My name is Stephen Augustine, and I'm a hereditary chief on the Mi'kmaq Grand Council. The reason why they call me a hereditary chief is that I come from a long line of hereditary chiefs. My father's name was Patrick. His father was Thomas Theophile. Thomas's father was Thomas, and that Thomas's father was Noël. Noël's father was Peter, and then Michael Augustine. Michael Augustine signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, in Halifax, on March 10, 1760. This is the reason for my involvement in the Mi'kmaq Grand Council. I'm a descendent of the treaty signer. Before that time—the same person, Alguimou—is a long line of hereditary chiefs. Gwimu is the name for the loon.
When Champlain arrived in Nova Scotia at Port-Royal, in the early 1600s, they baptized Grand Chief Membertou on June 24, 1610. His daughter married a hereditary chief, Alguimou. His name comes up. It is recorded by Champlain, Marc Lescarbot, Pierre Biard and a few others who were in Port-Royal at the time.
That gives you a context of the connection that I have with our land, our treaties and our peace and friendship. I wanted to give a perspective of the land. The idea is that our creation story, the Mi'kmaq creation story, explains that we were created on this land and that we peeled ourselves from the land as human beings. We belong to the land, not the other way around. The land doesn't belong to us.
We moved around quite freely. Every chief looked after their family. They had fires, what we call mawiomi. Mawiomi is the idea of coming together under one roof. The chief's responsibility was to take care that everybody had food, medicine, clothing, shelter, tools of survival, the ability to travel around and the ability to negotiate their survival from mother earth with the birds, plants, animals and fish, using ceremonies.
This is our connection to the land, which is very sacred. We belong to the land. There is a different kind of ideology around the notion of land in the mainstream context, because when you talk about land, you're talking about boundaries. You own a lot of land or acres of land. It belongs to an individual. It's registered at the local registry office. It has boundaries. Similarly, the laws of the land have boundaries as well. Our own job descriptions for the jobs that we hold are bound by the job description. We cannot go beyond or away from that.
In essence, when Europeans arrived, the early French, we allowed them to come and settle on the land as our fellow brothers and sisters. There were a lot of them. Almost 100 French people intermarried with Mi'kmaq women for the first 30 years of the 1600s. There were a lot of interrelationships. That was our way of making peace with the new arrivals. There was no question about us giving up our land. Marc Lescarbot wrote to Henry IV, King of France, and told him that the indigenous people here had no notion of private property or real estate, and they were not going to tell them that by planting their flag, they claimed sovereignty over our territory.
The fallacy continues. When the British arrived and declared war on the French and defeated the French, they assumed that they took control of the sovereignty that belonged to the French, which was at the time determined to be called Acadia or l'Acadie.
In Mi'kmaq, akadie is the term we refer to as “the land”, and A’kadi Kewak, or les Acadiens, are “people living in the land”, because they made their houses out of mud, straw and wood. Our terminology for Acadian people was A’kadi Kewak. They were related to us because they intermarried with our women from about 1605 to 1632, when De Razilly arrived with French women and children. In that instance, we were attached to the land spiritually and physically.
In terms of restitution of lands in a modern context, I would look at obtaining lands that are unoccupied; that are owned by the Crown, federally and provincially; and that nobody's living on and paying taxes on. Those are the kinds of lands...because we have to be able to obtain our livelihood from the land. We need to have access to fish, animals, birds and plants, because those are the necessary elements we relied on for our food, medicine, clothing, shelter and tools of survival. It's how we travelled around. Everything that came from those elements was our identity. That was our connection to the land. It describes us culturally and distinctively because of what we wear—the animals we wear, the feathers we decorate our clothing and headdresses with, and the shells and beads we use.
It all comes from the land. Everything comes from the land.