. He dug deeper and added more insights, more context, and increasingly, a focus on Indigenous women and their powerful work.
“I am quite certain now that there are no words that could ever express the scope and importance of his work to me in both my personal and professional life or to Mi’kmaq generally,” writes Dr. Pamela Palmater in the introduction to the fourth edition. She’s listed as the chair of Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University, but since the book was released, the university renamed itself Toronto Metropolitan University to stop celebrating Egerton Ryerson due to his role in creating the residential school system.
Dr. Palmater called We Were Not the Savages her “anchor,” a shield against racism and a sword of knowledge. “The so-called ‘Indian problem’ has never been about us. There is nothing wrong with our people; we were not the savages – the leaders of the invading European countries were. This truth has stuck with me ever since.”
Over the course of his long life, Daniel Paul wrote hundreds of thousands of words in columns, letters to the editor, and to his personal list of supporters. Danny’s writing superpower was his ability to condense his vast learning and thinking into plain words that you could never unhear. His writing is bold and brilliant, bubbling along like a flood river sweeping everything forward. His many foes clung to the branches as he washed the intellectual world from under their feet.
When I was interviewing him for his biography, he told me that he would figure out what he, a Mi’kmaw person, wanted – and then figure out how to make white people want the same thing. When a new highway exit was added to Nova Scotia in the 1980s, he noticed the sign read, “Annapolis Royal, established 1605, Canada’s oldest settlement.”
“After hearing about it, and viewing it, I contacted the mayor of the Town of Annapolis Royal, the warden of Annapolis County, and the Department of Transportation, and voiced my outrage. To their credit, after they were reminded about First Nation existence, the mayor and warden were shocked that they had supported the wording of the sign, and that they had not even briefly considered the existence of American Indian civilizations,” he wrote. They changed the sign to: “Annapolis Royal, established 1605, Stroll Through the Centuries.” Danny knew the power of words and valued solutions that brought people together.
His research was legendary. The foundational work for We Were Not the Savages was done in the 1970s and 1980s when he worked for the Department of Indian Affairs and had access to important documents. He found a “warden of the north” view of history that perpetually painted white people as heroic and central, and First Nations as subhuman and expendable.
Before Dan Paul set his sights on him, Edward Cornwallis was not a controversial figure. A 1975 National Film Board short called “Ballad to Cornwallis” sees a hippie poet swing from Cornwallis’s statue to tell him about all the great and awful things we’ve done in Halifax, the city he was sent to establish in 1749. Cornwallis was simply the fatherly founder, and his imposing statue demanded that you bend your neck and look up to him.
But Danny saw a replica of Cornwallis’s 1749 scalping proclamation, calling for the physical destruction of the Mi’kmaq, in a pub in the 1960s. The juxtaposition disturbed him greatly. He thought it should disturb everyone, so he quoted Cornwallis accurately and extensively. Cornwallis wanted to build a Protestant, British-ruled region, and wanted the Mi’kmaq – and the Acadians – gone. He paid government cash to any British person who murdered any Mi’kmaq. He prepared the groundwork for the Grand Dérangement of the Acadians.
Danny let white intellectuals try to defend those actions as civilized. They gave it a good go, but by the time the Cornwallis statue was removed from Halifax in 2018, they had lost the public debate. Few mourned the statue’s departure. I watched as it swung through the winter air and got dumped on a flatbed truck, then hauled off for storage. An eagle soared high above the small crowd.
Danny’s second book, published in 2017, is a novel “featuring love, comedy, intrigue, murder, compromise, war and peace.” He called it Chief Lightning Bolt. It begins in Mi’kma’ki, centuries ago, in a world that is not “pre-contact,” but thousands of years into a rich and fascinating civilization. It reveals another side to the author: a warm, loving, funny writer who gently begins with a sunrise, a nervous young man named Little Bear, and a charming woman named Early Blossom. Roughly 97 per cent of human history in this land was thus: entirely Indigenous.
His novel was overshadowed by his nonfiction book in his life, but perhaps in the long run of the future, the two books will be held by the same hands. One offers a brilliant deconstruction of colonized history in Mi’kma’ki, and the other rebuilds the lost world of Mi’kma’ki before the invasions. Together, they create a potent seedbed for our shared home.
As Danny wrote, “it is from these ashes of our greatness that we can one day see the Eagle rising through the Eastern Door, giving hope and purpose to a Nation being reborn.”
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