1999 Testimony in Court Case by Chief Stephen Augustine - Fascinating Historical Information.

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2 DECEMBER 2, 1999
3 COURT OPENS (TIME: 0945 hours)
4 THE COURT Good morning.
5 ALL Good morning, Your Honour.
6 THE COURT Mr. Wildsmith.
7 MR. WILDSMITH The Defence calls to the stand Chief Stephen
8 Augustine.
9 CHIEF AUGUSTINE, sworn, testified as follows:
10 THE CLERK Please be seated and spell your full name?
11 A. Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N. Augustine, A-U-G-U-S-T-I-N-E.
12 DIRECT EXAMINATION ON QUALIFICATIONS
13 MR. WILDSMITH Chief Augustine, would you just indicate to
14 the Court where you live and your present employment?
15 A. I live in Rupert in Quebec, about 30 miles outside of
16 Hull, and I work at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in
17 Hull.
18 Q. Let me show you Exhibit 44 that has been marked.
19 Could you identify what this is?
20 A. This is my resume.
21 EXHIBIT 44 [ENTERED] - RESUME OF CHIEF STEPHEN AUGUSTINE
22 Q. Did you prepare that?
23 A. Yes, I did.
4 Verbatim Inc. - Dartmouth, Nova Scotia - (902) 469-5734
5 Serving Atlantic Canada Since 1976

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1 Q. Let me show you Exhibit 17, volume 3, which under tab
2 15, document 15.
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Could you indicate what that is?
5 A. That's a curriculum vitae.
6 Q. Have you prepared that as well?
7 A. Yes, I did.
8 Q. Is your resume Exhibit 44 an updated version of the
9 same document?
10 A. Yes, it's an updated version with a change of address
11 and more detailed information about past employment and
12 public presentations.
13 MR. WILDSMITH I should indicate to Your Honour that I seek
14 to qualify Chief Augustine as an expert ethno-historian
15 able to give expert opinion evidence on the aboriginal
16 peoples. I have this on a piece of paper which I can give
17 to you in due course. And the aboriginal perspective on
18 aboriginal European relationships in eastern North America,
19 including the language, culture, oral traditions and oral
20 history of the Mi'kmaq Indians.
21 My friend, Mr. Clarke, I believe, is able to go part
22 way with respect to those qualifications. Maybe I should
23 just let him speak to that before I provide my examination

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1 of Chief Augustine, so that it may be a more restricted
2 basis as a result.
3 THE COURT That's fair enough.
4 MR. CLARKE Yes, Your Honour, there's just two positions
5 at this time that the Crown is in a position to address.
6 One is the ethno-historian as an expert ethno-historian.
7 We would take or request the Court to consider that issue.
8 And the other one is able to give expert opinion
9 evidence on the aboriginal peoples and the aboriginal
10 perspective on Mi'kmaq European relationships in eastern
11 North America, including the language, culture, oral
12 traditions and oral history of the Mi'kmaq Indians. That
13 would be the other clarification the Crown would be seeking
14 in cross, is rather than all aboriginal European
15 relationships in eastern North America, it be specific to
16 the Mi'kmaq/European relationships in eastern North
17 America. With the caveat that there has been extensive
18 evidence before the Court from a number of other witnesses
19 in relation to the Wawanki Confederacy, which includes, to
20 the Crown's understanding, some of the Eastern tribes, the
21 Abenaki, Penobscot, the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy. Our
22 understanding is that's not the majority of his evidence,
23 but we're concerned that his perspective on Mi'kmaq

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1 European relationships is where the qualifications should
2 lie rather than in the broader aboriginal/European
3 relationships in eastern North America.
4 MR. WILDSMITH Simply our point, and I will pursue it with
5 Chief Augustine, is that while 90-odd per cent of it is
6 going to be about the Mi'kmaq, the Mi'kmaq did have this
7 interactional relationship with other aboriginal peoples of
8 eastern North America and we do have documentation relating
9 to the state of the Penobscot dealing with the British, so
10 that, in our submissions, he should be able to speak to
11 that as well.
12 THE COURT I guess I understand what the issues are. So, go
13 ahead.
14 MR. WILDSMITH Maybe what I should do is give you this
15 proposed evidence guide, which does have the statement of
16 the qualification on it now.
17 THE COURT That's fair. It's helpful to have it.
18 MR. WILDSMITH So turning, Chief Augustine, to Exhibit 44,
19 can you tell us about your educational background?
20 A. On the second page, my most recent degree is in a
21 Masters of Art in Canadian Studies at Carleton University,
22 on which a thesis entitled "A Culturally Relevant Education
23 for Aboriginal Youth - Is There Room for A Middle Ground

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1 Accommodating Traditional Knowledge and Mainstream
2 Education?" This was successfully defended in December,
3 1998.
4 Prior to that, I attended one year for a qualifying
5 program in a Masters in History at the University of New
6 Brunswick. I did one semester of History in the Masters
7 level and I did not complete the program and I did not
8 write a thesis.
9 Prior to that, in 1986, I graduated from St. Thomas
10 University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology
11 and Political Science. Because those were my majors, I had
12 to do a qualifying year in a Masters for History program at
13 UNB.
14 In 1985, I attended a Native Law Program to prepare
15 myself to seek a degree in law, which I did not pursue
16 after completing the program.
17 Q. Very well. With respect to your Masters thesis and
18 the reference to traditional knowledge, with respect to
19 whose traditional knowledge?
20 A. This was mainly Mi'kmaq traditional knowledge but it
21 also reflected on other aboriginal examples in Canada and
22 North America of their traditional knowledge in areas of
23 technology using toboggans and building wigwams and

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1 structures and medicines and those other elements that are
2 integral to their cultures.
3 Q. Would that, in part, include Maliseet, Passamaquoddy,
4 Abenaki?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. You indicate on here that you speak certain languages.
7 English, obviously, you are speaking at the moment.
8 A. Yes, I speak Mi'kmaq. I have spoken Mi'kmaq all my
9 life.
10 Q. And French?
11 A. And French, yes.
12 Q. You say you have spoken Mi'kmaq all of your life. Are
13 you a Mi'kmaq Indian?
14 A. I am a Mi'kmaq Indian, born on the Big Cove Reserve in
15 New Brunswick.
16 Q. Are you a status Indian as well?
17 A. I am a status Indian and I am also Captain on the
18 Mi'kmaq Band Council, representing Sigenigtog, the area
19 where I was born.
20 Q. Could you spell that Mi'kmaq word and district for the
21 record?
22 A. S-I-G-E-N-I-G-T-O-G.
23 Q. Are you a member of the Big Cove Band?

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1 A. Yes, I am a member of the Big Cove Band.
2 Q. Is that located in the general vicinity of
3 Richebouctou, New Brunswick?
4 A. Yes, it's in Kent County, and it's about seven miles
5 up the Richebouctou River.
6 Q. What about your knowledge of Maliseet or other
7 aboriginal languages?
8 A. I am, because the Maliseet language is very similar to
9 the Mi'kmaq language, there are a lot of root words, I
10 would imagine about 10 per cent of the words that the
11 Maliseet use are recognizable in our language.
12 Q. Do you regard yourself as a Maliseet speaker?
13 A. No.
14 Q. You mentioned that you were a member of the Mi'kmaq
15 Band Council.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Can you just explain what you meant by saying that you
18 were, I believe, a captain?
19 A. The late Grand Chief Donald Marshall, Senior, called
20 upon me in 1990 to visit him because he had information
21 that my family had been involved with the Grand Council in
22 the early 1900s and he wanted to find out from me what my
23 relationship was to that family that was participating on

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1 the Grand Council. And he mentioned a name and I said that
2 was my great-grandfather, and my grandfather, and then my
3 father before me, had not participated. So he said, "I
4 think you're supposed to be on the Mi'kmaq Grand Council as
5 a hereditary chief representing your district."
6 And so he made the appointment in 1990 and called me
7 to attend the Grand Council meeting in Chapel Island and I
8 began my work with the Grand Council as a captain.
9 Q. Would that mean that you're a hereditary chief?
10 A. Yes, I'm a direct descendant of the signer of the
11 treaty on March 10, 1760, by Michel Augustine, Chief Michel
12 Augustine, who was living on the Richebouctou River at the
13 time.
14 Q. Okay, we'll get into that in more detail but you're a
15 direct descendent of Michel Augustine?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. And you mentioned the Grand Council, at least in its
18 modern day format. Could you just elaborate on what that
19 is and what you meant by representing one particular
20 district?
21 A. The Grand Council is made up of seven districts
22 throughout the Maritime Provinces from the Gaspe Peninsula,
23 representing one of the districts down as far as Tracadie

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1 River. Another district, Sigenigtog, represents -- I mean
2 expands down towards the mouth of the Saint John River,
3 down as far as Oxford/Springhill area in Nova Scotia. Then
4 we have Gesgapegoag, Sigenigtog, Mensigenigtog --
5 Q. Could you spell those for the record?
6 A. Starting with the Gaspe?
7 Q. Well, the ones that you have mentioned.
8 A. Gaspe is called Gesgapesgiag, G-E-S-G-A-P-E-G-I-A-G,
9 and it means the son gets lost over the horizon.
10 Sigenigtog, S-I-G-E-N-I-G-T-O-G. It's the remnants of what
11 is left over from an island drifting away. And M-E-N in
12 front of Sigenigtog, means what is left over when the land
13 tore itself off from the mainland, and it's been shortened
14 to Sigenigtog. Gespogoitg is G-E-S-P-O-G-O-I-T-G.
15 Q. Where is that?
16 A. Gespogoitg. That is in the Yarmouth, the southern,
17 southwestern part of Nova Scotia. Segebemagatig is the
18 area where the wild turnip grows. S-E-G-E-B-E-M-A-G-A-T-I-
19 G.
20 Q. Is that generally in the area of Shubenacdie?
21 A. Shubenacadie, around Truro, including Halifax and the
22 central part of Nova Scotia. Then we have Epegoitg, E-P-E-
23 G-O-I-T-G, which is Prince Edward Island, also including

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1 Pictou. Pigtogoalnei. P-I-G-T-O-G-O-A-L-N-E-I. Goalnei
2 means a harbour or a bay. Pictou Harbour or Pictou Bay.
3 That is all included in one district on the Grand Council
4 because it is believed at some point the mainland Nova
5 Scotia and New Brunswick was connected to Prince Edward
6 Island and this was only divided by a river. Eskegiag, the
7 six district, is the area around the Canso and it's spelled
8 E-S-K-E-G-I-A-G. It means pieces of rock or land, piecing
9 off the mainland and falling into the water and making a
10 loud splash. And then Omamagi is the Cape Breton area and
11 the Mi'kmaq Grand Council is made up of seven of these
12 districts.
13 Traditionally, there were two representatives from
14 each of the districts - a spiritual representative and more
15 or less one who was responsible for the well being, the
16 physical well being of the people in those particular
17 districts.
18 Q. Perhaps you could just spell Omamagi for the record.
19 A. O-M-A-M-A-G-I, Omamagi. So the Mi'kmaq Grand Council
20 is a pre-contact aboriginal Mi'kmaq political, spiritual,
21 social organization.
22 Q. In relation to the Grand Council today, rather than
23 historically, what kinds of functions or activities are

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1 they involved in and what role do you have, in particular?
2 A. My responsibility there is I represent the Sigenigtog
3 District on behalf of my people. I am responsible for
4 carrying the creation story, Tanwebegsulgtieg. T-A-N-W-E-
5 B-E-G-S-U-L-G-T-I-E-G. Meaning where we come from or where
6 our origins are from.
7 I also interpret the treaties -- I mean the wampum
8 belts, the treaties that were recorded on wampum belts for
9 the Grand Council. We have Charles Herney, who we call a
10 Putus, who is responsible for that function. P-U-T-U-S.
11 He is responsible for reading the wampum belts and relating
12 these stories to our people at our gatherings but right now
13 he is a very old man and he is slowly losing his memory.
14 So it's been given to me to take over those
15 responsibilities for the Grand Council.
16 Q. Okay, thank you. Your present position, you
17 indicated, is with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in
18 Hull.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Can you indicate what that position is and what your
21 duties are in that position?
22 A. My official title there is Native History Researcher,
23 but I have also, for a year, over a year now since October

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1 1st, 1998, I have been functioning and acting as -- and
2 taking over the responsibilities as Curator of Eastern
3 Maritime Ethnology.
4 Q. What does that mean, to be a Curator of Eastern
5 Maritime Ethnology?
6 A. I am responsible for the collections that have been
7 gathered in the museum for the last 100 years that are kept
8 there. These collections are from the eastern part of
9 North America that involve Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Beothuk,
10 Passamaquoddy, and some Penobscot material.
11 Q. Are the Penobscot connected to the Abenaki?
12 A. Yes, they are.
13 Q. What kinds of materials are we speaking about?
14 A. Material culture, drums, snowshoes, canoes, things
15 that were collected by area ethnographers while they were
16 doing research for the museum or for other museums or
17 universities in the United States, and they had deposited
18 their collections to our museum at some point in the past.
19 Q. In terms of how the Museum of Civilization is
20 structured, where would you fit into the various divisions
21 or services within the museum?
22 A. Well, the museum itself has an executive -- They have
23 a board of directors, then we have an executive that

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1 ensures the functioning of the museum on an administrative
2 level and financial level. Then we have programs. We have
3 a Canadian Ethnology Services Division. This is where I
4 work. Then we have Canadian Archeological Survey. All the
5 archaeologists work there. We have a history department.
6 We have a folklore department. We have a postal museum and
7 a children's museum. These are all divisions that take
8 care of different sectors of the museum in the public side
9 and they help to maintain the collections in the museum as
10 well by doing research and publishing material and
11 programming exhibits.
12 Q. Can you indicate what the mandate or mission is of the
13 Ethnology Service that you work as part of?
14 A. The mandate of the Ethnology Services Division is to
15 mainly to maintain the collections. Manage and maintain
16 the collections that we have to ensure their secure
17 condition, to look after the conservation of those
18 materials, to ensure that the public have access to the
19 resources in the museum, as well as to conduct further
20 research to provide context to the materials that are in
21 our collections.
22 Q. Could you tell us about the research and the kinds of
23 materials that would provide context, as you've put it, to

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1 the physical objects that are contained in the museum?
2 A. The research would have to be involved in collecting
3 information about cultural groups that the material may
4 have been collected.
5 Q. Does that involve the group of five, I think,
6 aboriginal nations you spoke about?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Beothuk, and
9 Penobscot?
10 A. Yes, it would require a systematic literature research
11 at archives locally in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island,
12 Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. And, on a national level,
13 with the Department of Indian Affairs and the National
14 Archives of Canada.
15 Q. So historical documents would be part of those
16 collections, would they?
17 A. Yes, we have an archival section as well in our museum
18 that has manuscript collections that were at the time of --
19 Some of them date back as far as the middle of 1600s, notes
20 by missionaries that have been deposited at our museum
21 instead of at the national archives.
22 Q. Are you involved in the collection and the analysis of
23 that material?

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1 A. Yes, it's part of my responsibility to accession
2 material that comes in. It's part of my responsibility to
3 make available to the public, to the researchers, access to
4 the resources or to the sources.
5 Q. Does it involve the interpretation of that material?
6 A. Yes, it does.
7 Q. Okay. How long have you worked with the Museum of
8 Civilization?
9 A. I have worked there full-time since three years,
10 October, whatever, 1996. I had worked there earlier on a
11 contract basis.
12 Q. Could you explain that?
13 A. I was involved in providing an update to a list of
14 aboriginal communities across Canada. Communities like
15 Restigouche, who have changed their name to Listugutj. L-
16 I-S-T-U-G-U-T-J. A lot of aboriginal communities across
17 Canada have changed their names back to their aboriginal
18 names and part of that task was to update that list,
19 because we had names that were like Fort George or St.
20 George or Coverdale that were not indigenous names to the
21 communities. So that involved updating and contacting all
22 the First Nations communities across Canada and aboriginal
23 organizations.

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1 Q. That was part of what you did under contract?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. If we turn to the third page of Exhibit 44, your
4 resume, we see the title "Publications."
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Can you, and bearing in mind that the Crown has
7 conceded your expertise with respect to the Mi'kmaq, could
8 you go through these publications and indicate what things
9 might be relevant to your expertise with respect to
10 Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, or Abenaki?
11 A. The first publication, "Traditional Indigenous
12 Knowledge and Preservation of Cultural Property," this
13 involved identifying cultural objects that were held in our
14 museum as well as in other museums across Canada and
15 identifying which ones were sacred and which ones were not
16 sacred objects and how these objects should be handled.
17 This involved having to provide source material on Mi'kmaq,
18 Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Beothuk, and Maliseet.
19 Identifying these materials as which ones would be sacred
20 and which ones would not be.
21 Q. Would that involve looking at something about the
22 culture of those aboriginal groups to make that
23 determination?

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1 A. Yes, I was utilizing the Mi'kmaq Creation Story in
2 order to indicate how these objects were interrelated in an
3 aspect of a spiritual ceremony.
4 Q. Okay.
5 A. In 1998, "What Have the River Systems Provided to the
6 Mi'kmaq?" It was a presentation made to the National Parks
7 at Kouchibouguac.
8 Q. We notice that the title refers only to the Mi'kmaq.
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. My question to you: Is there anything we should be
11 noting in that that might relate to the other aboriginal
12 groups besides the Mi'kmaq?
13 A. I was using the Richiboucto River as an example, but I
14 would say that this example would apply to most rivers in
15 the east coast of North America because there are the same
16 animals, birds, plants, and trees and conditions that the
17 aboriginal people would have followed the river system as
18 their main travel routes and relied on the same kind of
19 resources.
20 Q. So would that include the Saint John River or the St.
21 Croix River or Penobscot River?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Okay. Anything further, not necessarily in that

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1 article, but focusing in on things that would be germane to
2 the other aboriginal groups that you may be saying
3 something about in your evidence?
4 A. This one, this paper involved explaining about what
5 the river systems would have provided to the Indians as
6 sort of like a travel route, a source of food, medicine,
7 clothing, shelter, all the elements that are necessary to
8 survive or derived by the river or with the use of the
9 river, and the Mi'kmaq people would not have survived quite
10 well without the use of the river as travel routes.
11 Q. Anything else in the publications that might be
12 germane to Penobscot, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy?
13 A. "The Mi'kmaq History of Big Cove" dealt with the
14 Creation Story and the relationships, the treaty
15 relationships between neighbouring groups like Maliseet,
16 Passamaquoddy, Penobscot prior to contact and then I went
17 into more detail about the establishment of the Richiboucto
18 Reserve and then its reduction of 46,000 acres, I guess, in
19 a matter of 75 years.
20 Q. So you're saying that to look at Big Cove, you were
21 looking at the wide relationship that the Mi'kmaq had with
22 neighbouring aboriginal peoples?
23 A. During the treaty period and the colonial period prior

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1 to establishment of Nova Scotia, as well as after, I mean
2 prior to the establishment of New Brunswick as well as soon
3 after, the way the lands were being granted in New
4 Brunswick, it involved granting lands to Maliseet as well
5 as those that lived in Canoose River in southern part of
6 New Brunswick on the Passamaquoddy area.
7 Q. Other things under publications that would be germane
8 to Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot?
9 A. No, the other cases are more contemporary issues
10 involving suicides, social, land, and economy for the Royal
11 Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
12 Q. Okay.
13 A. In 1991, "The Introductory Guide to Mi'kmaq Words and
14 Phrases" involved words about trade and interaction with
15 tribes, ceremonies, and we went into detail about
16 explaining pipe ceremonies and sweat lodge and those words
17 that are attached to those kind of activities.
18 Q. Okay, moving on to thesis supervision, was there
19 anything in that MSC thesis that you were an external
20 examiner on that would be related to Maliseet Passamaquoddy
21 Penobscot?
22 A. More in a general context of approaching indigenous
23 communities, approaching indigenous elders, and in an

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1 example, this Masters degree student was going up to Yukon,
2 Old Crow, to study the porcupine caribou herd, and I was
3 appointed as her supervisor or asked to supervise on the
4 indigenous context of her thesis. And I was advising her
5 on how to approach elders in the community and this
6 approach needed to have some -- One had to have knowledge
7 of elders and attitudes and activities of elders and how
8 they would respond and how they would be -- how interviews
9 would be conducted and an interrelationship could be
10 established to minimize any conflicting situations.
11 Q. Where was this particular aboriginal group located?
12 A. In the Yukon Territories up in Old Crow, I mean, yes,
13 in Old Crow, Yukon.
14 Q. Okay. Moving on to the statement at the bottom of
15 this page about expert testimony, you have been qualified
16 in the past to give expert testimony, have you?
17 A. Yes, I have. And this part here that I had written, I
18 had no access to the court text or court document and I was
19 basing it on what I assumed I had spoken on and I don't
20 think that this is a proper wording for my qualification.
21 Q. Is this what you understood that you did, in fact,
22 speak to?
23 A. Yes.

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1 Q. And do you now know or do you -- are you able to say
2 whether you were qualified in that case to speak about
3 Maliseet, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy as well as Mi'kmaq?
4 A. I now know, but in my last testimony in New Brunswick,
5 the Crown made a correction to that line and I don't
6 exactly know the wording still to that because I was
7 supposed to be given a part of that transcript, but I
8 didn't -- I have not received it, so I am unable to
9 identify the exact phrasing of that.
10 Q. Is it your understanding that you were able to speak
11 about the other aboriginal peoples that were listed here on
12 your resume?
13 A. I was able to speak and give my opinion about those
14 relationships on those -- about those tribes, yes.
15 Q. All right. And that was in a case indicated here as
16 Josh Bernard. Was there a second case that you were also
17 qualified to give expert evidence in?
18 A. There was a second case involving Francis, I believe,
19 Harvey Francis. R v. Francis and others.
20 Q. When were you qualified in that case?
21 A. I believe in September.
22 Q. Of this year, 1999?
23 A. Yes.

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1 Q. Subsequent to the Bernard case?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. Okay. Now you have a lot of information about your
4 work experience in the subsequent pages here. Can you
5 isolate from this list things that might relate to the
6 Penobscot, the Abenaki, the Passamaquoddy, the Maliseet,
7 and things that might relate to archival work?
8 A. In 1991 to '93 I worked for the Big Cove Band Council
9 as their land claims advisor and it involved doing
10 extensive research at the Provincial Archives in
11 Fredericton and in Prince Edward Island as well as in Nova
12 Scotia to look for documentary material relating to the Big
13 Cove land claim.
14 Q. And would you then be making copies of that
15 documentation and keeping it for the purposes of analysis?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. And you did that from January of '91 to October of '93?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. All right. Other things related to original
20 historical work in archives or published sources?
21 A. In 1988 I was operating a research consulting services
22 dealing with archival research for First Nations
23 communities in New Brunswick. I provide research

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1 information from archival sources to their communities to
2 do profiles.
3 Q. Does that mean you went into the Archives and did the
4 research, found the documents and brought them back out?
5 A. Some of the documentation I had already, yes, and some
6 I found during the time that I did provide the service.
7 Q. Your CV just refers to 1988 here. Is there an end
8 date to that or how should be understand that?
9 A. Just for that year, yes.
10 Q. Okay.
11 A. 1986 St. Thomas University Challenge '86 Project, I
12 was a student archivist working at the Provincial Archives
13 in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick
14 researching and identifying and photocopying and organizing
15 Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy documentation at the
16 Provincial Archives and cataloguing that in a chronological
17 order.
18 Q. Okay.
19 A. Most of this information was passed on to history
20 professors, William Hamilton and William Spray of St.
21 Thomas University.
22 Q. And who are they?
23 A. William Spray at the time was vice president of St.

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1 Thomas University. He's a history professor at St. Thomas
2 University. William B. Hamilton, he was at the Mi'kmaq-
3 Maliseet Institute. He was also a history professor at UNB.
4 Q. What was the Mi'kmaq-Maliseet Institute?
5 A. Mi'kmaq-Maliseet Institute was established by an
6 agreement between St. Thomas University and UNB to focus on
7 specializing research and education for aboriginal
8 communities in New Brunswick. And these two involved
9 Mi'kmaq and Maliseet groups.
10 Q. Okay. And what else do we find here?
11 A. In April, 1978, to September I worked for Dr. Charles
12 Akerman, Department of Anthropology, University of New
13 Brunswick and Fredericton as an archival researcher. I was
14 providing research. It was more or less a verification of
15 documentation whereby the Indians in Maine had submitted a
16 claim to the State of Maine. And the Attorney General for
17 the State of Maine, Joseph Brennan, had hired under
18 contract Dr. Charles Akerman to verify this research, and
19 part of my responsibility was to do the actual archival
20 work to find the sources. And to see also if the Province
21 of New Brunswick had at some time in the past accepted
22 responsibility for the Passamaquoddy tribe in New Brunswick.
23 Q. Okay. So that seems to have taken you into the New

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1 Brunswick Provincial Archives and the Maine State Archives
2 both in Augusta and Orono, Maine?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Other things on your CV related to Maliseet,
5 Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Abenaki, or archival research?
6 A. No.
7 Q. Okay. And we have a section here on boards and
8 communities that you have participated on. Is there
9 anything in there related to the same issues of the other
10 aboriginal groups?
11 A. No, I --
12 Q. There's a reference in here to the Premier's Round
13 Table on Environment and Economy.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. What's that?
16 A. The Premier's Round Table on Environment and Economy
17 was established in 1973 and once the responsibility was
18 given to the public, I was invited by premier, then Premier
19 Frank MacKenna to sit on the Round Table to represent the
20 aboriginal people in New Brunswick, that would involve
21 Mi'kmaq and Maliseet representation on the Round Table.
22 And the Round Table itself is more or less concerned
23 with environmental issues and the economy of the province.

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1 In that context, companies who wanted to develop the
2 natural resources in the province were somewhat cognizant
3 of environmental factors and how to minimize these impacts
4 on the environment.
5 Q. Thank you. And you're still a member of that, are you?
6 A. I'm still a member, yes. It's been renewed twice
7 already.
8 Q. And just in general in your activities, whether they
9 are personal or professional or otherwise, have you been in
10 contact with people who are Maliseet and Passamaquoddy?
11 A. Yes, in fact, I have relatives living in Indian Island
12 in Old Town and in --
14 A. In Old Town, Maine, just outside of Orono north of
15 Bangor on the Penobscot River. There's an island, it's
16 called Indian.
17 Q. And you have relatives there?
18 A. I have relatives that live there that have
19 intermarried. My grandmother's aunt moved down to Boston
20 in 1888, married there a Passamaquoddy Indian. They had
21 twin children, two daughters, one moved to Indian Island
22 and one moved to Pleasant Point or Sebyiak.
23 Q. You had better spell that.

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1 A. S-E-B-Y-I-A-K or C, Sebyiac.
2 Q. So would those people be Maliseet, Passamaquoddy,
3 Penobscot or --
4 A. They have been accepted in their communities, so they
5 identify themselves as Passamaquoddy and Penobscot. And I
6 have attended Wabanaki meeting that have been held in
7 Orono, Maine, and in Indian Island as well as in
8 Passamaquoddy.
9 Q. What are Wabanaki meetings?
10 A. They are meetings that have been held between Mi'kmaq,
11 Maliseet, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribes.
12 Q. And that continues to be done periodically today?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Okay. The next part of your resume deals with papers,
15 lectures and public addresses.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Could you, again, highlight the things on there that
18 might be pertinent to the other aboriginal nations besides
19 Mi'kmaq?
20 A. Most of the presentations have been centering around
21 indigenous knowledge, relationships to the land, the
22 creation story, ceremonies attached around aboriginal
23 communities and in the general context most Eastern

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1 Algonkian-speaking tribes believe in the Glooscap as a
2 culture hero, a grandmother, other members of the family as
3 well as their relationships to other species of animals and
4 trees and plants and birds as being part of their family.
5 And so this understanding of that relationship, the
6 spiritual connectiveness involved these other tribes, all
7 right, people that have been identified as Passamaquoddy,
8 Penobscot, Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, even Beothuk.
9 Q. You mentioned Eastern Algonkian?
10 A. Eastern Algonkian-speaking tribes.
11 Q. And who would be included in that?
12 A. All the tribes living from the Delaware River all the
13 way up to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island,
14 Newfoundland, even the Inuit and the Montagnais, Mascapee,
15 Cree.
16 Q. So that would include the --
17 A. Ojibwas.
18 Q. -- Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Penobscot, Abenaki as well
19 as Mi'kmaq.
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Okay.
22 A. These are all -- linguistically all of these tribes
23 are related because a lot of the basic words stem from an

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1 older form of the language which has been identified as a
2 proto-Algonkian and like, for instance, the colour white is
3 wabeg, W-A-B-E-G. In Mi'kmaq there are various forms of
4 that word beginning with W-A-B in all Algonkian languages.
5 And the same for the colour black and the earth, the sky,
6 the sun and so on, so a lot of these languages are
7 connected in that way. In the similar way that Latin may
8 be identified as the base language for the romantic
9 languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. So the
10 Algonkian-speaking people are these group of people that
11 are interrelated by language in that context.
12 Q. The creation story that you have spoken about that has
13 commonality to more than the Mi'kmaq, can you indicate what
14 use the Canadian Museum of Civilization makes of you and
15 the Mi'kmaq creation story?
16 A. We are undertaking a major project for the last 15
17 years to develop the First People's Hall which is about
18 150,000 square feet of area or floor space --
19 Q. 150,000 square feet?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Sounds like bigger than a football field.
22 A. It's quite large. Because right now we have an area
23 in the museum called a grand hall which represents mostly

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1 the northwest coast, [Michka, Quaquaculak, Haida, Clinget
2 Nations and Salish and Shimsham?] And these people are
3 represented by their longhouses or cedar houses with totem
4 poles and this makes up a very unbalanced representation of
5 aboriginal people in Canada for the public. So the museum
6 has been involved in developing this other area to balance
7 out this representation to incorporate Plains Indians,
8 Inuit, Iroquoian and the East Coast.
9 And part of the First Peoples Hall involves collecting
10 information about how indigenous societies see themselves
11 coming into existence as opposed to coming across the
12 Bering-Beringia Strait, Bering Strait.
13 Q. Yes.
14 A. And so we're involved in a massive research project to
15 look for creation stories and the Mi'kmaq one has been
16 chosen as the one that will highlighting the opening in
17 April 19 -- 2001 when the First Peoples Hall opens so they
18 will -- the creation story will -- the Mi'kmaq creation
19 story will be highlighted as a story that indigenous people
20 have about their own creation and their own existence and
21 from their perspective.
22 Q. Why the Mi'kmaq one?
23 A. Because it has been the longest in contact. The

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1 cultural group has been quite a long time in contact with
2 European culture and the fact that this story has survived
3 this long.
4 Q. What's your role in it all?
5 A. I'll be relating the story in Mi'kmaq in the creation
6 story theatre which is part of the inside of this First
7 Peoples Hall at the very beginning stages of it.
8 Q. Are you going to be there every day on stage or what?
9 A. No, they're -- they had planned to videotape my
10 presentation in a holographic presentation to the public,
11 but because of funding and cutbacks, they have done a
12 three-screen projection, one on a screen in front and with
13 two screens in the back to emphasis, I guess, the visual
14 context of the story.
15 Q. So you'll be telling that story on the film?
16 A. It will be told on film in Mi'kmaq with a voice-over
17 in English and in French and with scenery in the back of
18 eagles and forest, scenery of the Maritime Provinces
19 basically.
20 Q. Have you already filmed that?
21 A. Yes, they are just editing. It will be finished
22 probably in January.
23 Q. All right. And have you, as a Mi'kmaq person, also

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1 participated in public ceremonies?
2 A. I have provided a lot of presentations. I have done
3 pipe ceremonies, sweet grass, sage tobacco-offering
4 ceremonies. I have done honour songs for aboriginal people
5 in aboriginal communities, on reserves, for the Grand
6 Council, for provincial governments, particular government
7 departments, lawyers, judges, RCMP as well as for the
8 National Defence, for international work with Environment
9 Canada, for the United Nations in Rome and as well as in
10 Madrid, Spain, and for the Governor General.
11 Q. What it about the Governor General?
12 A. During the Order of Canada investiture, there were two
13 aboriginal people identified, Freida [Henique?] and
14 Rosemary [Captana?], I was invited to do an honour song for
15 them and do a smudging ceremony during their investiture at
16 the Government House. And for the former governor,
17 Governor General Romeo LeBlanc.
18 Q. Now you see the Exhibit 17, Volume 3, that you have in
19 front of you, Tab 15, I believe it is. Are some of the
20 letters that you received from people thanking you for
21 those presentations included after your CV or resume?
22 A. Yes, the first one is a letter from John [Harredy?]
23 who's the director of Biodiversity Convention Office. He

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1 was asking the director of the museum, Dr. George
2 MacDonald, if I could come to Spain to represent the
3 aboriginal people at the United Nations Conference on
4 Biodiversity. I have prepared a paper on comparing
5 indigenous knowledge and mainstream science and this was
6 presented as the background paper for the Government of
7 Canada in Madrid, Spain, at the United Nations Conference.
8 Q. And if you -- I don't want you to go through them all,
9 but if you look to the third last letter, three from the
10 back, is that the letter you received from the Governor
11 General Romeo LeBlanc with respect to the --
12 A. Yes. That's a letter dated March 1st, 1999. Governor
13 General Romeo LeBlanc thanked me for delivering the Mi'kmaq
14 eagle song honouring the seven sacred directions and he
15 thought it was a very moving experience for all who were
16 there.
17 Q. All right. And so you did that at Rideau Hall on
18 February the 3rd, 1999?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Okay. Anything else that I haven't covered that you'd
21 like to bring to our attention about either your work as a
22 historian, as an ethnologist or with respect to the
23 Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot?

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1 A. No.
2 Q. Do you think it's fair to call yourself an ethno-
3 historian?
4 A. Depends on who -- fair to who or fair by who.
5 Q. Well, in your own opinion based on what work you have
6 done and continue to do.
7 A. I have quite an extensive knowledge about the cultural
8 groups and their history and their relationship with
9 treaties and their contact with the European nations that
10 arrived here orally, traditionally and from an academic
11 context.
12 Q. What do you mean by an "academic context"?
13 A. Studying in university, in formal education.
14 Q. And would that include reviewing historical documents
15 themselves?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Documents that are generated by the British or other
18 Europeans?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Thank you, Your Honour, those are all the questions
21 for Chief Augustine on his direct for qualification
22 purposes.
23 CROSS-EXAMINATION ON QUALIFICATIONS

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1 THE COURT Mr. Clarke?
2 MR. CLARKE Thank you, Your Honour.
3 Q. Chief Augustine, with regards to your qualifications
4 as an ethno-historian, I would like to cover a couple of
5 areas in that field. Mr. Wildsmith had asked you a number
6 of questions about your university background.
7 In your undergraduate degree, I note that you have
8 anthropology as one of your majors. Was that correct or
9 was it a minor in your B.A.?
10 A. It was a major, yes.
11 Q. Major? And how many history courses were part of that
12 anthropology major or were there any?
13 A. History courses involved three of them.
14 Q. And what were they in relation to those history
15 courses that you took in your B.A. level?
16 A. Indian/White Relations.
17 Q. In what time frame would that have been?
18 A. In terms of the course?
19 Q. Yes, what time frame did the course cover?
20 A. It was from September to April.
21 Q. Would it have been 16th century Indian/White relations
22 or 17th century or do you recall?
23 A. It covered a wide period and it more or less focused

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1 on Spanish, Dutch, French, and English contacts in North
2 America and the subsequent history that developed
3 afterwards, in a general context, in terms of the
4 experience aboriginal people were undergoing, whether there
5 was acculturation, assimilation or those kind of concerns.
6 Q. So that wasn't specific to northeastern North America,
7 i.e. New England and what is now referred to as the
8 Maritimes?
9 A. It sort of started in the south, like, where Columbus
10 landed and it developed northward. And the focus ended up
11 in the New England/New Brunswick areas.
12 Q. And what was the other courses about?
13 A. Native people and the law. It was given by [Graydon?]
14 Nicholas.
15 Q. And what type of subject matter were those courses
16 covering?
17 A. It was treaty-related material, land-related material,
18 but --
19 Q. And again were those courses primarily concerned with
20 what is now the Maritime provinces and New England or did
21 they cover North America generally, like the previous
22 course?
23 A. No, it covered mostly the Maritime region.

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1 Q. And the treaties, which treaties would they have been
2 with? Were they the Mi'kmaq treaties or were they some of
3 the New England treaties as well?
4 A. It covered most of all the treaties that -- each
5 student was given an assignment to write a paper on a
6 particular treaty. But in general, in the class, Graydon
7 Nicholas lectured to us about -- around the beginning of
8 1700, around the Treaty of Utrecht period towards the
9 establishment of the Province of New Brunswick.
10 Q. What year was that?
11 A. 1783-84.
12 Q. Now you say each student was assigned a treaty to
13 write on. Do you recall which one you wrote your --
14 A. The Richibucto Treaty, 1760, the one signed by Michel
15 Augustine.
16 Q. So that would have been the 1760-61 series of treaties
17 then, would it?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. One of the things that comes up in these cases is the
20 reference and use of terminology. In your experience, what
21 is the Mi'kmaq preference, to use "band," "tribe," "local
22 community," as far as terminology? What would you prefer
23 to hear when we refer to that type of thing? Is it "band,"

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1 "tribe"?
2 A. It varies, whichever community you go. Most Mi'kmaq
3 people will say We're Mi'kmaq, or Mi'kmaw. I'm a "Mi'kmaw."
4 "Nation" has been used because the Assembly of First
5 Nations organized itself around communities, calling
6 themselves First Nations. And so a lot of the Indian
7 reserves identify themselves as First Nations communities.
8 So instead of using "First Nation," they say "Mi'kmaw
9 Nation Community.
10 And the Grand Council itself identifies itself as a
11 national organization.
12 Q. As a national -- you mean, the Grand Council of First
13 Nations or the Grand Council of the Mi'kmaq?
14 A. The Grand Council of the Mi'kmaq.
15 Q. Is a national organization or recognizable as a
16 national organization?
17 A. Yes, we like to consider it.
18 Q. So when we refer to, in your reference to communities
19 of the Richibucto, is that a band, a tribe, or is it a
20 local community, from your perspective or from the Mi'kmaq
21 perspective?
22 A. Well, since the establishment of the Department of
23 Indian Affairs in 1876 and the Indian Act, they've

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1 identified reserve or lands reserved for Indians, and
2 identified Indians to live on those particular communities.
3 So there's been a lot of movement of those particular
4 communities, and people that are involved. So this is sort
5 of like the Department of Indian Affairs referred to these
6 groups as bands.
7 Q. So that's the terminology that's more modern in
8 respect to the history of the Mi'kmaq nation than, say,
9 pre-contact. It would never have been considered then?
10 A. No, it would be --
11 Q. Now you've also indicated that part of your eduction,
12 I believe, when you were at St. Thomas you did research?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. And that included for the State of Maine?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Where was that research conducted? Was that in Nova
17 Scotia, New Brunswick or was it just in the State of Maine?
18 A. It was mainly in New Brunswick at the Provincial
19 Archives, the main body of information that was being
20 collected was there. But the information verification
21 element of it was in the Provincial Archives here in Nova
22 Scotia, in Fredericton, in New Brunswick, and in Maine, in
23 Aaron and Augusta.

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1 Q. So what was your function? Did you collect it or did
2 you verify it?
3 A. I collected the information at the Provincial Archives
4 in Fredericton. And then I was involved in the
5 verification of the other information.
6 Q. And what was involved in the verification process?
7 A. You're given a document and there's a lot of
8 information in the documents, and there's source numbers on
9 the documentation. You go to the particular archive. You
10 look up the source and you look up the document and match
11 the document that you have in the binders that they
12 provided. And it was just to ascertain they were the right
13 amount of sheaves of documents in that particular reference
14 series.
15 Q. And did you do a systematic analysis of those
16 documents for the State of Maine or was that someone else's
17 responsibility?
18 A. Dr. Charles [Ackerman?] presented a systematic
19 analysis of that. This was after an oral presentation
20 between myself and three others that were involved in the
21 project.
22 Q. And the oral presentation was in relation to the
23 accuracy of the verification or --

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1 A. Well, it was a systematic -- he organized it in wall
2 charts on the wall and we were making presentations to him
3 in order for him to systematize and put it into a report
4 format to the Attorney General for the State of Maine.
5 Q. And that was in the late 80s, I believe it was, or was
6 that in the late 70s you did that?
7 A. I believe it was in the late 70s. The main land claim
8 agreement came in 1979-80.
9 Q. Okay. Now in your opinion, or in your words, what is
10 the role of an ethno-historian? What is an ethno-historian?
11 A. An ethno-historian is concerned with the ethnographic,
12 the structure and the make-up of a cultural group and its
13 development over time, its change, its structure of a group
14 as a culture. Looking at issues like language, folklore,
15 sacred -- they say religious ceremonies, and their
16 political make-up and their structure, basically.
17 Q. What training post-graduate have you done to be
18 qualified as an ethno-historian or is there a qualification
19 for an ethno-historian?
20 A. There's a position at the museum for ethno-historian.
21 You have to have lots of education and working experience
22 in the cultural field as well as in the historical field of
23 a particular group of individuals. My specialization was

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1 the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet and Penobscot/Passamaquoddy of
2 eastern Canada. There is no -- most ethno-historians have
3 either a combination of anthropology, history, and
4 archaeology as a background.
5 Q. Is ethnology a sub part of anthropology or a
6 subdiscipline of anthropology?
7 A. Yes, it is.
8 Q. Do you have any post-graduate level training in
9 ethnology?
10 A. Yes, the course I took with Derrick Smith was an
11 anthropology course looking at aboriginal issues in North
12 America.
13 Q. Did it deal with anything -- did it deal with the
14 Mi'kmaq or the Maliseet in those studies or it was just a
15 generalized review?
16 A. No, it was a seminar course, and it required
17 presenting two papers, two seminar papers, and one major
18 work. And my work was focusing on Mi'kmaq history and the
19 creation story.
20 Q. Now in the ethno-history or ethnology field, is it
21 possible to maintain an objective distance or a scientific
22 detachment when studying a community in which you are
23 actually a member of?

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1 A. Yes, the discipline now has gone away from the
2 classical methodological approaches to analyzing
3 communities. And working in sort of the ethnographic
4 present has allowed researchers to be in the community, to
5 live in there and to study their own. In fact, a lot of
6 the contemporary focus is to present information from the
7 context of the community. It has been valued more than the
8 classical researches that involve looking at a cultural
9 group from classifications that have been established
10 outside of the community and may bear no relevance to the
11 cultural group being studied.
12 One example would be religion and spirituality.
13 Q. Then have you developed your own methodology or have
14 you followed a standard methodology and if so, what
15 standard, and what procedure do you use?
16 A. I have developed my own methodological approach to
17 dealing with aboriginal communities, more on an ethical
18 basis. Because in the past aboriginal knowledge,
19 aboriginal technologies have been appropriated from our
20 communities and other people benefit financially from these
21 type of researches, especially when it involves mining,
22 medicines, collection of medicines and knowledge about the
23 environment. In fact, I have been involved in developing

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1 an ethical approach to doing research in aboriginal
2 communities for Environment Canada.
3 Q. Could you take us through step by step, or would it be
4 too long, your methodology?
5 A. No, no. By going into an aboriginal community, first
6 of all, you would have to survey all the literature that
7 you would be able to find on that particular aboriginal
8 community. There would be a protocol that you would have
9 to follow in terms of contacting whoever the administrative
10 or political head of that community would be to obtain the
11 necessary permissions or licenses to access individuals
12 within that community and then to be able to know the
13 proper protocol of ensuring the proper handling of
14 information in terms of confidentiality and by providing
15 the people who provide information to you with gifts and
16 presents and monetary stipends to ensure that the process
17 is closely done in a way that is more beneficial to the
18 community as well as when you finish your research and do a
19 report, before you finalize the report, you would give your
20 draft to the community involved and to see if there is any
21 information that they would not want to be given publicly,
22 as well as the final report, when it is presented, that you
23 ensure that wherever this report and for what purpose the

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1 report will be used that the community are informed,
2 communities are informed about where this document is going
3 to go. Plus the benefits from there that might accrue from
4 this information would be partially negotiated with the
5 community involved.
6 Q. That format that you use, how does that differ from
7 the standard methodology that you were taught when you took
8 your seminar courses?
9 A. Well, classically -- Well, it doesn't differ that much
10 because the ideal is to minimize taking somebody's
11 information or improperly doing research in the community.
12 So --
13 Q. You mean "improperly doing research in the community,"
14 would that be contrary to local traditions and the local
15 culture, or contrary to doing research, period?
16 A. Contrary to local cultures and contrary to the
17 principles of whatever the researching institute or whoever
18 provides funding for the research. Classically, what has
19 happened in the past is anthropologists or historians or
20 just researchers would come in and start interviewing an
21 elder or somebody about technology, let's say, about canoes
22 or toboggans or snowshoes and different people would come
23 out with patents on those things, and even medicines and

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1 native people would not even be allowed to touch that plant
2 that has been particularly identified as their traditional
3 medicinal plant. It's happened in many instances and
4 Environment Canada has been focusing on providing an
5 ethical approach to that kind of research.
6 Q. Now in your work then, do you distinguish between
7 western scientific understanding of human history and the
8 history told by the elders of your community and what do
9 you do if there is a conflict between the two of them?
10 A. You don't -- When you have two sources of information
11 or two sources of knowledge, in the instance of indigenous
12 people in North America, there is a lot of reliance on
13 dreams, on visions, on fasting, and how these people are
14 influenced and use this in terms of their traditional
15 activities, like hunting, ceremonies, drumming, dancing and
16 pipe ceremonies, sweat lodge ceremonies. There is a
17 different sort of information. It's more all encompassing
18 and it makes sense of everything that is around in its
19 world view.
20 While in the mainstream context, research has been
21 broken down in particular categories, like economy,
22 political, archaeological, anthropological, social,
23 cultural, religious and those categories, and it is not

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1 simply possible to superimpose one over the other, the
2 written context or the oral context over the written. We
3 have to deal with them separately and juxtapose these two
4 and take from it a more rounded source of knowledge rather
5 than saying that is true and that is not true. According
6 to your cultural traditions, all knowledge and all
7 information is valid. If you don't agree, well, that is
8 valid, that you don't agree, you have your reasons and
9 rationality. In all likely instances, aboriginal people
10 will not push their values upon you to change your thinking.
11 Q. Do you make a distinction in your assessment of oral
12 history and oral tradition -- Perhaps before we get to
13 that, in oral history and oral tradition, what is your
14 definition of oral history and oral tradition?
15 A. Oral tradition is a culmination of all of the
16 collective knowledge of indigenous people in a particular
17 group, cultural group, like the Mi'kmaq people, Mi'kmaw.
18 Their embodiment of where they come from, there is a
19 general understanding. There is the sun, there is the
20 earth, there is Glooscap and all the other entities around
21 him. There is a general adherence to that belief that we
22 are all related to each other and we belong to the land and
23 so on. I'm sorry, can you frame your question again?

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1 Q. Your definition of oral history and oral tradition.
2 A. Okay. In the traditional oral tradition, it is a
3 collective memory of all the Mi'kmaq people of their past
4 history, their past traditions, their past organization,
5 their past activities, traditional activities - hunting,
6 fishing, gathering, collecting and so on. It's embodied in
7 everybody and it gets passed down in songs. It gets passed
8 down in ceremonies, in narratives, in dances, in drumming.
9 Also, in stories. And so this is more or less the oral
10 tradition, which can span as far back as the memory can
11 take us about our culture.
12 Now the oral history is more or less a methodological
13 approach of collecting information. Oral history can be a
14 person being interviewed about medicines and the person
15 could either be writing notes down or having a tape
16 recorder or a video camera and recording that particular
17 individual's life experience about what they have
18 experienced in their lifetime and what they have seen or
19 heard in their lifetime and how they relate that. That's
20 more a methodological approach of doing oral tradition. It
21 could be about the Jews during the war and the Holocaust.
22 It could be about Turks. It could be anybody who could
23 talk about their personal experience about a war experience

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1 or whatever. That is the method involved in recording
2 those voices in that context and those experiences.
3 Q. When you are doing that sort of work, do you make a
4 distinction between what actually happened, the recorded
5 past, or what people believe might have happened in the
6 past? How do you distinguish between those two in your
7 capacity when you are assessing oral history and oral
8 tradition?
9 A. Oral tradition would involve interpretation of dreams,
10 visions and more or less deal with an incident occurring in
11 relation to when I was born or when my grandmother was born
12 or when my grandmother canoed across to Newfoundland or
13 there was a natural disaster or there was some particular
14 event, a big snowstorm or an icestorm. It could have been
15 when a young person might have shot a moose for the first
16 time. Those time frames are -- it's incidences that are
17 recorded around particular events, around a particular land
18 formation. It could be around Glooscap's Mountain or
19 around a certain inlet or around a river. A particular
20 incident may have occurred. A starvation or a moose didn't
21 come this year or caribou didn't come and it was a hard
22 winter. So oral tradition would more or less focus on that
23 while oral history would identify a particular moment in

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1 that person's lifetime. More recent, depending on the age
2 of that person.
3 Q. So tradition is more of a global concept within the
4 community and history is the individual's recollection of
5 an incident?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Is it, in this concept of oral tradition, is it
8 possible to derive knowledge about what people understood
9 over 200 years ago from what they understand today occurred
10 200 years ago?
11 A. Yes, in the context that the Mi'kmaq Grand Council is
12 organized in such a way that we would read past treaties.
13 We would read the wampum belts. We would re-enact the
14 ceremonies that were practiced traditionally by our people,
15 and, in this way, these ceremonies involve relationships
16 between families, relationships between communities and
17 relationships between neighbouring communities. And so it
18 was contiguous to the survival of indigenous nations, like
19 the Mi'kmaq, to ensure that these activities continued,
20 even symbolically.
21 Q. When you're reviewing the history that you're talking
22 about, and your studies, when you look at Mi'kmaq oral
23 history and oral tradition, do you view it as a Mi'kmaq or

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1 someone who has training in the western historical
2 tradition? I'm thinking of your training in university
3 plus your seminar training and your current employment
4 where you have obviously have ongoing on-the-job training,
5 I guess, "OJT," we call it, I guess, or government used to
6 call it.
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. How do you review it? Do you review it as a Mi'kmaq
9 or as somebody who has got an education that allows you to
10 go in and make a critical assessment of this oral history
11 and oral tradition?
12 A. Well, first of all, I am a Mi'kmaq on the Grand
13 Council from Big Cove. I look at it from that context from
14 an experiential context. Then I look at my educational
15 training that has allowed me to look at documentation and
16 be able to determine what kind of information that I am
17 looking for. At the beginning, usually there is a sense of
18 direction it gives you, where this article or document is
19 going and what kind of information does it record and how
20 does it record it and who is it about and what is it about
21 and those main questions you start to ask yourself. And I
22 credit that to my academic education, to be able to
23 critically analyze documentation.

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1 Q. We've heard evidence in this Court and I'm just
2 wondering, from your experience and your knowledge, not
3 only as a Mi'kmaq individual and elder and hereditary
4 chief, is their culture, the Mi'kmaq culture, primarily an
5 oral culture?
6 A. Primarily, yes, because it is not taught in the
7 schools about our history or culture, about our treaties,
8 our relationships with Europeans. It is not taught in a
9 formal way in schools.
10 Q. Was there any form of hieroglyphic developed by the
11 Mi'kmaq prior to European contact or European contact?
12 A. There was a form of symbols that had been utilized by
13 the indigenous people to convey message on trails, on boats
14 in the waters, on the land and the river systems, marking
15 on trees and so on, as well as on their own clothing, on
16 the hats of women that may gather. There are particular
17 designs on the hat that would identify a particular woman
18 at a ceremony to determine whether she was the chief's
19 wife, grand chief's mother, chief's daughter, or chief's
20 sister. In this way, younger members of the tribe would
21 not inappropriately approach a lady for asking the wrong
22 kind of questions. These markings differentiated also
23 hereditary chiefs that would have come from certain

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1 districts and so on.
2 When the missionaries arrived, LeClerc developed a
3 standardized system of these hieroglyphics and began to
4 teach the Indians about prayers. Maillard also further
5 developed these and [Crowder?] and they published books,
6 and most recently, David Schmidt published a book on these
7 hieroglyph.
8 Q. I note on your outline that you will be referring to
9 some works that are in Exhibit 17 by Ms. Cruikshank.
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. She is an anthropologist, is she not?
12 A. She is.
13 Q. And you have a basis in anthropology in your -- In
14 your work, do you follow her opinions or do you just use
15 her as a reference?
16 A. I follow some of her opinions but I have also other
17 opinions about some aspects of it, but I will go into that
18 in more detail.
19 Q. This form of hieroglyphics, it was developed when,
20 17th century, 16th century?
21 A. When LeClerc arrived, he --
22 Q. Okay, so it's post contact.
23 A. Yes.

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1 Q. And it's a form of communication, is it not?
2 A. It was a communication that was standardized by
3 LeClerc in order to facilitate him teaching the Lord's
4 Prayer and Catholic prayers to the Mi'kmaq people.
5 Q. Is the wampum or wampum belt a form of communication
6 as well?
7 A. Yes, it is.
8 Q. It is a form of written communication, is it not?
9 A. More symbolically than written. It is a construction
10 of wampum quahog shells that are almost a quarter of an
11 inch in height and about the same in diameter and they have
12 been strung on sinew and they form figures on a belt that
13 is strung together by these quahog shells and there are
14 symbols on the belt that might indicate a pipe or a wigwam
15 or other elements, individuals, and these are just more or
16 less representations and symbols of a larger discussion
17 that might have taken place and an interpretation of that
18 larger discussion is minimized to a symbol and whoever
19 reads the wampum tries to replicate the context of that
20 speech that was given.
21 Q. So each time it's read by a different individual, it
22 could be read differently.
23 A. There would be not a transcript that somebody would

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1 have to read. You would have to --
2 Q. Interpret it.
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Now you mentioned ways of expressing this oral or
5 relating the oral tradition. Tings like stories, legends,
6 myths, songs, dances. Do you distinguish between these
7 various forms of expression of the oral tradition, or are
8 they all just expressed the same way, or is there a
9 difference? Is there one mode that expresses it
10 differently than another?
11 A. I don't understand the exact context.
12 Q. Well, when you go out into the community, as in your
13 capacity from the museum, and you're going to a community
14 that you have never been to before and you're assessing --
15 I suppose you've probably been to quite a few. And you
16 want to assess some of their oral traditions and you go
17 through your protocols and your methodology and you want to
18 assess that oral tradition and some of it is expressed to
19 you in different forms, and I believe you mentioned there
20 was dances, there's song, there's the dreams or the myths.
21 Is there a difference in how you assess those or do you
22 assess them all in the same way?
23 A. You would have to, in terms of the kind of assessment,

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1 in terms of eliciting some sense of knowledge from that --
2 I'm still trying to -- Like maybe a song or a particular
3 song of a particular community, I would more or less, in
4 order to analyze that, I would want to determine when that
5 song is sung in relation to what activity, who has the --
6 who is the bearer of that song and how did they come to
7 sing that song and what does the song mean. In that
8 context, this is how I would analyze.
9 Q. So I gather from what you're saying then, it's not
10 just the song. It's when it's related, how it's related
11 and by whom. So there is a whole bunch of things that you
12 take into consideration when you consider the tradition of
13 that particular item?
14 A. Yes, you would have to establish the context of that
15 particular -- I just still didn't fully understand the
16 context of that.
17 Q. My apologies. Do you have any training in
18 historiographic from the museum? Have you done any
19 historiographic work at all?
20 A. I did more of my historiographic training is during my
21 qualifying year at UNB for Masters in History.
22 Q. That was the three of four months --
23 A. No, I did one full year at UNB and then one semester

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1 in the Masters program, and it was more or less on the
2 historiosicity and historicity, historicism, methodologies
3 in gathering information in the historical context plus the
4 -- most of my studies was on Loyalist history in the east
5 coast from the American Revolution to the settlement of New
6 Brunswick as a colony.
7 Q. I note as well that you're going to be mentioning and
8 you're going to be relating some -- the creation story and
9 a couple of other types of stories that are part of the
10 Mi'kmaq culture. Is there any oral traditions that are
11 secret that the community would never disclose to outsiders?
12 A. Yes, there are.
13 Q. Would they be individually with regards to the
14 community or would they be in regards to the background of
15 the Mi'kmaq community or nation rather than one individual,
16 particular individual?
17 A. It is most of them are individually based, like a
18 family story or a family experience in the past or a
19 certain legend that is told is particular to that family.
20 Q. I guess we would refer to it in our parlance as "the
21 skeleton in the closet" sort of thing.
22 A. I don't know, but there are also stories that
23 communities don't want to share and then there are stories

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1 as well the whole Mi'kmaq Nation might not want --
2 Q. Okay.
3 A. -- either at the Grand Council or at the band level.
4 Q. And I note, in general, the -- in your publications,
5 the majority of them, if not all of them, when you deal
6 with the Mi'kmaq are primarily with your own background in
7 New Brunswick, is that not -- would that be true without
8 going into too much detail? There's some peripheral
9 specifics with regards to some of the communities in Nova
10 Scotia?
11 A. Well --
12 Q. For example, is there anything dealing with the
13 Eskasoni or the Membertou, Whycocomagh areas like in Cape
14 Breton in any detail or is it just generalization in any of
15 those publications?
16 A. For the publications?
17 Q. Uh-huh, things --
18 A. They're more contiguous to all of the Mi'kmaq Nation.
19 Q. But they're titled --
20 A. Not just New Brunswick alone.
21 Q. Okay. They're titled Big Cove. That is a specific
22 reserve, the "Mi'kmaq History of Big Cove"?
23 A. Yes.

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1 Q. Okay. And that would cover the reserve at Big Cove
2 itself, would it not?
3 A. It begins with the creation story and talks about the
4 Mi'kmaq as a nation and how the relationship with the
5 Europeans --
6 Q. Okay. So the creation story and the relationship with
7 the Europeans is in general. Have you written anything
8 specific about any of the reserves in Nova Scotia other
9 than sort of in general terms?
10 A. No.
11 Q. As a hereditary chief, I take it that's passed down
12 from father to son type of position?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. It's not an elected position, is it?
15 A. No.
16 Q. Okay. And because of the ancestral heritage it makes
17 you a hereditary chief. Now you're a captain in the Grand
18 Council, correct?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Of the Mi'kmaq First Nation?
21 A. [no audible response]
22 Q. Is the Grand Council is responsible over all reserves
23 in the Maritimes Mi'kmaq reserves?

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1 A. It's responsible for all of the area of territory in
2 Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. As I was
3 explaining in my explanation of what the Grand Council
4 encompassed, it's responsible for on-reserve and off-
5 reserve as well.
6 Q. Okay. And as a member of the Grand Council, you -- do
7 you report to the Grand Chief or how does that hereditary
8 function, is it -- what I'm thinking of it's sort of like
9 the House of Lords in England where the British had these
10 hereditary lords. Is it ceremonial or is it a functionary
11 position?
12 A. It's a combination of ceremonial, political, spiritual
13 and I don't think I can equate it to the European system of
14 governing things or hierarchy of order, I have orders that
15 you have to do this or it's more an embodiment of all of
16 Mi'kmaq life and culture and traditions and spiritualities.
17 And those responsibilities to each other and to the Grand
18 Council are more or less consensual.
19 Q. Do they have any political responsibility over the
20 Mi'kmaq Nation as far as direction and guidance and --
21 A. Oh, definitely.
22 Q. -- polity?
23 A. Definitely, yes. That includes part of it and it's

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1 not just the political.
2 Q. And as a captain of that Grand Council, you're -- and
3 in regards to your research and everything, you can be
4 impartial with regards to your commitment to the Grand
5 Council as a hereditary chief?
6 A. Impartial in what sense?
7 Q. Your obligations and your impartiality of your --
8 where your evidence is, where it will be coming from. Do
9 you feel impartial or do you feel committed?
10 A. I can't -- I don't know how you --
11 Q. Can you separate your responsibilities as a witness
12 from your commitment to the Grand Council?
13 A. Oh, yes, definitely.
14 MR. CLARKE That would be all the questions, Your Honour.
15 THE COURT Mr. Wildsmith?
16 ARGUMENT RE QUALIFICATIONS - MR. WILDSMITH
17 MR. WILDSMITH I have not a great deal to say, I guess, at
18 this point. No further questions for Chief Augustine.
19 With respect to his qualifications, I think we have
20 run through the fact that in addition to all of his
21 expertise that the Crown concedes with respect to being
22 Mi'kmaq, his areas of responsibility at the Museum of
23 Civilization include Indians of Eastern North America and,

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1 indeed, it seems like his area of expertise extends to
2 Eastern Algonkian speakers, but certainly is including a
3 fair degree of expertise relating to Penobscot, Maliseet,
4 Passamaquoddy, the other aboriginal peoples who live in
5 Northeastern North America.
6 What I seek to qualify him with respect to I believe
7 corresponds with what Judge [Lorden?] qualified him for
8 with respect to his testimony at least in the Bernard case
9 in New Brunswick with the exception that Judge Lorden was
10 not comfortable, if I can put it that way, with the term
11 "ethno-historian." And my understanding of where he was
12 coming from was that you had Dr. Wicken who had a Ph.D. and
13 was in the discipline of ethno-history, and I think that
14 with respect to Judge Lorden, he was looking for somebody
15 not who had expertise in the area, period, but somebody who
16 had a Ph.D. or an equivalent background to Dr. Wicken.
17 In our submission, there are different levels, you
18 might say, and I think, in essence, what we have in Chief
19 Augustine is somebody with greater expertise about the
20 Mi'kmaq side of or the ethno side of it, but less expertise
21 perhaps on the side of being an historian, but, yet, it
22 should not change the fact that that is the discipline
23 within which he works and within which he's been trained

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1 and within which he has experience and within which his
2 role at the Museum of Civilization requires him to actually
3 participate. So while you could set the bar at different
4 levels, it would seem to me that on the standard test of
5 who's an expert vis-a-vis this court, that Chief Augustine
6 qualifies and should be treated with sufficient respect to
7 be called an ethno-historian. That's what he does.
8 THE COURT Thank you. Mr. Clarke?
9 ARGUMENT RE QUALIFICATIONS - MR. CLARKE
10 MR. CLARKE Clarification, Your Honour, I believe, I
11 know that Mr. Augustine or Chief Augustine was not sure
12 what he had been qualified as. On page 93 of the
13 transcript in the Bernard case, Judge Lorden qualified him,
14 just for clarification, "I will declare the witness as an
15 expert in aboriginal peoples of Eastern North America
16 qualified to give opinion evidence with respect to their
17 language, their culture, their customs, their ceremonies,
18 oral history, and oral traditions. And that was the same
19 qualification that Judge Lorden provided Mr. Augustine in
20 the [Vinyl Paul?] case, which, I think, Mr. or Chief
21 Augustine referred to as the Francis case, which was
22 subsequent to the Bernard testimony.
23 The restriction on the ethno-historian, from the

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1 Crown's perspective, is that, from the Crown's perspective,
2 Chief Augustine has vast knowledge. He has experience in a
3 lot of fields. His resume speaks for itself and the CV
4 speaks for itself with his understanding and comprehension
5 of his community, "his community" being the Mi'kmaq
6 community specifically. The Crown has no quarrel with that.
7 The ethno-historian takes that expertise into a
8 different field, from the Crown's perspective, as not only
9 must he be able to understand and comprehend the community,
10 but he must also have some form of, I would think,
11 professional or educational training beyond what we have
12 heard today, which is a number of history courses at the
13 B.A. level and coursing at the Master's level. Yes, he's
14 done some archival or archival research. I don't believe,
15 from the Crown's perspective, it would qualify in the same
16 area as what Dr. Reid and Dr. Wicken have been qualified
17 before this Court.
18 I believe, from the Crown's perspective, that we don't
19 have any quarrel with his qualification to be able to speak
20 on behalf of the Mi'kmaq and their European relations in
21 Eastern North America, specifically with the qualifications
22 regarding language, culture, and the oral tradition and
23 oral history of the Mi'kmaq.

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1 We quarrel with the quasi-professional qualification
2 of an ethno-historian.
3 Dr. Wicken himself is an academic; he teaches; he's
4 written in the field. The work that -- the papers and the
5 publications that, and due respect to Chief Augustine, are
6 specific to the community, the East Coast, but I don't
7 think it takes us into the qualification of an ethno-
8 historian, but we'd have no quarrel with him being able to
9 give expert opinion on the aboriginal people's perspective,
10 especially the Mi'kmaq-European relations in Eastern North
11 America. That's all.
12 MR. WILDSMITH If I could add one footnote, Your Honour.
13 THE COURT Go ahead.
14 ARGUMENT ON QUALIFICATIONS - MR. WILDSMITH
15 MR. WILDSMITH Notice that the statement of qualifications
16 is with respect to the aboriginal perspective on
17 aboriginal-European relationships. I think the concern
18 that Judge Lorden had, which is acknowledged in this
19 statement, is that Chief Augustine won't be asked about the
20 British or the European perspective or the European
21 practices or the British practices. That kind of
22 information has come in through Dr. Reid and Dr. Wicken.
23 So what he will be restricting himself to in his testimony

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1 is the aboriginal perspective on that relationship and that
2 documentation.
3 DECISION RE QUALIFICATIONS
4 THE COURT A person can acquire the expertise necessary to
5 be recognized as an expert for purposes of testifying
6 through training, through experience or through a
7 combination of the two things. There isn't any specific
8 background that every person must have in order to be found
9 to be an expert in a certain field. No doubt there are
10 elements that would have to be found that would apply to
11 everyone, but I think it's quite clearly the case that
12 whatever the field might be, having a Ph.D. in that field
13 is not a necessary requirement for expertise to be
14 recognized.
15 Chief Augustine has testified during this part of the
16 proceedings with great clarity and a total absence of
17 jargon so I was able to understand everything that he was
18 talking about, at least to the extent I can know about
19 these things at all. And at one point in describing how or
20 what his evidence had been previously and what he had been
21 qualified to testify about previously, he said, now this is
22 not an exact quotation, but this is more or less what he
23 said, that he had quite an extensive knowledge of the

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1 groups, and he included there all of the groups that he's
2 been asked by the defence to be qualified on, and their
3 history and the treaties and their relationship with the
4 Europeans both through oral tradition and academically.
5 And I think that's a very good description of what
6 I've heard about the background that he has had. There's
7 not the slightest doubt in my mind that that does qualify
8 him to testify as an ethno-historian. He does know a great
9 deal, obviously, about the history of all of these peoples,
10 including the other eastern groups which were mentioned and
11 he works as an ethnologist, obviously recognized by the
12 Government of Canada as an expert in that area and the work
13 that he does quite clearly involves a considerable
14 historical aspect.
15 As I say, I don't think there's any doubt at all that
16 he qualifies. Not in the same way as Dr. Wicken was
17 qualified. They've taken different paths to reach the
18 point of being qualified to testify as experts in this
19 area. That's not picking one over the other. I'm just
20 saying there's more than one route to get to that point.
21 I'm more than satisfied that Chief Augustine has
22 followed one of them and is qualified to testify exactly as
23 described in the qualifications that were suggested by the

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1 defence.
2 MR. WILDSMITH I don't want to be redundant, Your Honour,
3 I'm not sure if I read into the record, and this document
4 wasn't intended to go into the record, so perhaps I'll just
5 confirm that what he's qualified --
6 THE COURT I'm sorry, do you want me to read it? I've got
7 it here in front of me --
8 MR. WILDSMITH Yes.
9 THE COURT -- and I will.
10 Qualified as an expert ethno-historian able
11 to give expert opinion evidence on the
12 aboriginal peoples and the aboriginal
13 perspective on aboriginal-European
14 relationships in Eastern North America,
15 including the language, culture, and oral
16 traditions and oral history of the Mi'kmaq
17 Nation Indians.
18 MR. WILDSMITH Thank you, Your Honour. Would you like to
19 take the morning break now?
20 THE COURT Perhaps we could do that?
21 COURT RECESSED
22 COURT RESUMED

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1 DIRECT EXAMINATION
2 MR. WILDSMITH Thank you, Your Honour, I have two more
3 pieces of paper here to mark as exhibits. They've been
4 marked first Exhibit 45, which is called The Mi'kmaq
5 Creation Story Outline, and Exhibit 46, which is Ancestors
6 According to Oral Tradition of Alguimou and Augustine. And
7 just at the outset, Chief Augustine, would you just
8 identify what they are and then we'll come back to them
9 later. Exhibit 45 first, the document that's called The
10 Mi'kmaq Creation Story.
11 EXHIBIT 45 [ENTERED] - THE MI'KMAQ CREATION STORY OUTLINE
12 EXHIBIT 46 [ENTERED] - ANCESTORS ACCORDING TO ORAL
13 TRADITION OF ALGUIMOU AND AUGUSTINE
14 A. This is an outline of the creation story itself with
15 the Mi'kmaq names written on one side to explain what these
16 names mean in relation to the story that I am going to
17 relate later on in my testimony.
18 Q. Okay. And did you prepare these two pages, the
19 outline?
20 A. Yes, I did.
21 Q. Okay. Thank you. And Exhibit 46?
22 A. Exhibit 46 is in relation to the -- my family history,
23 the line of descent in the Alguimou clan as well as

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1 Augustine. Alguimou was baptized as Augustine in 1747 and
2 the line of descent from thereon to myself.
3 Q. And on the second page, the last name that appears in
4 the line of descent is Stephen Joseph Augustine?
5 A. That's me, yes.
6 Q. That's you. Okay. And we'll come to that in a few
7 moments. My first question to you then, following the
8 evidence outline, is this, what can you say about the
9 Mi'kmaq system of knowledge? How is knowledge kept and
10 recorded and transmitted within Mi'kmaq society?
11 A. Mi'kmaq knowledge is basically in the oral tradition
12 and a lot of the information and knowledge is passed down
13 from generation to generation, from grandmother,
14 grandparents, great-grandparents to their children and
15 their grandchildren and so on. A lot of the information is
16 held in stories, like the creation story.
17 Other stories that have been identified by writers,
18 like Silas Rand, who was a linguist studying the Mi'kmaq
19 language in the 1800s, who collected a series of legends.
20 He refers to them as legends. These are stories that --
21 about our culture and our tradition, our relationship to
22 the land and so on. It embodies that as well as songs,
23 ceremonies, sweet grass ceremonies, tobacco ceremony, pipe

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1 ceremonies, sweat lodge ceremony, sharing ceremonies and so
2 on.
3 Q. What kind of information would be recorded in that
4 system of knowledge that would have to do with political
5 structure, leadership, territoriality?
6 A. Information would be more or less family stories,
7 family stories and then family stories in relation to land,
8 places where events occurred and how the families were
9 involved or attached to these places.
10 It also involves events that occurred over these
11 places and so the transference of knowledge relates to
12 those elements as well as elements that touch upon the
13 spiritual realm dealing with figures like Glooscap, his
14 nephew, Martin Apistanootj. And so --
15 Q. Sorry, I missed that word.
16 A. A-P-I-S-T-A-N-O-O-T-J. And it would involve those
17 kinds of relationships with grandmothers, grandfathers,
18 children, mothers and animal, as well, experiences with
19 animals. It would identify a particular species of animal,
20 like a rabbit. It would talk about -- The oral tradition
21 can talk about that relationship of that rabbit with the
22 people, in terms of its applying itself for food, it having
23 white fur and brown fur and some of its physical

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1 characteristics would be explainable through those creation
2 stories and --
3 Q. Would they deal with issues such as who were the
4 Mi'kmaq, where did they live, how was their traditional
5 economy structured?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. How was their political organization structured?
8 A. It would embody that sort of knowledge or information,
9 but in the context that oral tradition comes down to us, it
10 doesn't separate spiritual, physical, political, social
11 elements. It doesn't say this is a social story about
12 rabbit and the Mi'kmaq. It would explain the relationship
13 and the interconnectiveness of everything around an
14 individual in a community and a rabbit and so on.
15 Q. Okay, and what about the concepts, and I know that my
16 friend, Mr. Clarke, explored this with you a bit in his
17 cross-examination on your qualifications, but I would like
18 to bring it out again, about the concepts of oral tradition
19 and oral history and how knowledge and information is
20 carried within the Mi'kmaq community through those concepts?
21 A. Throughout our -- Could you repeat that?
22 A. I'm asking about oral tradition, what is that; oral
23 history, what is that?

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1 Q. Oral tradition is a combination of all of the
2 information that is known collectively in the collective
3 memory of a community in our Mi'kmaq community about our
4 culture, our traditions, our spiritual ceremonies, our
5 relationships with each other as human beings in our
6 communities as well as our neighbouring nations and so on.
7 It would embody those traditions about how those
8 relationships would have been maintained or enhanced in the
9 past.
10 Q. Would they be recorded in stories and legends?
11 A. They would be recorded in stories and legends and
12 songs.
13 Q. And other bits of information as well?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Okay, and what about oral history?
16 A. Oral history would be information that an individual
17 would be able to relate about what he experienced, what he
18 observed and what he knows in his own particular or her own
19 particular lifetime, and to be able to offer insights into
20 those experiences.
21 Q. How is it that you would come to know the oral
22 tradition and oral history of the Mi'kmaq?
23 A. Being a descendant of the original signer of the

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1 treaty in 1760, Michel Augustine, and others before him,
2 Algimou, the name appears in various formations, but in our
3 language, it means Algimou, A-L-G-I-M-O-U. It is to be
4 like a loon or to behave like a loon or to have that
5 characteristics of a loon. In Mi'kmaq, the name "loon" is
6 Algimou -- or gimou.
7 Q. And Exhibit 46 that you have already identified, has
8 those two words on it, does it not. Gimou, the loon; G-U-
9 I-M-O-U. As well as Algimou.
10 A. Yes. So it came to a point in time for the Mi'kmaq
11 people in eastern Canada that the Government of Canada was
12 formed in provinces and there was a division of territories
13 and a responsibility to look after the Indians went to the
14 federal Department of Indian Affairs and so, therefore,
15 Indian Reserves were established.
16 There was also missionary work that was done by the
17 church and the priests and they were given the sole
18 responsibility to enhance the religions element, the
19 Catholic religion among the Mi'kmaq people and to be put on
20 Indian Reserves. In that context, a lot of the traditional
21 activities were discouraged and to the extent that the
22 Mi'kmaq people began to lose contact with their own history
23 and their own traditions and their own ceremonies. And so

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1 my great-grandfather and my grandfather and my father
2 basically didn't participate too much in the Grand Council
3 and its structure because it had been more concerned about
4 trying to obtain living off the land and so they weren't
5 more or less concerned about how the structure of the Grand
6 Council was to survive and so my father and my grandfather
7 were not involved in the Grand Council. Not until such a
8 point that I was asked to participate, being the direct
9 descendant of the Augustine clan and the Alguimou clan who
10 had traditionally been involved in the Grand Council all
11 along.
12 Q. So your knowledge about the oral traditions and oral
13 history --
14 A. My knowledge came to me from my grandmother, Agnes
15 Augustine, her maiden name is Thomas. She was originally
16 from Lennox Island, Prince Edward Island, and she married
17 my grandfather, who was 40 years her senior, when she was
18 13 years old. So she was able to hear stories from my
19 grandfather, who talked about stories about his great-
20 grandfather, having signed treaties in the Maritimes
21 Provinces and explaining about the ceremonies that were
22 attached to those treaties.
23 And the Creation Story happened to be one of those

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1 stories that was attached to the relationship between
2 ourselves, the land, as well as with other people, and it
3 was a way of conducting ourselves in our lives, I guess, as
4 a means of survival on the land with the animals and with
5 other people. So the Creation Story forms that foundation
6 of knowledge in the Mi'kmaq society.
7 Q. Do you interact with other members of the Grand
8 Council or other elders in the community to obtain
9 information from them about the oral tradition and oral
10 knowledge?
11 A. Yes, I participate in the Grand Council meetings every
12 year. They are still functioning around the church and the
13 missionaries, because of treaty arrangements and agreements
14 that we entered into with the French in 1610 when our Grand
15 Chief Membertou accepted baptism on June 24, on the Feast
16 of St. Jean Baptiste. When he accepted, he offered the
17 protection of the Mi'kmaq to the French. He offered
18 protection for the French by the Mi'kmaq people. That the
19 Mi'kmaq would not hinder or bother the French. In the same
20 context, the French offered in exchange protection by the
21 French by the Vatican.
22 Q. Okay, we'll come around to the wampum belts, but you
23 mentioned about meeting at Chapel Island of the Grand

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1 Council.
2 A. And because of that influence and that agreement, the
3 coming together at Chapel Island on the Feast of St. Anne
4 has organized our Grand Council around there in respect of
5 that exchange agreement with the French.
6 Q. How long has that been going on?
7 A. Well, since 1610, more specifically, 1635, the mission
8 was established and a chapel was built on Chapel Island.
9 Q. Where is Chapel Island, just to put it in the record?
10 A. It's in Omamagi, in Cape Breton, near St. Peter's.
11 Q. Okay. You spelled Omamagi before and I see that it's
12 also spelled on Exhibit 46. Just to divert here for a
13 moment, are there different orthographies for recording the
14 Mi'kmaq language?
15 A. There are about five different orthographies right now
16 that are in existence. LeClerc, when he developed the
17 hieroglyphics in the early 1600s, mid-1600s, he used the
18 French alphabet, their French pronunciation system to
19 record the Mi'kmaq language, for his own benefit. It
20 wasn't utilized to teach anybody.
21 Maillard relied on those documents to learn the
22 hieroglyph himself and to further advance his work on
23 developing a more refined hieroglyphic writing system in

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1 the Mi'kmaq. But Maillard continued the same linguistic,
2 the writing system as LeClerc because of the French
3 pronunciation and their knowledge of linguistic
4 terminologies and the symbols that are used to record.
5 Later on by the 1800s, Thomas Irwin from Nova Scotia,
6 Prince Edward Island --
7 Q. Thomas who?
8 A. Irwin, I-R-W-I-N, developed an interest and recorded
9 the Mi'kmaq language using an English alphabet and he tried
10 to publish some material on this and he was not able to and
11 gave his work over to Silas Rand, who developed another
12 form of an English alphabet recording the Mi'kmaq language.
13 Again, finally, around the turn of the century, 1900,
14 Father Pierre Pacifique from Restigouche recorded the
15 language again in French with a different linguistic, with
16 a different alphabet or different orthography.
17 And then later on, Don [DeBlois?] who worked at the
18 Museum of Civilization, developed another form that was
19 different than Rand's and I believe Bernie Francis, from
20 Cape Breton, also developed another form. And I am aware
21 of another one that is being developed by [Manny Metallic]
22 in Restigouche.
23 Q. So there are a whole variety of ones. Which ones are

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1 you using or which one are you using when you provide
2 spellings to different words?
3 A. I can read all of them, basically, but I am more
4 comfortable using with Rand's -- not Rand but Father
5 Pacifique's system because of people in my community, in
6 Big Cove, have relied on Father Pacifique's system of
7 writing. But I interspersedly, in order to facilitate some
8 spelling, I borrow from Bernie Francis as well because it's
9 a more simpler English orthography. I mean, using the
10 English alphabet.
11 Q. So we have talked about you acquiring knowledge
12 through the Grand Council meetings and the interactions
13 that take place there. What other sources do you have for
14 information?
15 A. Over the last 26, 27 years, I have been employed by
16 the federal, by the provincial, by native organizations and
17 bands across most of the Atlantic region and it has enabled
18 me to visit most native communities because a lot of the
19 work that I was doing was delivering a service to the
20 aboriginal people as well as interpreting the culture and
21 traditions of our people to the government people who were
22 providing the service to native communities. So I have had
23 a lot of opportunity to visit the local communities, talk

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1 to elders and hear stories and songs and record their
2 stories or songs or whatever.
3 Q. Does that include visiting communities and speaking to
4 people who would be in the present day province of Nova
5 Scotia?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Are you familiar with and have you visited and talked
8 to people from all or some or most of the reserves?
9 A. I visited all Mi'kmaq communities, all 30 of them in
10 the Maritime provinces. Even in Newfoundland, Conne River.
11 Q. Have you spoken with elders from those communities?
12 A. I have spoken to elders in our own language and
13 recorded stories and exchanged stories and compared stories.
14 Q. As a result of that process, do you have information
15 to share with us that goes from pre-contact times to the
16 present?
17 A. Yes, I will be able to relate the Creation Story and
18 some of the stories of my grandfather and other stories in
19 relation to relationships between the Mohawk or the
20 Gwedech. They were recognized as a Gwedech. G-W-E-D-E-C-
21 H. Or sometimes it's spelled with K-W-E-D-E-C-H.
22 Q. And they're the Mohawk, are they?
23 A. They're identified as the Mohawk people.

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1 Q. Okay.
2 A. And also stories that relate our relationships with
3 the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Maliseet people and the
4 Inuit people.
5 Q. Would it relate to issues of land use and occupancy
6 and trade, Mi'kmaq economy, Mi'kmaq political organization
7 from that time period towards the present?
8 A. It would include that information but not specifically
9 only that information.
10 Q. Fair enough. Perhaps I could take you back to Exhibit
11 46 now, since we have talked about some of the things that
12 are on Exhibit 46, and you mentioned your grandmother, if I
13 remember correctly, who came from Prince Edward Island.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Is she identified on this?
16 A. No. Yes, on the bottom, under the date, 1871, Thomas
17 Theophile Basil Tom Augustine was born at Humphrey's Mill,
18 near Moncton, who was the son of Thomas Augustine and
19 Theodus Knockwood. And Basil Tom married Agnes Thomas of
20 Lennox Island, Prince Edward Island. She was born June 14,
21 1898 and died December 7th, 1899 -- I mean 1998, sorry.
22 She was over a hundred years old when she passed away.
23 Q. And if we look from that reference to 1871 and Thomas

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1 Theofield Basil Tom Augustine, and we look over to the next
2 page, we see his name appearing there, do we, and your line
3 of descent?
4 A. Yes, Thomas would have been my father's father.
5 Q. And so your grandmother would have fit at that point
6 in the chart.
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Beside Basil Tom Augustine.
9 A. Yes. He was a brother of Noel Tom Augustine, who was
10 my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side.
11 Q. Yes, what this line of descent is showing is that you
12 come from two descendants of Tom Augustine.
13 A. It was some way and my grandmother explained to me
14 that our people maintained our linage. They would be more
15 or less cross-generational marriages. Where, in fact, my
16 father would have been my great-grandmother's first cousin,
17 and I would have been in my grandfather's generation on my
18 mother's side.
19 Q. Yes, so to put this together, because I'm not very
20 good at this first cousins and all the different ways of
21 explaining this, both your mother and father are
22 descendants that could go back to Michel Augustine.
23 A. Yes.

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1 Q. All right. I am not sure that it's necessary to go
2 through the details of Exhibit 46 that you have prepared
3 here, but do we see Michel Augustine on here from 1760s?
4 A. 1730 is the approximate birth date of Chief Michel
5 Augustine, baptized as an adult on August 27th, 1747.
6 Q. How would you know that precise date?
7 A. I have the copy of the certificate somewhere. Not the
8 certificate but the information relating where his baptism
9 was recorded. Then his son was Joseph Augustine and one of
10 the ways a lot of our people were able to record knowledge
11 about certain events, that they would take on the name of
12 an important person who had contacted him, more like a
13 surveyor general or a lieutenant-governor or a governor,
14 and they would take on the name. In this case, Joseph
15 Augustine sometimes came out as Mitchell or Morris, and Mr.
16 Morris was a surveyor general at the time in that period
17 who was conducting surveys on lands around the reserves.
18 Q. Yes, I think we have already seen references to
19 Charles Morris in Dr. Wicken's evidence.
20 A. And then his son was Peter Joseph Augustine, who was a
21 chief in Richiboucto River in 1798 until about 1839. He
22 died about 1841 at a very, very old age. I think they said
23 he was about 104 years old. His son, Noel Augustine, did

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1 not become chief because Moses Perley had commissioned a
2 Jacques Pierre Paul as Chief of the Richiboucto Tribe in
3 1841. So Noel Augustine's son was Tom Augustine, and then
4 Tom had two sons, Noel Tom and Basil Tom. He had other
5 sons as well but these were more important for me in my
6 linage. So they were named such in this line of descent of
7 my ancestors.
8 Q. In the date of 1848, we see a reference to Tom
9 Augustine marrying Theotiste --
10 A. Theotiste Knockwood.
11 Q. And the word "nocout" appears there?
12 A. Nacout, yeah.
13 Q. What does that mean?
14 A. It was more or less no coat. They didn't wear a coat.
15 Q. No coat.
16 A. No coat. The "no-coat" family more or less lived
17 around Moncton, around Peticodiac region, down into as far
18 as Springhill, Nova Scotia and further down.
19 Q. Does this indicate at all whether the name Knockwood
20 is derived from Nacout?
21 A. Yes, it does.
22 Q. Is that your understanding?
23 A. Yes, it is. There are Knockwoods in Prince Edward

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1 Island and in Nova Scotia and in New Brunswick as well.
2 They're the same group that are related from the Knockwoods
3 that she stems from.
4 Q. There are Knockwoods in Shubenacadie.
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Can you take us back to 1730 on this and Michel
7 Augustine and you've mentioned about Algimou. Can you tell
8 us how Algimou became Augustine?
9 A. Michel Augustine was baptized on Feast of St.
10 Augustine on August 27th, 1747 and was given the name
11 Augustine. There was a practice of the missionaries, when
12 they baptized somebody on a certain feast day, they
13 attributed or gave that name to the individual, a saint
14 name, either Joseph. Like my name, for instance, Stephen
15 Joseph Augustine. But there was also names like Francis,
16 Paul, Joseph, Peter, Peter Paul. Those are all saint names
17 taken from feast days in the Christian or Catholic calendar.
18 Q. So does that explain why the name Algimou is used on
19 your Exhibit 46 for the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s?
20 A. Yes, the name is Algimou and it appeared in various
21 formations throughout the early documentation. Alguimou,
22 Algimatimg, Algimout, Argimout. When Panoniac was killed
23 in Membertou's time in 1608 --

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1 Q. Who was killed?
2 A. Panoniac.
3 Q. Spelled?
4 A. P-A-N-O-N-I-A-C. There was a name applied to a person
5 who brought his body back and it was spelled A-R-G-I-M-O-U-
6 T. And it's a French spelling and it's pronounced Argimou.
7 Q. Okay, this Exhibit 46 indicates that your ancestor,
8 Peter Algimou, in the 1600s, lived in Cape Breton in the
9 District of Omamagi.
10 A. Peter Algimou or Denys, they called him Pierre Denys
11 or Pierre Algimou. He ended up being involved in a war and
12 his son, Tomas Denys, he and his son moved to Cape Breton
13 and the grand chief that was John Denys, he's a descendant
14 of that same family, from the Richiboucto River.
15 Q. But the Denys moved to Cape Breton.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. If you go back to the 1500s, there is some reference,
18 and I don't know if this is what you were referring to,
19 Algimou is Chief of the Richiboucto River District.
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. His brother, Denys, lived in Omamagi, and his other
22 brother, Pedousaghtigh.
23 A. Pedousaghtigh lived in Esedeiik.

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1 Q. Which is Shediac.
2 A. Yes. There is another brother, Sabchaulauet, who
3 lived up in the Miramichi. S-A-B-C-H-A-U-L-A-U-E-T.
4 Q. Is that not the same name that we saw for someone who
5 signed the treaty in 1761 from Miramichi?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. In the 1400s, the name is slightly different.
8 Algimatimg
9 A. Algimatimg
10 Q. Is that a predecessor name to Algimou?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. And you're indicating in here that that individual
13 lives in a variety of locations?
14 A. Yes. The Algimou family was a very large family among
15 the Mi'kmaq people and there are a lot of stories and
16 traditions. I will be able to talk about it when I arrive
17 to my grandfather's story about Listugutj and Nemisgog.
18 Q. Could you just identify what those locations are that
19 are in modern day terms that are put in the Mi'kmaq
20 language in the 1400s here?
21 A. Listugutj is that area or community around the Gaspe
22 in Quebec. Nemisgog is in that area as well.
23 Q. We can get the spellings of this off Exhibit 46, or at

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1 least the court reporter can, so we won't bother spelling
2 it, but the second one is from the Gaspe area as well?
3 A. A little bit further south.
4 Q. Yes?
5 A. Lsipogtog is Richiboucto River.
6 Q. Is that the next one?
7 A. Nabosageneg is the Aboujagane River. Sigenigtog is
8 that area where I represent. Epegoitg is Prince Edward
9 Island. Omamagi is Cape Breton. And these individuals
10 appear in documentation that have been also recorded by the
11 early missionaries, like by our --
12 Q. Why is it that people are living in so many different
13 locations?
14 A. It was a large family. There were no particular
15 boundaries stopping anybody from moving freely and living
16 and surviving on the land.
17 Q. So does that mean one individual lives or moved to all
18 of these communities?
19 A. Yes. Usually at a lot of our gatherings, or mawiomi,
20 M-A-W-I-O-M-I, a lot of marriages would be organized in
21 these kind of gatherings so that individuals could decide
22 to marry somebody in Prince Edward Island or Gespogoitg or
23 around the Yarmouth area or Cape Breton or in New

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1 Brunswick, and move there where the woman would be from and
2 would be -- They would live and be assumed or consumed in
3 that society, in that group.
4 Q. Did that pattern persist after contact with the
5 Europeans?
6 A. Well, it persists today. My grandmother was Prince
7 Edward Island, from Prince Edward Island and she married my
8 grandfather, who was originally from Big Cove but was
9 living up near around Moncton. And then my dad married my
10 mother from Big Cove and that's where they settled.
11 MR. WILDSMITH Your Honour, I am not sure how late you
12 would like to go. I was going to move to Exhibit -- Volume
13 15 at this point.
14 THE COURT Probably a good time to stop then till quarter to
15 two.
16 MR. WILDSMITH Okay.
17 COURT RECESSED (12:40 hr)
18 COURT RESUMED (14:59 hr)
20 MR. WILDSMITH Thank you, Your Honour.
21 Q. One small matter, Chief Augustine, before we start on
22 your exhibit number 46, the Alguimou ancestry, can you
23 comment on the change of name from the 1400 to the 1500s,

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1 the change in the spelling?
2 A. In the 1400s?
3 Q. Yes. We have A-L-G-I-M-A-T-I-N-G and then by the
4 1500s it's Alguimou, A-L-G-U-I-M-O-U.
5 A. Alguimou is the actual word, actual name of the family
6 clan.
7 Q. Which one, the one in the 1500s, Alguimou, would --
8 A. Alguimou.
9 Q. Yes.
10 A. Is to be like a loon, but, generally speaking, the
11 French and the English couldn't discern the name Alguimou.
12 The Mi'kmaq people also played along with giving names or
13 nicknames to somebody. Algitmating means that that person
14 is being sent around everywhere.
15 Q. Oh, I see.
16 A. Playing with the name Alguimou. They gave him a
17 nickname, Algitmating. Who's he? He's our chief or we
18 send him everywhere, so the name would have applied
19 Algitmating, meaning he's being sent everywhere. Or
20 Alguimou, it's just the different ways that the French and
21 the British recorded the name. The Mi'kmaq people would
22 have just used Alguimou or Algitmating.
23 Q. All right. Going back to our evidence guide then, I

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1 think you've finished explaining the concepts of oral
2 tradition and oral history. Do you recall if there was
3 something more you wanted to say on those subjects?
4 A. On those documents?
5 Q. Just -- not on the documents, we'll come to that, but
6 just on what is meant by oral tradition or oral history and
7 any distinction between the two.
8 A. I think I've said what I had to say on that.
9 Q. Okay. So we'll turn now to the first document that
10 you'd like to speak to, which is document number 289 in
11 Volume 15 of Exhibit 17. Now this seems to be an item that
12 you are the author of?
13 A. Yes. This document was prepared for a group of mining
14 interests companies in conjunction with the Federal
15 Government of Canada through the Natural Resources. And
16 they wanted to have a perspective about traditional
17 knowledge, how they can treat traditional knowledge in
18 their environmental impact assessment studies which were
19 very important for mining and resource extraction companies
20 to have consideration for.
21 And so I was contacted by Natural Resources and asked
22 to put together the element on traditional knowledge, a
23 definition and belonging to the land, approaches to how to

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1 preserve traditional ways and that was it.
2 Q. Okay. In the definition that appears there on the
3 first page then?
4 A. On the first page after the title, it says
5 "traditional knowledge," and it has an illustration of an
6 aboriginal person holding a young boy. The next page to
7 that it says, "traditional knowledge, a definition." Here
8 I would just like to begin with the second paragraph --
9 THE COURT Excuse me, what does is it that we're --
10 MR. WILDSMITH That's 289.
11 THE COURT 89, thank you.
12 MR. WILDSMITH 289.
13 THE COURT Thank you.
14 MR. WILDSMITH Perhaps I could stop you just before you do
15 get to that, Chief Augustine. I see you have in front of
16 you a notebook.
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. Could you explain what that is and what the
19 information is that's in that notebook?
20 A. Well, in this notebook most of the documentation that
21 I have an opportunity to look through I've noted page
22 numbers and places where it's important for me to refresh
23 my memory, to focus on and to help me explain my

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1 perspective and opinion on these.
2 Q. Okay. So that's information that you prepared and
3 recorded yourself in that notebook?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. To aid in refreshing your memory and assisting you in
6 working through the documents?
7 A. Yes.
8 MR. WILDSMITH Your Honour, is it okay if he makes use of
9 that?
10 THE COURT That's fine. Yes, that's fine.
11 A. It's all handwritten notes. In the first paragraph,
12 it just explains who I am and the context of how story-
13 telling came into my purview. In the next paragraph,
14 Traditional knowledge (is based) is
15 used within the context of aboriginal social
16 values and philosophies, mainly, that the
17 earth and (everything) every being, animal,
18 plant and rock upon it is sacred and should
19 be treated with respect.
20 On the other hand, aboriginal
21 spirituality is a belief system based on
22 creation stories, dreams, and visions and
23 gives meaning to the knowledge and

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1 principles of a way of life, but even though
2 it is part of every activity of daily life
3 for traditional people, it does not in
4 itself constitute traditional knowledge,
5 rather, a spirituality conveys an
6 interrelationship (with all things) that all
7 things are connected and must be considered
8 within that context. This holistic approach
9 serves to maintain harmony and balance
10 between individuals and the environment.
11 Traditional knowledge cannot be
12 standardized due to the vast diversity of
13 aboriginal cultures and because no two
14 landscapes or ecosystems are the same. It
15 represents the culture of a community where
16 elders act as a library of knowledge.
17 Traditional environmental knowledge can
18 be used wisely in environmental assessment
19 on aboriginal traditional territories. It
20 may include knowledge of natural cycles of
21 land, water and winds, wildlife patterns and
22 previous land use activities.
23 And then it goes on to say that

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1 Consideration of traditional knowledge
2 (in the last paragraph) recently has been
3 included as a requirement in environmental
4 review guidelines for mining projects in
5 Canada. (And this is in context to this
6 piece of literature.) However, it has been
7 taken into account in some resource projects
8 for many years as indigenous knowledge or
9 local knowledge. Despite this, much of the
10 traditional knowledge used by mining
11 companies does not exist in written form.
12 Clearly, understanding and using
13 traditional knowledge requires a commitment
14 to long-term relationships, respect for
15 aboriginal culture and a sustained effort to
16 listen and to share information.
17 And on the next page, the notion about belonging to the
18 land,
19 The elders teach that Mother Earth is
20 sacred, that you live with the land and that
21 you share Mother Earth with all other living
22 entities, animal life, plant life, mineral
23 life and so on. Aboriginal people have

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1 lived in harmony with the land and consider
2 themselves as belonging to the land rather
3 than owners of the land.
4 Traditional elders tell diverse
5 creation stories according to their tribal
6 group that explain the connection between
7 their people and the land on which they live.
8 Q. Is that information that you provided for this
9 publication?
10 A. Yes, I did.
11 Q. And does that information apply with respect to the
12 Mi'kmaq in present day Nova Scotia?
13 A. Yes, it does.
14 Q. Okay. And is traditional knowledge part of then what
15 you are bringing to the Court in your subsequent testimony?
16 A. Yes, it is.
17 Q. Okay. And did you have recourse to, it says in here,
18 "elders as the libraries of knowledge," in order to get the
19 information that you were going to convey to the Court?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Okay. Other things in this document?
22 A. No.
23 Q. All right. Let's turn to 294 which makes reference to

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1 an article by Julie Cruickshank.
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. Appeared in The Canadian Historical Review in 1994
4 called Oral Tradition and Oral History reviewing some
5 issues. What use would you like to make of this document?
6 A. I want to be able to offer some written accounts about
7 identifying and explaining the difference between oral
8 tradition and oral history by an anthropologist who has
9 spent a lot of time doing research among aboriginal
10 communities collecting traditional knowledge and recording
11 stories.
12 Q. She didn't do her work with the Mi'kmaq, did she?
13 A. No. Julie Cruickshank's work was basically among the
14 Denys people in the Northwest Territories or the western
15 part of Northwest Territories, mostly in the Yukon
16 Territories from Old Crow all the way down to [Tegish?].
17 Q. The information then that you were going to point us
18 to in this document, is it opinions that you agree with and
19 share?
20 A. I agree with some elements of what she is wanting to
21 share here. And so I'm going to offer some opinions and go
22 through parts of her paper here.
23 Q. Okay. Then perhaps you could make clear in your

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1 testimony which parts you do not agree with.
2 A. Yes. Julie Cruickshank sets out in this paper an
3 explanation of oral tradition and oral history by reviewing
4 some contemporary issues from various perspectives. She
5 outlines that there seems to have been some shift going
6 along, happening among anthropologists, folklorist in terms
7 of their evaluation of the importance and -- of oral
8 tradition and oral history.
9 And she wants to, in her article, summarize these
10 elements in terms of how oral tradition is used in a
11 contemporary context in cross-cultural education. And she
12 also wants to explore whether there is an overview that
13 could provide some ethnographic instruction for people
14 today.
15 And on page 404, which would be on the next page, in
16 halfway she looks at the historical approach to analysis of
17 oral tradition. And in this, the first paragraph she says
18 that
19 The terms 'oral tradition' and 'oral
20 history' remain ambiguous because their
21 definitions shift in popular usage.
22 Sometimes the term 'oral tradition'
23 identifies a body of material retained from

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1 the past. Other times we use it to talk
2 about a process by which information is
3 transmitted from one generation to the next.
4 'Oral history' is more a specialized
5 term usually referring to a research method
6 where a sound recording is made of an
7 interview about first-hand experience
8 occurring during the lifetime of an eye
9 witness.
10 And in this context, I would tend to say I agree in terms
11 of it being a methodological approach, but in terms of
12 sound recording, that -- it includes sound recording, but
13 it also should include a visual recording as well as a
14 written recording of accounts in --
15 If a historian or a researcher was interviewing an
16 elder or somebody and writing down this information, I do
17 believe that that information forms a basis of a part of an
18 oral history conveyed by the informant at the time.
19 Q. Do we have examples in the evidence books here of that
20 form of oral history?
21 A. Yes, the work that has been done by Silas Rand,
22 Francis Ganong, by other recorders of history, interviewed
23 elders about information concerning place, nomenclature in

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1 Nova Scotia and in New Brunswick and so on.
2 Q. If I could just show you Volume 1 of Exhibit 17 and
3 direct your attention to the material that would be
4 identified in here on page 39, from there forward, are
5 there other examples in there besides, I believe you
6 mentioned, Rand and Ganong of --
7 A. The information that I have used, yeah, is gleaned
8 from that context.
9 Q. I mean, people who have recorded oral history at some
10 point in the past.
11 A. Yes. William F. Ganong, William Francis Ganong, who
12 is a natural scientist. He described the natural evolution
13 of the geography of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and
14 Prince Edward Island and he relied on Mi'kmaq and Maliseet
15 and Passamaquoddy elders providing information about that.
16 Q. What about Item 301?
17 A. Bernard Hoffman's doctoral dissertation involved
18 research, interviewing Mi'kmaq people in mostly around New
19 Brunswick and more predominantly in Burnt Church, but did a
20 lot of research in relation to -- Most of the elders that
21 he interviewed were from Burnt Church. Diamond Jenness, he
22 has visited Atlantic Canada as well. Laura Lacey. Laurie
23 Lacey interviewed Mi'kmaq elders.

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1 Q. Did you mention Pacifique.
2 A. Pacifique. Father Pierre Pacifique. He edited a
3 newspaper that was published from Restigouche, New
4 Brunswick. It was written totally in the Mi'kmaq language
5 with a little interspersed with some French. And it was
6 published for about 30 years out of Restigouche. And he
7 was in touch with a lot of the Mi'kmaq communities, and he
8 provided service and interviewed a lot of Mi'kmaq people to
9 provide that information. And, in his article, "Le Pays
10 des Mi'kmak," he includes a lot of that documentation.
11 Q. What about Speck?
12 A. Frank Speck, he was an anthropologist. He was out of
13 the University of Pennsylvania and he worked out of the
14 university museum there. He travelled throughout the
15 Maritime region, in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New
16 Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and he also did some
17 major work in Montagnais Territory among the Innu Nation
18 there. And he collected information from elders and
19 documented it and provided it to the museum.
20 Q. Wilson Wallace?
21 A. Wilson Wallace was another anthropologist. He, along
22 with his wife, developed a history book as well as on his
23 own. He wrote an article for the American Anthropologists

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1 called "Medicines Used by the Mi'kmaq Indians," and as a
2 result of his visits to the Mi'kmaq communities to
3 ascertain documented material on medicines, the use of
4 medicines.
5 Q. And do you know Ruth Whitehead?
6 A. Ruth Whitehead also worked at the museum, Nova Scotia
7 Museum and she is also an anthropologist who specialized in
8 Mi'kmaq history and culture and she's done a lot of
9 publications, writing, and interviewing elders and so on.
10 Q. Are these all sources that you have and use in your
11 work at the Museum of Civilization?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Okay. So, I'm sorry, we got a little digression from
14 page 404 here in Document 294.
15 A. Again, going down as far as page 408, "Contemporary
16 Approaches to Analysis of Oral tradition." In the second
17 paragraph, she says:
18 Broadly speaking, oral tradition, like
19 history of anthropology, can be viewed as a
20 coherent open-ended system for constructing
21 and transmitting knowledge. Ideas about
22 what constitutes legitimate evidence may
23 differ in oral tradition in scholarly

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1 investigation and the explanations are
2 certainly framed differently. They cannot
3 be compared easily nor can their accuracy or
4 truth value necessarily be evaluated in
5 positive terms. From this perspective,
6 scholarly papers can be understood as
7 another form of narrative structure by the
8 language of the academic discourse.
9 And I agree with her statement in this paragraph.
10 Q. What do you understand it to mean to say that it is a
11 "coherent open-ended system" in the second line?
12 A. In that it has a certain structure in the way the
13 information is offered or delivered. Structure according
14 to that cultural -- that culture's context of structure.
15 Q. What do you make by "open-ended"?
16 A. Open-ended meaning that it incorporated and involves
17 different elements, like social, political, religious,
18 economic elements, as well as spiritual and supernatural.
19 Q. Okay. Are there things in this article?
20 A. No. There's four cultural contexts that she wants to
21 analyze in her approach and they're more perspectives from
22 an anthropologists who studied oral tradition. She also
23 looks at a prospectus from a historian who studied oral

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1 tradition and an ethno-historian who has studied the oral
2 tradition, as well as a court of law in relation to a court
3 case involving indigenous knowledge being offered as part
4 of evidence.
5 And she indicates that the stories are based on
6 families to places, events, and sites, and these have some
7 context and relevance to the information that is offered.
8 In the first case, she talks about [Renatto Resaldo?]
9 who did an ethnographic study of the [Elongat?] people in
10 the Philippines during the 1970s. He was able to try to
11 obtain some understanding of their meaning of their oral
12 traditions.
13 In that context [Resaldo?] looked at the information
14 that the people had offered in the oral context and it
15 seemed to be based on events that occurred and identifying
16 certain geographic locations. In that context, there was
17 some meaning that could be obtained from that relationship
18 between people in their environment and the places that
19 they named on that environment.
20 Q. You mean in the oral tradition, there were locations
21 or place names?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Included in the oral tradition.

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1 A. In terms of understanding those names in that context.
2 As for the historian, Judith Binney, who studied the Maori
3 in New Zealand, she was also looking at the issues about
4 Maori histories and what do they mean in terms of their
5 relationship with the land, with each other, and so on, and
6 that she was able to make some recognition of the
7 relationships that were involved, the information that was
8 offered by the Maori in terms of their dances and songs and
9 music.
10 And then she looked at Ethno-historian Cohen, who on
11 page 411.
12 Q. 411, yes.
13 A. In the third full paragraph, she said -- or he says:
14 If we look at how oral tradition is
15 used in practice, we come to see that for
16 the majority of the people, it is not a set
17 of formal texts. It is a living, vital part
18 of life. Knowledge of the past is not the
19 dead and dying survivals of a past oral
20 culture handed down through narrow conduits
21 from generation to generation but is related
22 to the critical intelligence and active
23 deployment of knowledge. Furthermore, it is

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1 inclusive rather than exclusive.
2 People will always acknowledge that
3 some elders know or remember more than
4 others, just as they will acknowledge that
5 written versions of oral accounts are
6 valuable but neither authoritative elders
7 nor written texts close off the discussion
8 and circulation of historical knowledge in
9 the communities.
10 Q. What does that mean for us?
11 A. He is saying here that the oral tradition and the
12 written elements must be considered together in order to
13 glean from it valuable information and that one cannot
14 discount the other.
15 In the fourth example about the courts, there is, I
16 guess, an attempt to codify oral traditions and songs and
17 dance and narratives and, in this context, the writer
18 explains the example of the Gitksan Wet'suwet'en.
19 Q. They were the people that were involved in the
20 Dogamot* case?
21 A. Yes, on page 412, if I can just make a summary here.
22 The Gitksan Wet'suwet'en shared their
23 relationship to the land on their own terms

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1 by using oral tradition in that they were
2 stating that they were an organized society
3 before contact. They had house clan systems
4 in place prior to contact and after contact
5 and they had linkages to the past and to the
6 present as demonstrated in their totem poles
7 and oral tradition was their statement to
8 their title to the land.
9 In two contexts, the Gitksan offered their stories, which
10 are called adaawk, A-D-A-A-W-K, and it's the stories that
11 are integral to their culture and traditions and their
12 ceremonies and dances. The Wet'suwet'en K-U-N-G-A-X, was
13 their songs and dances and ceremonies that were attached to
14 the stories that the Gitksan were relating.
15 Q. You might as well spell those other two aboriginal
16 names and I will just do it. G-I-T-K-S-A-N for the
17 Gitksan, and W-E-T-apostrophe-S-U-W-E-T-apostrophe-E-N for
18 the Wet'suwet'en.
19 A. And down on page 14, again in the third paragraph, in
20 the second sentence on the second line, it says:
21 Oral tradition anchors history to place
22 but it also challenges our notion of what
23 place actually is. We frequently view place

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1 simply as a location, a setting or stage
2 where people do things.
3 Indigenous traditions make place
4 central to an understanding of the part and
5 map events along the mountains, trails and
6 rivers connecting territories.
7 Oral tradition also complicates our
8 definition of what constitutes an event. We
9 usually think of an event as a discrete,
10 apparently bounded incident and view stories
11 as illustrations that may supplement our
12 understanding of such events but our
13 definitions reflect our own stories and
14 events defined by a historian may appear
15 epiphenomenal (I don't know if you want me
16 to spell that) indigenous accounts that
17 invoke a very different kind of sequence of
18 causality.
19 Again, the notion of place as being very important in that
20 the land and families are a part of that notion of place.
21 It is important in this context of Mi'kmaq that our
22 stories and oral traditions are also attached to the land
23 and places and events that took place over the land.

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1 Q. Are there a lot of places in Nova Scotia which have
2 Mi'kmaq names?
3 A. Yes, there are very -- In fact, most of Nova Scotia
4 and -- well, all of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and
5 Prince Edward Island all have Mi'kmagy. We have names for
6 the rivers and shores and forests and mountain areas and
7 valleys in our language. Either they are descriptive names
8 of the area, just saying it's a nice, shiny river or it's a
9 nice high hill.
10 And there is a lot of occurrence of same names in Nova
11 Scotia and in New Brunswick and in Prince Edward Island.
12 Like, for instance, Tracadie. Tracadie is a Mi'kmaq name
13 and it means Tlakatimk. T-L-A-K-A-T-I-M-K. Tlakatimk is
14 where you sit down and play games. And so the place where
15 you sit down and play games is always identified where they
16 may have gathered together for certain ceremonies and part
17 of that gathering is to spend time playing games of memory
18 and dexterity and endurance, because some of these games
19 would last two or three days at a time.
20 Q. How old would those words be, the Mi'kmaq words for
21 the places?
22 A. They would be precontact names, and sometimes contact
23 names where they may have met Europeans and wanted to play

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1 games with them as well.
2 Q. That was on page 413, I believe, that you were reading.
3 A. Yes. And so, in that context, I think the oral
4 tradition and oral history has been fully outlined by Julie
5 Chruikshank in terms of how these concepts have been used
6 by anthropologists, by historians, by ethno-historians, as
7 well as by the courts, and she offers an opinion which
8 states that there is, yes, an ethnographic lesson that we
9 can obtain from this and there is a method that we can
10 obtain information from oral tradition and oral history, as
11 well as the written documentation. And I agree with her on
12 that.
13 Q. Okay. And do you find that applicable to the Mi'kmaq
14 in Nova Scotia?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. All right. I would like to move to the Wolfe article
17 in volume 17, 326.
18 A. The Wolfe article, I make reference to this because
19 Alexander Wolfe was a descendant of a very strong family
20 among the [Sotoanishnanee?] people in Saskatchewan and,
21 like myself, he undertook to study his own culture's
22 history, their stories, their oral tradition, and he has
23 moved forward with this perspective and tried to capture

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1 some of these stories in a written context. He has offered
2 some opinions in his work by publishing a book entitled,
3 "Earth Elder Stories - The Pinayzitt Path." The word
4 Pinayzitt is spelled P-I-N-A-Y-Z-I-T-T.
5 Q. Do you know what that means or what that is a
6 reference to?
7 A. The people.
8 Q. Path of the people?
9 A. Yes. So in the preface, Harvey Knight, who is a well
10 known anthropologist, who works in the University of
11 Minnesota, I believe, offered to write the preface to this
12 article and in the preface he comments on Wolfe's work on
13 Roman numeral 8, viii. On the second paragraph, Harvey
14 Knight says:
15 Wolfe's work is significant in that it
16 is a written presentation of authentic
17 Indian history. His book contains many of
18 the important elements of the traditional
19 Indian approach to history. He presents
20 historical accounts in narrative form
21 interwoven with the significant events,
22 personalities and notable places, such as
23 the ancestral homeland and sacred pilgrimage

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1 site of his people.
2 Historiographic elements, such as the
3 genealogy and maps are presented to support
4 these accounts and to serve other important
5 traditional functions as well. A clan's
6 genealogy was essential for determining the
7 procreation of healthy offspring and thereby
8 ensuring their survival.
9 Geographic knowledge of plains, lakes,
10 rivers and mountain ranges was crucial to
11 their survival because it was on these vast
12 areas that they roamed, hunted, and gathered
13 food, evading and confronting their
14 traditional enemies.
15 Again, in ix, on the next page, number 9, Harvey Knight
16 makes a reference to the correct and respectful approach to
17 traditional -- to oral traditions which Wolfe recommends in
18 his introduction. It is important to reiterate his points
19 briefly, and he says:
20 First, to gain a deeper understanding
21 of the history and culture through the
22 stories of its people, one must first learn
23 the language of the family, tribe, or nation

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1 to which the stories belong. Language and
2 culture are inextricably interwoven and
3 interdependent.
4 Second, in approaching oral traditions,
5 one must become aware of the principles and
6 practices that govern those traditions, just
7 as western literary traditions have their
8 modes and devices in history its established
9 methodologies, Indian oral traditions have
10 rules and principles that are distinct and
11 valid in their own right.
12 Third, it should be recognized that the
13 practice and principles of oral traditions
14 vary from band to band and nation to nation.
15 Their form and content is determined by
16 language and environment.
17 Finally, anyone seriously undertaking
18 the study of Indian oral tradition should be
19 prepared to respect and preserve these
20 traditions in their pure form. This can
21 only be done if the written form is
22 manipulated to conform to the rules,
23 language, and style of Indian oral

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1 traditions. But the ultimate goal should be
2 to achieve a balance, allowing Indian oral
3 and written traditions to coexist side by
4 side without one diminishing the importance
5 of the other.
6 And I think this is an important element that needs to be
7 firmly put forward in analyzing and studying oral
8 traditions.
9 Q. But what do you get then from the reference to "oral
10 and written traditions side by side not diminishing one
11 from the other"?
12 A. That information can be obtained from both sources in
13 order to round out a fuller vision of the occasion that may
14 have occurred at some point in time in the history of the
15 aboriginal people.
16 Q. Okay, thank you. Anything further?
17 A. Furthermore, in the introduction that was written by
18 Mr. Wolfe himself, he, on page 13, he on the second full
19 paragraph, he says:
20 Grandfathers realize that a time was
21 coming when what they had to say would be
22 important to the well being and stability of
23 their descendants yet to come. From

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1 predictions made from before their time,
2 they knew that in the future there would be
3 a need for the [Inishnabay?] to know of
4 their descendency and history, their
5 language and their culture. Without this,
6 future descendants would become lost and
7 would be in confusion.
8 Again, in the third paragraph:
9 These stories show why certain customs
10 are observed in a certain manner as
11 prescribed by their cultural and spiritual
12 tradition. In some of the stories, there is
13 humour.
14 Another type of story told by
15 grandfathers and grandmothers to convey a
16 lesson in life employ a deceiving legendary
17 character named [Nannapooshow?] who was able
18 to communicate with all creation. He
19 sometimes ended up a loser. Other times, he
20 did some good things and the way in which he
21 did them was humorous.
22 The [Nannapooshow?] stories, the
23 grandfathers, said were to be told during

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1 the winter season. The stories relating to
2 the family and the historical background of
3 the [Inishnabay?] could be told at any
4 season.
5 A lot of these stories were about survival, about the
6 buffalo, about the people and their relationship with the
7 buffalo and how they survived with the help of the buffalo
8 in their culture because the buffalo provided their food,
9 clothing, and shelter and so on, as in on page 17.
10 MR. CLARKE If I might just interject, Your Honour.
11 Perhaps I am missing the relevance of this. This is
12 dealing with western Canada, I believe, and all we have
13 here at tab 326 is an introduction. I don't think we have
14 the main articles that Mr. Wolfe wrote. All we have is the
15 introduction to what appears to be a book of some sort and
16 Chief Augustine is referring to the preface and the
17 introduction.
18 Is there a point other than just reading what it's
19 for? I mean, maybe there's something here that I'm missing
20 but, again, there is no book here. It's just the
21 introduction to some article or book written by Mr. Wolfe.
22 Again, it's dealing with western Canada and unless there is
23 a direct relationship between this and the oral tradition

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1 or oral history of the Mi'kmaq, or eastern natives in
2 eastern Canada, I can't see the relevance of it.
3 MR. WILDSMITH We will be bringing it back around to the
4 relevance. I think until Chief Augustine has concluded,
5 that would be the appropriate time to ask, well, what is
6 the connection of this to the balance of his testimony.
7 THE COURT Unless I missed the point, this is talking as the
8 other parts of the evidence I've heard this afternoon, or
9 most of it, about the significance, uses, ways of
10 determining and all that, oral traditions, and I take it
11 that it's being offered as a general thing.
12 MR. WILDSMITH Exactly, that the same kind of thing happens
13 in the west happens here.
14 THE COURT That's what I understood was being said.
15 MR. WILDSMITH Yes.
16 THE COURT I don't see any problem with that evidence.
17 MR. WILDSMITH All right.
18 THE COURT Obviously, if it gets to the specifics, it's of
19 no direct consequence to anything we're dealing with here,
20 which doesn't mean that the generalities aren't of some
21 significance.
22 MR. WILDSMITH No buffalo here.
23 THE COURT That I've seen. Except in the Saint John Zoo,

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1 once, I think.
2 CHIEF AUGUSTINE The significance of the preface and the
3 introduction is how Mr. Wolfe was according respect and
4 identifying an approach that he used that was very
5 important in conveying the history and traditions of his
6 culture, his own people, and how he went about to record
7 this information in the context that this information would
8 be discernable to the general public.
9 In this way, Harvey Knight provides a preface by
10 commenting on Alexander Wolfe's approach to this and, in
11 the same context, in a general context, I would say the
12 same thing applies in my own experience in analyzing my own
13 culture and traditions to convey it in a discernable way to
14 the general public in an English language rather than in
15 the Mi'kmaq language. That is all I have to say on this
16 article now.
17 MR. WILDSMITH Okay. And I take it that this is an
18 introduction and a preface to a larger book that contains
19 these earth stories.
20 A. Yes, the larger book contains the actual stories that
21 his grandfather told him about raiding certain communities,
22 about moving about on the plains in certain areas in
23 Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, all the way down even into the

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1 United States.
2 Q. So the stories themselves are set in a different place
3 in Canada and no direct pertinence to Nova Scotia?
4 A. They have no pertinence to Nova Scotia.
5 Q. So that's what you wanted to say about the Wolfe
6 introduction?
7 A. It's the approach and methodology of treating oral
8 tradition.
9 Q. Okay, and with that introduction, then, would you like
10 to turn to the Creation Story?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. In that regard and without disturbing the flow of your
13 story, there is a reference here to two items from volume
14 15, 287 and 288. You have volume 15 still up there, I
15 believe?
16 A. I lost my guide. I don't know what happens to it.
17 The reference to the Creation Story is in 15-287. It is an
18 article that was published after I made a presentation to
19 the Canadian Association of Conservation of Cultural
20 Property in Whitehorse in the Yukon. And it is the written
21 presentation the people, the general public that was in
22 attendance who are mostly people that worked in the museums
23 as conservators that had to handle certain objects

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1 belonging to aboriginal people and they wanted to determine
2 which objects were sacred. And in order to put the objects
3 in a context, I related the creation story which explains
4 the significance of the pipe ceremony, the tobacco, the
5 sweet grass, the pipe bags and --
6 Q. Okay.
7 A. -- all of what is involved in the spiritual context of
8 the creation story.
9 Q. And, similarly, there's an account of the creation
10 story in the next article, is there?
11 A. In the next article, I wrote for The Turtle Quarterly.
12 It was a special edition focusing on the survival of
13 indigenous cultures in North America. And I wrote about a
14 Mi'kmaq perspective on the history of Big Cove and included
15 the creation story as a starting point to our story and
16 then went on to talk about historical events that took
17 place in our community.
18 Q. So the creation story is a creation story that applies
19 to Big Cove, according to your piece under Tab 288. Does
20 the creation story have application to the Mi'kmaq in
21 present day Nova Scotia?
22 A. Yes. Because it explains the -- geographically the
23 placement of people on Mi'kmagy. Like the Seven Districts

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1 of the Mi'kmaq Grand Council are explained in the creation
2 story. The ceremonies that we do during our Grand Council
3 meetings are explained as well in the creation story. It
4 also explains the interconnectiveness and the relationship
5 between Mi'kmaq people and their land, the role of the
6 mawiomis, the role of animals, birds, plants and fish and
7 the whole cultural makeup of the Mi'kmaq people identifying
8 themselves with their clothing and the techniques they used
9 to build canoes and snowshoes and toboggans and wigwams and
10 their medicines, the kind of foods they eat and the clothes
11 they wear.
12 Q. Okay. Without further ado then, perhaps we should
13 move to that, bearing in mind Exhibit 45 that has the list
14 of names and spellings on them so we don't need to break, I
15 think, the flow of your story by spelling the names that
16 are already on Exhibit 45.
17 A. Yes, if I may have my bundle.
18 Q. You've just taken an item out of your knapsack. Would
19 you just explain what it is and give a little description
20 for the record?
21 A. The bundle that I have taken out contains certain
22 sacred objects that are integral to our ceremonies in our
23 culture, in the Mi'kmaq culture, in the Mi'kmaq Grand

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1 Council. The bundle has been part of our family, the
2 Aguimou family, and it's been passed down through
3 generations. And it contains basically ceremonial objects
4 and story -- the creation story that I am going to share is
5 attached to the bundle and explains the contents of the
6 bundle. And --
7 Q. What's the bundle made out of?
8 A. The bundle is made out of duffle cloth, deer hide and
9 glass beads sewn with cloth thread or cotton thread and
10 sinew. Some of it is cloth ribbons, red, white and black,
11 which are the traditional colours for the four sacred
12 directions in the Mi'kmaq world. And it's basically made
13 out of material from modern day context in society.
14 Q. The duffle cloth you refer to, it looks like a bright
15 red colour.
16 A. It is red, yes.
17 Q. It is red. Any significance to the colour?
18 A. Red is a colour signifying the sacredness of our
19 knowledge and traditions. It also represents our blood as
20 well as the earth in our cosmology as well as the wisdom
21 and knowledge of our elders.
22 Q. Proceed.
23 A. In the context of the creation story being passed

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1 down, the elders explain the significance and the meaning
2 of our pipe ceremonies as well as the sweet grass ceremony,
3 the tobacco-offering ceremony and the sweat lodge as well
4 as the significance of and the meaning of eagle feathers.
5 And the bundle itself contains all these sacred elements.
6 It has elements of rocks, stone, eagle feather, sweet
7 grass, the sacred pipe, tobacco, and a wampum belt.
8 Q. What's the pipe made out of?
9 A. The pipe is made out of stone and wood and it's
10 decorated as well. It's carved.
11 If I may start with the creation story, I would just
12 like to sing one song, one line of a song to honour the
13 knowledge of our ancestors who passed down this information
14 to us, and it's part of having to sing this song in order
15 for me to continue with the story. [Witness sings song in
16 Mi'kmaq.]
17 That is a song inviting the spirits to come and gather
18 and watch over us and preside over and guide me in terms of
19 my deliberation of my words in -- about my culture and
20 traditions.
21 Q. I don't suppose we'll find that written down anywhere.
22 A. No. The elders have always taught our people that the
23 significance and the meaning of the number seven is very

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1 important because there are seven levels of creation. The
2 beginning element, the first part is Geezoolgh, I don't
3 think I need to spell that out.
4 Q. No, it's on Exhibit 45.
5 A. And Geezoolgh is a concept more or less of creation
6 because the word in itself means "you have been made" in
7 our Mi'kmaq language. If we tell somebody Geezoolgh means
8 you live, you exist. There is no concept of an entity or a
9 human configuration maybe looking down above the clouds
10 below us. It has no gender. It has not even a human
11 context to it. Geezoolgh was borrowed by the French
12 missionaries to identify the creator or God in the French
13 Catholic context.
14 But in our context, we say "Geezoolgh" is you have
15 been created so once you become aware of your ears and your
16 eyes and your nose and your mouth, between your mind and
17 your heart, you are aware of your world, well, your
18 creation has begun. And once it's stopped, well, your
19 creation is remembered by your family and friends. And so
20 it is in the context of that that we consider creation. So
21 that's the first level. It's everything was made.
22 And the next level is the Sun, which we call Nisgam,
23 and Nisgamich is the term we use for grandfather, N-I-S-G-

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1 A-M-I-C-H. Grandfather Sun casts its shadow on us, so we
2 always refer to Nisgam as the shadow-giver. It gives us
3 our shadow. And everything that is on the surface of the
4 world which has a shadow and the shadow moves has spirit,
5 if I may borrow the English context of spirit. But part of
6 that context of spirit for us is our physical appearance,
7 our heart, our beating heart and our beating lungs that
8 generate air and our blood through our system. Our blood
9 flows through our veins. We are connected to our shadows
10 by our feet. And so we are also attached to the earth by
11 our blood. And so our blood is connected to our ancestors
12 who have gone on to the other world, the spirit world. So
13 Grandfather is a very important element in our world view.
14 The second element to be created is the Earth,
15 Oositgamoo. It's made out of two words, "wesgit" means the
16 surface of and "gamoo" is to stand upon. So when you
17 combine the two words together it's a surface of area upon
18 which we stand and share with all living entities, whether
19 it's the birds, plants, trees or fish or animals. And so
20 all of these we share as equals.
21 And upon the surface of the world or earth,
22 Oopsitgamoo, the life-giver, the spirit-giver and the
23 sustainer of life, which is Geezoolgh and Nisgam and Mother

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1 Earth, caused a bolt of lightning to hit the surface of the
2 earth to shape a person out of the elements of the earth,
3 out of the sand, out of the rocks, out of the wood and
4 grass and whatever else there is on the surface of Mother
5 Earth was come to together, was brought together by that
6 bolt of lightning and it made a shape of a human.
7 The head was in the direction of the rising sun
8 towards the east. Its feet were in the direction of the
9 setting sun and its -- both of his hands were outstretched,
10 one to the north and one to the south. This person we call
11 Geululesgop, "the first one who spoke," which was later
12 given the name Glooscap, was given its creation. And it
13 was not until the passing of one winter that a second bolt
14 of lightning hit the same spot where Glooscap lay.
15 And this time he was given his toes and his fingers
16 and all his other extremities and our elders teach us that
17 he was also given seven sacred parts to his head. And he
18 was given two ears to listen to his world from the goodness
19 of his heart because our elders tell us that when we become
20 formed as a new life, the first thing we hear is our
21 mother's heart and that heartbeat is always expressed in
22 the use of the hand drums in our culture. The drum beat is
23 our -- the beat of our mother.

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1 The second two elements of creation on Glooscap's head
2 is two eyes that he could see his world around him to
3 observe the changing elements of its surface. And so he
4 had to look at the world around him from the goodness of
5 his heart.
6 The sixth -- the third element are two holes in his
7 nose, the creation of his nose provided Glooscap to be able
8 to breath in the air that he needed to live. He also was
9 able to sense, to smell his place and everybody's place
10 around him, so that he would be able to sense from the
11 goodness of his heart and understand his world around him.
12 And, last, his mouth, and from the mouth, our elders
13 tell us, we take in the air, we take in the water that is
14 shared for everybody. We take in medicine to help our
15 bodies to be in a healthful way and food to sustain
16 ourselves to live for a long time.
17 And the last to come out of the mouth is words so that
18 our elders tell us if we learn to listen, to look at one,
19 excuse me, to look at one another and sense each other's
20 place and share our foods and our medicines, we will be
21 able to live comfortably and that our words will come out
22 in a way that is respectful to one another.
23 And so it is in this way the elders tell us that

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1 Glooscap was given these seven sacred parts to his head.
2 Also Glooscap was still stuck to the surface of Mother
3 Earth. He was to look and observe the changing faces of
4 Mother Earth, the trees and the birds, changing, the
5 animals changing, fish also changing, blanket of snow
6 arriving on Mother Earth to protect her and so on. And so
7 he was stuck for the passing of one winter on the surface
8 of the earth until Grandfather Sun came back to visit
9 longer each day, the snows began to melt and the ice melted
10 and the leaves began to form and the birds came back and so
11 on.
12 Also, the thunder spirits returned to the area where
13 Glooscap lay and the third bolt of lightning hit where
14 Glooscap was laying and he stood up. And our elders tell
15 us that the concept of the cradle board in our society is
16 very important and is reflective of the way that Glooscap
17 was stuck to Mother Earth because he had to observe the
18 changing face and he had to understand the world around him
19 before he had the freedom to travel around.
20 Q. That was a cradle board?
21 A. The cradle board.
22 Q. What's that?
23 A. It's a piece of board that is usually designed and in

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1 such a way that a young baby could be strapped to that
2 board with a deer or moose hide and with blankets of fur.
3 And the child would be secure in this cradle board with its
4 hands tied and there's a protuberance around the head of
5 the child where if the cradle board were to fall down, the
6 child would not hurt itself. And --
7 Q. What are the boards made out of?
8 A. The board was made out of pine or spruce or it could
9 be made out of hardwood or cedar. And it was designed in
10 such a way to hold a baby upright and that the mother could
11 carry it on her shoulders and travel wherever she did to
12 carry -- to collect medicine or make food or make a fire or
13 build a shelter. The child observed those things because
14 the mother carried it and either hung it on a tree or put
15 it in a wigwam where the family lived.
16 So this concept of the egtigenakin in our language,
17 E-G-T-I-G-E-N-A-K-I-N, meaning "my other right hand," this
18 concept is embodied in the Glooscap's attachment to the
19 Earth is his attachment to his mother and in the same way
20 this other right hand, which is the cradle board, is
21 attached to the mother, and in that way the child learns to
22 take food in its mouth and observe its world around it.
23 And eventually the hands are free and then the body is

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1 free and the child is ready to walk about realizing that
2 fire is hot, a knife is sharp and certain things are
3 already realizable for the child. So in this context,
4 Glooscap had to be knowledgeable of those elements of
5 Mother Earth before he was given his freedom.
6 So when the third bolt of lightning hit where he was
7 laying, he stood up and right away he said, "Geezoolgh,
8 thank you for giving me my life. Grandfather Sun, thank
9 you for giving me my shadow and my image and my heart and
10 my lungs and my blood and my connection to yourself. Thank
11 you for providing spirit into my life." And he looked down
12 to Mother Earth and he thanked the Earth for allowing
13 herself for his creation.
14 And he looked to the east, to the direction of the
15 rising sun, he looked to the south, to the west and the
16 north. And he turned around seven times and then he
17 travelled to the direction of the setting sun until he
18 arrived to area where there are lots of mountains and then
19 he decided to travel south until he arrived to an area of
20 red soil and then he decided to turn back north to the land
21 of the ice and snow. And at this point, he decided to go
22 back to where he owed his existence, which was somewhere in
23 eastern North America.

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1 And there he arrived where the bolts of lighting had
2 hit the earth. The sparks were still left over on the
3 ground. And as he was looking up at Grandfather Sun, he
4 saw a bird circling around and slowly this bird was soaring
5 around gracefully in a circular pattern until it landed in
6 front of him and it was the gitpo, the bald eagle. And the
7 gitpo identified himself, "I am gitpo, I am bald eagle. I
8 have come from the great spirit, the giver of life."
9 Q. Could you spell that, gitpo?
10 A. G-I-T-P-O. And he says, "I -- because I fly the
11 highest of all the birds and see the furtherest of all the
12 birds, I have become the messenger for the Great Spirit and
13 I have come to tell you that you are going to be joined by
14 your family to help you understand your world."
15 And so as the eagle was flying up into the sky, a
16 feather fell and before it landed on the earth Glooscap
17 picked it up before it landed and he held onto it and he
18 hung on to the feather since then. And, according to our
19 tradition, oral traditions, the eagle feather has always
20 symbolized our relationship to the life-giver and our
21 relationship to the sacred bird, the eagle, the bald eagle.
22 Q. Is that an eagle feather you now have in your hand?
23 A. This is the bald eagle feather that we hold and we

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1 bring out during our ceremonies and during our discussions,
2 our meetings and when we do these things.
3 Q. Part of the sacred bundle.
4 A. This is part of the sacred bundle, yes. So as
5 Glooscap turned around and he looked over, he saw an old
6 woman sitting on a rock and he wandered over. She was --
7 had grey white silvery hair glistening from the sun
8 reflecting off her. He wandered up to her and said, "Who
9 are you? Where did you come from?"
10 And she turned around and said, "Glooscap, my
11 grandson, you do not recognize me. I am Nogami, I am your
12 grandmother," she said. "I owe my existence from this rock
13 on the ground. Early this morning dew formed on this rock.
14 And with the help of the Giver of Life, Grandfather Sun and
15 Mother Earth gave me a body of an old woman already wise
16 and knowledgeable."
17 She said, "If you respect my wisdom and knowledge, I
18 will help you understand your world. I will teach you how
19 to obtain your clothes and your food and your shelter and
20 your tools and your medicine and how you're going to travel
21 about, on the water, on the ice, on the snow, and on mother
22 earth."
23 Glooscap was happy that his grandmother came to join

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1 him. He called upon an animal that was scurrying along
2 near the forest and this animal was Abistanoodj, the
3 Martin, and he looked at Martin and said, "My brother," he
4 said, "can you come? I want to ask a favour of you." And
5 the Martin said, "Yes, my brother, Glooscap. What do you
6 want? He said, "I want to ask you if you can give up your
7 life so that grandmother and I can continue to live. We
8 need to obtain our food, our clothing, and all these things
9 that we need to survive from you." The animal says, "My
10 brother, take my life." And Glooscap took Abistanoodj and
11 passed him over to grandmother. And grandmother snapped
12 its neck, laid him down on the ground.
13 In the meantime Glooscap looked up and offered his
14 thanks for taking the life and asked for forgiveness for
15 taking the life of an animal who was his brother, and
16 apologized.
17 And in that same time he also asked if the Giver of
18 Life and the Shadow Giver and Mother Earth could give back
19 the life of this animal, because he says, "The animals are
20 my brothers and sisters, that I will need to rely on them
21 forever so that we will be able to continue to live." And
22 so the animal came back to life. And Glooscap told
23 Abistanoodj to go back into the forest where they will stay

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1 forever, so that they will enjoy this relationship with one
2 another.
3 In the meantime there was another dead animal in its
4 place. Grandmother prepared the animal to be cooked and
5 asked Glooscap to bring together seven sparks that were
6 left over from the bolts of lightening and to put together
7 seven pieces of wood on top of these sparks in order to
8 build our fire which we call Uktchibuchtao or the Great
9 Spirit fire.
10 And it was upon this fire that the first meal of meat
11 was eaten to celebrate grandmother's arrival to the world.
12 And so as time went on, Glooscap decided to go down by
13 the water. And as he was walking down by this tall, sweet-
14 smelling grass, a young man stood up in front of him. He
15 was tall. He had black, long hair and white sparkling
16 eyes. And it frightened him. And he looked at him and he
17 said, "Who are you? Where did you come from?"
18 He said, "My uncle, you do not recognize me. I am
19 your sister's son. My name is Nedawansum. I owe my
20 existence from the direction of the rising sun, far out in
21 the ocean, which ocean caused the waters to roil up. And
22 foam began to form on top of this water. And the foam was
23 blown ashore, and it rolled along collecting sand and

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1 seaweed and all the other elements of the earth. And
2 finally it rested on this sweet grass. And with the help
3 of the Giver of Life, the Giver of the Spirit of Life, and
4 the Sustainer of Life gave me a body of a young man."
5 He said, "I bring my physical strength. I also have
6 spiritual giftedness, and I also have vision for the
7 future." And he told Glooscap, "If you respect this in me,
8 it will help you understand your purpose in this world."
9 And so Glooscap was happy that his nephew came into
10 this world. He called upon the fish of the waters and the
11 oceans. And he said, "My brothers and sisters, the fish,
12 can you come ashore and offer yourselves so that we can
13 continue to survive because you will be able to provide to
14 us all the elements that we need to continue to live." And
15 so the fish came ashore and offered themselves.
16 Glooscap told his nephew to gather the fish and bring
17 them to grandmother, and grandmother prepared a feast of
18 fish to celebrate his nephew's arrival to the world.
19 And so Glooscap and his grandmother and his nephew
20 were enjoying their world around the fire, keeping warm,
21 cooking their meals and so on.
22 So one day Glooscap was alone by the fire. A woman
23 came and sat beside him and said, "Are you cold, my son?"

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1 He looked at her and said, "Who are you? Where did you
2 come from?"
3 She said, "I am your mother. You do not recognize me,
4 my son. I owe my existence from the leaf of a tree that
5 fell to the ground. And early this morning dew formed over
6 this leaf. And with help of the Giver of Life, the Spirit
7 Giver, and the Shadow Giver, and the Sustainer of Life,
8 Mother Earth gave me a body of a young woman."
9 She said, "I bring all the colours of the world, all
10 the blues of the skies, the yellows of the sun to form
11 together the greens of the grass and the forest. The red
12 of the earth, the black of the night, the white of the snow
13 and all the colours of the rainbow."
14 And she said, "I bring strength so that my children
15 will withstand the elements of the earth, and I bring
16 understanding that they will rely on one another and listen
17 to one another, so that the will continue to survive and
18 exist."
19 Glooscap was happy that his mother came into
20 existence. This time he called upon his nephew to go and
21 gather all the food from the plants and the trees and the
22 roots and brought these together for grandmother to prepare
23 a feast to celebrate his mother's arrival to the world.

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1 And so in this way Glooscap was able to enjoy the
2 wisdom and knowledge of his grandmother. He was able to
3 enjoy and understand the spiritual giftedness, the physical
4 strength and the vision for the young people for the
5 future. And also the strength and understanding of his
6 mother.
7 So one day the eagle came back to visit Glooscap when
8 he was alone. And he said, "Grandmother and you have to
9 leave the world. You have to go to the spirit world. And
10 the only time that you will come back is some day when the
11 Mi'kmaq people are going to be in the danger of ceasing to
12 exist. Glooscap will come back to help. You and
13 grandmother will have to stay in the spirit world, but you
14 have to instruct your mother and your nephew to make sure
15 that this spirit fire never goes out, because out of this
16 fire a spark will fly, and when it lands on the ground a
17 woman will be created. And another spark will fly out, and
18 another woman. Finally there will be seven women created
19 all together. And seven more sparks will fly out and seven
20 men will be created. And together they will form seven
21 families. And they will disperse from the area of the fire
22 by taking a piece of the fire with them."
23 And we are told by our elders that the Mi'kmaq people

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1 arrived in Mi'kmagy and divided themselves into seven
2 clans, in order not to forget the significance and the
3 meaning of the number seven in relation to the creation
4 story.
5 And so the seven districts of the Mi'kmaq Grand
6 Council are set up in such a way that the clans would not
7 interfere with one another in the way that they survive
8 from Mother Earth, the elements of Mother Earth, from the
9 rivers and the forests and the oceans, but they will be
10 able to survive from the fish, the animals, the birds, and
11 the plants and the trees.
12 So Glooscap also instructed his mother and nephew that
13 when the people dispersed from the area, the seven original
14 families will return to the area of Uktchibuchtao or the
15 Great Fire, which is, we believe, somewhere between
16 Montreal and Quebec City, modern day Montreal and Quebec
17 City. Somewhere in between there is the area of the great
18 fire.
19 And after the passing of seven winters, Glooscap told
20 his mother and his nephew that the Mi'kmaq people will
21 gather their seven fires and bring together their wood,
22 some elements of stone, and skins of animals, as well as
23 medicines that will be identified as the strongest

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1 medicines that offer themselves, healing and wellness.
2 So after they arrive to the area of the Great Fire,
3 all the seven original families will rekindle the fire by
4 bringing their fires back together to honour the Giver of
5 Life, Geezoolgh, Grandfather Sun, Nisgam, the Giver of the
6 Shadows of Life, the Spirit Giver, and Mother Earth, the
7 Sustainer of Life.
8 They will also honour Glooscap's creation because the
9 bolts of lightening that hit the earth caused sparks to be
10 left over, to be used for the Great Spirit fire. And so by
11 relighting this, it honours, symbolically, those first four
12 levels of creation.
13 In order not to forget the significance and the
14 meaning of the grandmother, we take the stones, the rocks
15 from which grandmother owed her existence, and we would be
16 able to bring together seven rocks which represent the
17 seven stages of creation, seven more rocks to represent the
18 original families, seven more rocks to represent the seven
19 clans of each of those seven families, and seven more rocks
20 to represent the seven medicines that are brought together
21 from each of those seven original family groups.
22 So in this way when we do our sweat lodge ceremony, we
23 do a dome-shaped covering, almost like a domed-shaped tent

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1 where inside the seven representatives from the seven
2 original families, sagamow, we call him, the Grand Chiefs
3 of each of the original families would sit down and
4 represent their own people.
5 The sagamow, in our language, represents the most
6 oldest individual and the most knowledgeable individual in
7 our society whose responsibility is to look after the
8 spiritual, physical and emotional well being of his own
9 people by providing them with the necessities of life and
10 the spiritual connectedness to his own people from life til
11 death. And in this way, the sagamow have this
12 responsibility.
13 Q. What's the word and how do you spell it?
14 A. S-A-G-A-M-A or M-O-W or M-A-W. The spelling varies,
15 sagamow. "Mow" means the "most" and "sag" means "long time
16 ago." The most long time ago individual.
17 So the seven representatives gathered together to do
18 the sweet grass -- the sweat lodge ceremony. They call upon
19 seven rocks at a time. They close the area where they all
20 gathered inside of the sweat lodge. They ask for
21 forgiveness. They pray to the seven entities of creation
22 and they sing together. They bring their words together.
23 And they pour water over red hot rocks that have been

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1 placed inside of the Uktchibuchtao. And in this way steam
2 is created and the situation becomes really hot inside of
3 the sweat lodge and this is how we acknowledge our
4 recreation. It is coming back into the womb of our Mother
5 Earth. And in this way we celebrate our creation as well
6 as grandmother's arrival to the world.
7 Seven more rocks are called upon for the seven
8 original clans, seven more rocks to the seven clans or sub
9 clans of each of the seven families, and seven more rocks
10 for the seven medicines. And there are four rounds
11 altogether for the sweat lodge involving 28 rocks
12 altogether.
13 And so once this is all done, everybody is red hot
14 from the heat and steaming and sweating. And when the flap
15 of the sweat lodge opens, everybody comes out almost like a
16 newborn baby, all red and shiny, and crying sometimes, like
17 a newborn baby would cry.
18 And this is how we symbolically give thanks and
19 represent grandmother's creation, arrival to our world, is
20 through the sweat lodge ceremony, by heating the rocks and
21 pouring water on the rocks and creating steam.
23 meaning of the nephew who arrived from the sweet grass and

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1 the salt water of the ocean and the foam and all the other
2 elements, we take the hair of our Mother Earth and braid
3 it, just like our own hair.
4 Q. And you're holding up in your hand now, what?
5 A. This is a braided piece of sweet grass that has been
6 burnt on the end. And we light the sweet grass on the
7 Uktchibuchtao, and we offer the smoke of the sweet grass to
8 the Giver of Life, to the Shadow Giver, as well as to
9 Mother Earth, the Sustainer of Life, and to the direction
10 of the east where Glooscap and the eagle come from, the
11 south where the grandmother comes from; the west where our
12 ancestors as well as the young people with the vision for
13 the future, our past as well as our future is represented
14 in the west, and in the north, our mothers, who have the
15 medicine in their systems for us to continue to survive and
16 exist. And the medicine bear, the white bear, the polar
17 bear of the north is a symbolic representation of our
18 connection to our mothers.
19 And so our words are entrusted in our smoke from the
20 sweet grass, and so we say we offer this smoke to these
21 seven sacred directions or the seven sacred entities, so
22 that we will lodge our promises to them, and so that we
23 will be able to continue in our life in such a way that we

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1 hold these sacred covenant and relationships with these
2 spiritual entities as well as with the bird entities, the
3 animal entities, the plant entities, and the fish entities
4 that are involved in the creation.
6 meaning of the mother, we take the leaf of the plants and
7 the bark, and we form that together to make our tobacco.
8 And in this way this represents the mother. Glooscap's
9 mother comes from the tree and the leaf of the tree is used
10 as our tobacco. And we offer the tobacco to the giver of
11 life and ask in forgiveness. And we say these long prayers
12 that we ask if we, you know, we ask for forgiveness for
13 taking a life. We ask for forgiveness if we have offended
14 something. We ask for strength so that we will continue
15 and guide us in our deliberations and so on, all these
16 seven sacred entities. The tobacco is offered each time
17 and then placed in the fire and the burning of that tobacco
18 and the rising of the smoke gives the words, delivers these
19 words, our intentions to the spiritual entities as well.
20 Q. Any particular leaves or bark that you refer to, any
21 particular plants or trees?
22 A. It depends on where people are living. There are
23 elements of cedar. We have bearberry leaves. There are

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1 sweetgrass. There is sage involved. Some bark of certain
2 trees. We have wild tobacco that is incorporated in that.
3 As well as some real tree, parts of a tree, like red cedar
4 that included in this as well. That's basically it. And
5 in order to put everything in a meaningful whole and that
6 everything makes sense and is connected and inter-related,
7 because our name, Mi'kmaq people, Nigimaq, and [Nigamana?]
8 It is a term that makes reference to my relations. Nigimaq
9 means my relations.
10 Q. Spell that, please?
11 A. N-I-G-M-A-K or M-A-G. Or M-A-Q, depending on where
12 you are. If I was in Eskasoni, I would say Nigimaq. And
13 if I was in Big Cove, I would say Nigimaq. And, in
14 Restigouche, they would say Nigimaq. So Nigimaq means my
15 relations. [Wigimaq?] means his relations. [Wogamaq?]
16 means their relations. [Gogamaq?] is your relations. So,
17 in that context, the word nigimaq became a noun. Became a
18 noun rather than a pronoun because each time my relations,
19 your relations, his relations, in our language, in the
20 Mi'kmaq language, logically, there is no such thing as a
21 word as relation separate away from something else. It has
22 to be attached to something. It's my relation, your
23 relation or their relation. So the word nigimaq is more or

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1 less a European formulation to signify these people are a
2 relation of people and we have not --
3 Q. You mean they are related to each other?
4 A. We are related to the animals. We are related to the
5 land. We are related to the sun, yes. So, in that
6 context, the stone from which grandmother owed its
7 existence is shaped into a pipe.
8 Q. You're now holding a stone bowl, is it?
9 A. This is a stone bowl that it is not a traditional
10 Mi'kmaq pipe. It is one that has been given to me to carry
11 for the Treaty Number 6 of Cree in Alberta where one of the
12 members of their tribe, Wandering Spirit, who was hanged
13 during the Riel rebellion, it has been in his family for a
14 long time and the elder of that was carrying it after
15 hearing the Creation Story related to me, that he had a
16 dream a year before when he was preparing for a sundance,
17 that somebody from the direction of the rising sun had just
18 saw a figure coming with a gift and he said that Creation
19 Story was a gift to me, and I was supposed to give this
20 pipe to you. And I've been carrying this since 1992, from
21 a ceremony that I did in Frog Lake with the First Nations
22 Circle on the Constitution. So it's been an honour for me
23 to carry it.

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1 My own pipe is in a sacred bundle and I am not allowed
2 to take it out unless I do it in a particular ceremony
3 among my own nation.
4 So I am using this Cree pipe as an example. So the
5 stone of the pipe, the stone is shaped into a pipe that
6 represents grandmother. The stem of the pipe comes from a
7 tree that is Glooscap's mother.
8 Q. Is that true as well of the Mi'kmaq pipe that you
9 referred to?
10 A. This is true of the Mi'kmaq pipe. This is more a
11 representation of a 10-day fast that I undertook, fasting
12 without food and water, in order to obtain a vision as to
13 the kind of stem that I am going to put onto this pipe. I
14 had to undergo this ceremony in order to properly receive
15 and carry this pipe.
16 Q. So the stem you have there is a Mi'kmaq stem, is it?
17 A. It is a stem. It is my own design of the stem. In
18 our culture, the pipe gets passed down from generations.
19 The stems stay with the person.
20 And sometimes the stems are offered in a sacred fire,
21 or Uktchibuchtao, in order to bring to another level of a
22 ceremony or a closure or a continuance or another phase of
23 our spiritual activities.

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1 So this is a stem that comes from the tree. It's made
2 out of black cherry, cherrywood. And so it brings together
3 the spirit of the mother and the grandmother. The wisdom
4 and knowledge, the understanding, the spiritual guidance
5 that the mother has and we bring together to form the pipe.
6 So we take the tobacco that comes from the leaves as
7 well from the mother and we fill the pipe offering the
8 tobacco to the seven sacred entities, because we call upon
9 these spirits to sit around and to listen to our
10 deliberations, our words and so that we will be able to
11 send the smoke back with the spirits and say go back to
12 where you come from and take our words with you. So guide
13 our words and protect them so that they would not be
14 disrupted or broken, unless we come back together and call
15 these spirits back together and we want to agree to change
16 our words and then blow the smoke back to these entities.
17 Also, in order, once we fill the pipe with seven
18 pinches of tobacco and it's brought back together, we take
19 the hair of Mother Earth, which is represented by the
20 nephew, who arrived on the sweetgrass. We take the
21 sweetgrass and light it on the Uktchibuchtao or the spirit
22 fire and we draw the smoke into our mouths but not into our
23 lungs and we offer -- we blow the smoke. This is how we

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1 entrust our words. So the tobacco and the pipe ceremony
2 and the sweetgrass ceremony is integral to our
3 relationships to each other as human beings, our
4 relationships to the animals, the plants and the birds and
5 the fish, our relationships as clans we relate to each
6 other, and our relationships with our neighbouring nations,
7 like the Gwedech, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy people, the
8 Maliseet nations.
9 And, in this way, we are able to sit down and share
10 our words and we come to some consensus or agreements and
11 this is how we do our ceremonies. Once the ceremonies are
12 done, we sit down and we have these feasts to signify these
13 arrivals of these different entities. We have a feast of
14 birds to offer thanks to Glooscap's creation. We have a
15 feast of animals to honour grandmother. We have a feast of
16 fish to honour the young people and a feast of plants and
17 fruits and vegetables to honour our mother. In this way,
18 we are able to have these feasts to offer food to one
19 another as our thanks to our creation and providing respect
20 and dignity to our deliberations.
21 In this way, when we gather together, when we go to
22 the tobacco or the sweetgrass ceremony, we say we are going
23 to put our differences outside of this circle and when we

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1 come inside of the circle, we cleanse our ears so the
2 sweetgrass ceremony is done and we cleanse our ears, our
3 eyes, our mouth, our nose, and our hearts and our hands.
4 So, in this way, we will look and hear and sense and share
5 our words from the dignity of our hearts and our minds with
6 a clean mind and an open heart.
7 So a lot of our ceremonies are in relation are in this
8 context. This is the meaningful symbolic embodiment of
9 solemnizing our words with one another and these extend to
10 animals as well as birds, plants and whatever between human
11 beings, between families, clans, districts, nations and so
12 on.
13 So, in a lot of ways, a lot of these ceremonies had
14 been observed and recorded in the written context but the
15 full understanding of them was not ever conveyed in the
16 documentation that is available surrounding ceremonies that
17 involved European peoples and treaty agreements. I say
18 that in advance in the context of this process.
19 There is a process whereby this ceremony, the pipe is
20 brought out and this ceremony is conducted when we gather
21 together to just share things or to come to some consensus
22 on issues. Either they could be conflicting. It may be
23 involving war or peace or it could be just marriage and

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1 whatever.
2 Q. Now you mentioned something about the seven sparks
3 making seven women and seven sparks making seven men, that
4 they formed seven clans and went into seven different areas.
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Can you say anything as to whether the Creation Story
7 says anything about where those seven places are?
8 A. They just basically went east and west and north and
9 south and some places in between in some of the areas. The
10 Abenaki probably is one of them. The Algonquin Nation,
11 Odawas are one of them, certainly, and the Montagnais
12 probably one of them. The way the story came down to us is
13 more or less its context in our world view.
14 A similar kind of a Creation Story was recorded among
15 the Penobscot Nation by an individual by the name of Joseph
16 [Nicolar?] who published the book in 1890s, in Maine, and
17 it was entitled "The Life and Traditions of the Red Men,"
18 and there is also a version of the Creation Story that was
19 related to him by his own ancestors in the early 1800s.
20 And it also includes Glooscap, his grandmother, a nephew
21 and a mother figure and those other elements of creation.
22 Q. You were mentioning a location thought to be somewhere
23 between Montreal and Quebec?

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1 A. Somewhere in that area.
2 Q. Is that the origin of Glooscap and the fire from which
3 the seven clans were formed?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Would the Mi'kmaq be one of those seven?
6 A. The Mi'kmaq are one of those that belong to those
7 seven original families. Even at the time of contact,
8 these people had some differences but they had
9 traditionally come together to the area of the great fire
10 to form a council with the Abenaki, the Odawas, the
11 Maliseet, the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot Nation and the
12 Mi'kmaq people.
13 Q. Okay, anything further on the Creation Story?
14 A. The only other element is these colour sequences, the
15 white represents the north; the yellow, the east; the red,
16 the south; and the black to the west. Because early in the
17 morning when we are doing our ceremonies, mostly this is
18 when it occurs, during the sunrise, and the direction of
19 the east is yellow. The sun is coming up and when we look
20 behind us, it is still darkness in the west. And to the
21 north there is white for the snow. To the south is the
22 redness of the land in the south. The soil is red.
23 Q. So the bundle contains four pieces of cloth that were

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1 the colours you just gave?
2 A. Yes, and the ribbons on the stem of the pipe represent
3 the blue of the sky, the green of Mother Earth. And the
4 purple representing our hearts, which represents
5 grandfather sun, who gave us our shadows, our spirits, our
6 hearts and our -- I was going to say liver -- but lungs.
7 Q. I think we have covered on the record the other
8 elements that you have identified in the bundles except
9 maybe the tobacco was in a buckskin pouch, is it, a
10 deerskin pouch?
11 A. The tobacco is in bearskin pouch with glass beads on
12 there with an image of a thunderbird. It was given to me
13 from the [Ishnabay?] people in [Giddygonzeebee] in Maniwaki
14 near -- northeast of Ottawa, about two hour's drive.
15 Q. And the rocks were in another pouch that you did not
16 take out?
17 A. The rocks are representations of grandmother and they
18 are rocks that have been given to me from different areas
19 of the world and there is even a piece of coal that comes
20 from France, the children of France who were afflicted with
21 cancer gave me a piece of coal when I went there to do
22 ceremonies for them.
23 Q. Okay, so that brings to a close the Creation Story?

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1 A. Yes.
2 MR. WILDSMITH Would Your Honour like to take an afternoon
3 break?
4 THE COURT All right. Let's try to be back by quarter to
5 four, just make it a short break.
6 COURT RECESSES
7 COURT RESUMES
9 MR. WILDSMITH Chief Augustine, are we ready now to move to
10 the stories that came from your grandfather, John Simon.
11 A. Yes. There are two stories that are significant in
12 explaining our relationships as family groups and our
13 relationships between each other, between ourselves as
14 living within the different districts of our Grand Council.
15 I might just explain a little bit the whole notion of
16 our use of English terminology in this context to try to
17 explain. Districts in our context, in our words does not
18 attribute territoriality towards our society. Like there
19 were no visible boundaries between the districts and nobody
20 was standing guard on each of those areas saying, well,
21 you're now in Sigenigtog. You're now in -- And so when I
22 say "Districts of the Grand Council," in the context that I
23 would use it in our own language, we call it mawiomi. M-A-

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1 W-I-O-M-I. Mawiomi is sort of like a fire that is burning.
2 We come to the fire to warm ourselves. We come to the fire
3 to cook our meals. We come to the fire to perform our
4 ceremonies. And we come to the fire to enter into
5 agreement with one another. And so the purpose of the
6 mawiomi is to keep these fires going in such a way that all
7 of our people within our mawiomi, within -- that identified
8 themselves attached to that fire will come to that fire
9 during our gatherings and ceremonies.
10 So the mawiomi, in that context, is a way of ensuring
11 that people survive, that we would be able to provide
12 clothing and food and shelter and those things that when an
13 individual is not able to provide that for themselves, like
14 elders and orphan children or widows. And so in this way,
15 the function of our mawiomis and the sagamaw in that
16 context, is more integral to the survival of our peoples
17 within a certain geographic area.
18 But it's not territorially identified in the way that
19 municipalities would be identified, in a way counties would
20 be identified in the European context. So --
21 Q. Would there be seven of those mawiomis?
22 A. There are seven mawiomis in the Grand Council, so, in
23 this context, the story -- the first one, if I might make

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1 reference here to number 3 on the evidence guide --
2 Q. Yes.
3 A. -- Grandfather Johnny, S-I-M-O-N-D-S, the ethnographer
4 that was collecting this information in 1964 thought my
5 grandfather's name sounded like Simonds so she spelled it
6 that way. It was Marie L.G. Corsetti that collected this
7 information in 1964.
8 Q. Could I just ask you to take a look at Volume 17 and
9 the two tab numbers that are marked there just to identify
10 whether those are written components of those two stories?
11 Is that what you're referring to now by the ethnographer
12 who collected them? That's Exhibit 17, Tab -- Volume 17,
13 Documents 314 and 315.
14 A. Yes. These are the documents that I'm going to talk
15 about.
16 Q. Okay. I'm not going to ask you to read them or
17 anything. I just want you to identify them. And you say
18 they were originally collected by Angeli or L.G.
19 A. L.G. Corsetti.
20 Q. And these two documents, are they contained in the
21 collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization?
22 A. Yes, they are. They're identified as 3-F-15M, Box 23,
23 F4 and the next one is also in the same reference area.

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1 Q. So were they collected independently of you?
2 A. Independently of me?
3 Q. Yes.
4 A. Yes, they were. We have the tape recordings and the
5 translation was done by my grandfather's son's wife.
6 Q. So were they recorded as Mi'kmaq language?
7 A. The originals were recorded in the Mi'kmaq language.
8 And I must say, the written context vary a little bit.
9 Q. Yes.
10 A. Because of the education of the person that was trying
11 to translate them.
12 Q. And did you get the stories from your grandfather
13 directly or grandmother directly?
14 A. I got them from my grandfather, Johnny Simon, with
15 whom I lived with after I came back from Germany. My
16 parents wanted me to learn more about my culture, my
17 language from my grandfather, Johnny Simon, and my
18 godmother, and she wasn't my biological grandmother, she
19 was my stepgrandmother, but she was also my godmother, who
20 was an Acadian person that was adopted in Big Cove when she
21 was a child. And she grew up in Big Cove speaking our
22 language and learning our culture and knowing more about
23 our culture than most. She was very instrumental in

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1 teaching me a lot about my own traditions as well as my
2 grandfather. This story comes from my grandfather, Johnny
3 Simon.
4 Q. Told to you directly.
5 A. Yes. S-I-M-O-N.
6 Q. Yes. And I see on Exhibit 46, the Alguimou clan
7 history, there is a reference to a John Simon, S-I-M-O-N.
8 A. Yes, that would be his -- that would be my mother's
9 father.
10 Q. And that's who you're talking about here?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Okay.
13 A. There are two stories in relation to him conveying
14 them. One is about Oijiboget and the other one is
15 Getoasoloet. They're reversed or inversed here --
16 Q. You would like to tell them in the reverse order --
17 A. I'd like to tell them in the reserve order because --
18 Q. Oijiboget first?
19 A. Oijiboget, yes. It's a story about an individual that
20 I was living in Restigouche with a community of Mi'kmaq
21 people. I say "a community," would be around Bay de
22 Chaleur area and finally in and around where the modern day
23 community of Restigouche is, that general area around there

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1 has been identified as Listugutj. It encompasses several
2 rivers and the Bay de Chaleur and in the south side of New
3 Brunswick as well. So --
4 Q. At the risk of asking a silly question, can you put a
5 time frame on when the story would take place?
6 A. Before the arrival of Europeans to North America. The
7 story is about Kwedech people, K-W-E-D-E-C-H, arriving and
8 raiding a Mi'kmaq community.
9 Q. Kwedech are those that we earlier suggested might be
10 Mohawk?
11 A. They've been suggested to be the Mohawk people, yes,
12 that were occupying the area around Montreal, Quebec, on
13 the south side of the St. Lawrence River. And they came
14 and sometimes arrived in Gaspe and so a lot of times there
15 were skirmishes between the Mi'kmaq and the Kwedech and a
16 lot of the oral context refer to those skirmishes and this
17 is one of them. And the Kwedech, having arrived and wiped
18 out almost every Mi'kmaq in the area and chased away the
19 rest, captured a woman and the woman was pregnant. And she
20 was taken by a Kwedech chief and she gave birth to her
21 baby. And the Kwedech chief adopted him as his son.
22 And the young person grew up in the Mohawk and Kwedech
23 territory with the other kids. Finally came home to his

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1 mother one day and said, "They're making fun of me and the
2 way I talk. They're making fun of me. They call me
3 Oijiboget, meaning a little bit small for his size. And so
4 his mother says, "Well, that's because you're not one of
5 them." And he says, "Well, who am I then?" And she says,
6 "You are a Mi'kmaq and you come from Mi'kmagy and your
7 father, the chief, stepfather, killed your father and took
8 me and captured me as his wife and now we are here."
9 And the young boy wanted to know if he could learn the
10 language of his culture. And so the woman started to teach
11 him about the language and started to show him canoes and
12 -- that are more or less made by the Mi'kmaq people,
13 snowshoes so she could determine who his own people were,
14 medicines, traditional medicines and all these other things
15 that he needed to know about his own culture.
16 Q. When you say that, can you tell the difference between
17 snowshoes that come from one aboriginal group from another
18 or canoes that come from one --
19 A. Well, the canoes are distinctly different among the
20 Mi'kmaq people. In relation to the Kwedech, the canoes
21 have the high gunnels on the side and they have a low front
22 and back of the canoe to -- for more or less river travel
23 as well as ocean travel. And some of the rivers are rough

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1 that are near the oceans and so they were built in such a
2 way to withstand high waves and which are differently
3 constructed than canoes that are made more or less for
4 inland travel in the lakes and the lesser rivers.
5 Q. Is that true of snowshoes as well?
6 A. Snowshoes are, among the Mi'kmaq people, because the
7 snow is wet and it freezes a lot of times and there's
8 crusty snow, the snowshoes are made in such a way that the
9 webbing that is made out of moose hide is thicker and has a
10 kind of like a wider knitting.
11 Meanwhile in towards Kwedech territory, the snowshoes
12 are a little bit more closer woven and there are thinner
13 stripes of hide used, and so it facilitated weight being
14 carried on light powdery kind of snow as opposed to the
15 snow that was in the East Coast that was wet and crusty.
16 Q. Okay. So --
17 A. So --
18 Q. -- wanted to know --
19 A. -- the mother taught the young boy the difference
20 between these techniques of our -- how we survived and to
21 understand those. Also she taught him the Mi'kmaq
22 language. And so one day he decided that he would kill his
23 stepfather and so he attacked him while he was sleeping one

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1 day and hit him on the bottom of his foot because he knew
2 that the Kwedech chief was a spiritual, strong, spiritually
3 strong individual, this was a way to kill the person is to
4 hit him under the heel. And this is how he discovered the
5 weakness of his stepfather and killed him in that way.
6 And he had asked his mother to prepare him moccasins
7 that were designed in the Mi'kmaq way, snowshoes, and
8 arrows and whatnot so that he -- when he arrived back in
9 Mi'kmaq territory, that he would be recognized. But as
10 soon as he left, it was during the summer, and he
11 automatically assumed the shape of a turtle and hid in the
12 sand and he -- to escape detection from the Mohawks. And
13 then he turned into a loon and dove in the water and swam
14 for long ways, the alguimou, and this is where the family
15 name comes from that bird.
16 Anyway, he pretends to act as a bird or turns into a
17 bird and the Mohawk chase him with spears and they can't
18 detect him under water because he swims fast and stays
19 under for a long time.
20 Then he shapes -- changes his shape into a rabbit and
21 a rabbit dives into the snow and buries itself into the
22 snow and escapes detection by the Mohawk or the Iroquois.
23 And they use spears to destroy the snow, and today they

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1 have a game that's called snow snakes that is in relation
2 to this chase to try to capture this Mi'kmaq who escaped
3 the Kwedech.
4 And so they tried to throw their spears in the snow
5 and they don't hit the rabbit. And then he turns into a
6 partridge and he climbs on the trees and hops from tree to
7 tree. Finally, he arrives in -- back into Mi'kmagy because
8 he hears several children playing and he knows that they're
9 speaking Mi'kmaq, so he jumps down and turns into a child
10 and take -- goes home with these children. And in this
11 way, he arrives to the home back to Listugutj.
12 And the mother recognizes that this young person is
13 not who he's supposed to be, so he says, "Who are you?"
14 And he says, I am Oijiboget. I am son of this certain
15 Mi'kmaq chief that used to be here. And he says, "Oh, I
16 know you, who you are."
17 And so she instructed him to go to the next wigwam
18 which was the grandmother's house and he stayed there and
19 decided to seek the hand of the chief's daughter. And this
20 chief happened to be somebody else that's not originally
21 from this area and he had a battle with the chief, and this
22 is more or less cutting it short.
23 Because what the story indicates is that the Mi'kmaq

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1 people in this story, in this legend identify themselves
2 between the nation that they had battles with and that
3 Oijiboget is this person that came back from this to tell
4 of his survival and to come back to his people and identify
5 all of these elements of his own culture as well as weaving
6 himself into the land, in the water, in the sand, in the
7 rabbits, in the birds and the trees.
8 And in this way we are also -- the story identifies
9 that there is a spiritual connection to these animal
10 entities and these bird entities and elements of Mother
11 Earth, the snow, the earth, the water and the trees and
12 those things that are the embodiment of our world. And
13 that this relationship has significance to what we do today
14 and our beliefs and our relationships today with our earth.
15 So the story of Oijiboget basically ends there. He --
16 well, he goes back and attacks the people and they raid the
17 Kwedech and there is a games going on of endurance and
18 there seems to be almost like a game of chess going on
19 inside of a wigwam between he and Mohawk chiefs. And in
20 this way, there is some kind of a spiritual battle going on
21 which sometimes has been misrecorded as a real all-out
22 bloody battle between the Mohawk and the Mi'kmaq people,
23 but it was more or less a family skirmish.

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1 So that's -- in that context I want to just relate
2 that part of the story as the beginning part of it. The
3 next chapter goes into Getosasaloet.
4 Q. And that's the story that's under Tab 314 then in
5 Volume 17.
6 A. Yes, and this one is about a Mi'kmaq chief that lives
7 in Restigouche area, again. And he is attacked by Kwedech
8 and he was supposed to have listened to his father not to
9 wander too far into Kwedech territory and he does. And so
10 he runs afoul of the neighbouring Kwedech and he is
11 attacked and he survives, but his village is in shambles
12 and everybody's ran away. So he wants to survive and he
13 goes to the mountain where they call that today Sugarloaf
14 Mountain in Campbellton.
15 And he goes to the base of that because there's a
16 source, a water source and a spring which is supposed to
17 have spiritual values to it and then if you go and put your
18 wound or whatever, that you will be fixed. And so
19 Getoasaloet lays under there and finally his wounds are
20 fixed up.
21 And finally he decides to travel through Mi'kmagy and
22 he goes to [Dubosemkek?], to Burnt Church, Eel Ground,
23 around that area Kouchibouguac, [Bedjibouquack?]

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1 Richeboucto River, Buctouche River, Cocagne, Shediac,
2 Aboujagane and he keeps going all the way down to
3 Shubenacadie, Canso, and on to Onamagi, and he wants to go
4 and visit his uncle, who is Pierre Algimaut. And he asked
5 his uncle if there is a young woman --
6 Q. So he is from Restigouche?
7 A. And he goes all the way to Onamagi.
8 Q. Which is Cape Breton.
9 A. To Cape Breton.
10 Q. Where his uncle lives.
11 A. Where his uncle lives and he asked his uncle if he
12 could have the hand of a woman in that community and the
13 uncle says yes, take her with you. So, on his way back, he
14 picks up people and he advises them, he stops at
15 Aboujagane. He also talks to --
17 A. Aboujagane. There is a community there and he stops
18 there to visit and says I've been attacked, you know, and
19 now I have a new wife and I want you to help me reform my
20 community. And he is told that he can take some families
21 with him to join him. And he talks to a person by the name
22 of Alguimou as well in that area. Al --
23 Q. My geography must be bad because I don't know where

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1 that particular place is that you're referring to. Perhaps
2 Your Honour does or the Crown does but I don't.
3 A. Aboujagane is near Shediac, New Brunswick. Between
4 Moncton and Shediac. It's a river. It divides and we call
5 it Aboujagane meaning where the river divides.
6 But also when you start to put a needle into a bead,
7 you say Nabosagegen. So it has a double meaning. People
8 where they made beads, also where the river forks out. And
9 so he continues his way. He stops at Lsipogtog and talks
10 to Michel Augustine and asked if he can provide some
11 elements to his family and they go back.
12 And he arrives back to Listugutj and he and his wife
13 marry and they have children and his two young sons go out
14 and camp somewhere in the wilderness and the young sons
15 hear somebody coming and one of the sons says "I don't hear
16 anything," and the other says, "I do. It's coming. It's
17 arriving." For two days he listens and finally on the last
18 day, a frog appears and says, you know, "The Kwedech are
19 coming. You had better go and warn your father because
20 they're going to do the same thing."
21 So they go and warn his father and the father says, "I
22 don't know anything about the Kwedech. I am a powerful
23 chief. I know I should have knowledge about this thing and

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1 I don't know it." So his mother and children and his wife
2 leave the area and he is left alone. Again, he is attacked
3 and the community gets wiped out and he does the same
4 thing. He goes back looking for more people, but not for a
5 wife this time. And he comes back again, repopulating the
6 area. And the fact that the area is called Listugutj
7 today, in our language, when you say "Listugutj," means
8 don't heed your father. Don't listen to your father.
9 Don't obey your father or disobey your father. So that
10 area got to be named Listugutj for disobeying your father.
11 The story is in relation to a young man not obeying his
12 father.
13 Also, the story is used in a context of almost like
14 the main frame for our ancestry. It involves and includes
15 elements of our past, like our ancestors. Algimating is
16 also included in this story, Michel Argimou or Michel
17 Augustine. Pierre Algimou is also included in this story.
18 And so these people may have spanned two, 300 years in our
19 past but they're all incorporated in this one story about
20 this person travelling back and forth through our mawiomi
21 to try to repopulate and also explaining the nature of the
22 naming of that area. So it has several functions in our
23 world view.

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1 So it is important in the way that the story is
2 conveyed. It embodied the supernatural elements or our
3 society, also incorporating the real life contemporary
4 personages in our culture as well as those individuals that
5 were known to be very famous for their involvement in
6 certain events that took place in our history.
7 Q. Was Getoasaloet looking for a wife in all of the
8 communities that he was going into?
9 A. He was looking for a wife when he went to Omamagi or
10 Cape Breton, and he found one. He was involved in a
11 different -- There's other legends that are attached to it
12 and they expand and kind of develop in different way.
13 There is a story about him and his relationship with that
14 woman and the woman spirit and soul being taken out
15 somewhere in the ocean and seven wizards or witches taking
16 her soul out of her and keeping her in a teepee far out in
17 the ocean.
18 So that has a story in the context of relationships to
19 people who are gifted to do things in a supernatural way,
20 and it also conveys the protocols and the mannerisms that
21 we have to have in relation to those individuals. Because
22 if we don't treat them right, that they could make life
23 miserable for us. Or if we treat them right, that they

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1 could make life good for us. They were not always
2 identified as evil or bad and, in our context, I firmly
3 believe there was no element or understanding of bad.
4 As in relation to the Creation Story, the story
5 unfolded and everything was explained as it related to
6 everything else. There was no dualism in the context of
7 good and evil counterplaying one another.
8 And I think the story that is related about Glooscap's
9 wife being taken by a witch, an evil witch, is more or less
10 a European interpretation of the story when it was recorded
11 by Silas Rand and the influence of the priest to indicate
12 those people who have spiritual giftedness are evil and are
13 associated with the devil.
14 Q. In the Getoasaloet's story, you indicate that he moved
15 from Restigouche to various communities along the way to
16 Omamagi?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. What significance should be attached to your reference
19 to those places?
20 A. Well, the names of those communities along the way,
21 Aboujagane and the connectiveness of those communities and
22 those rivers. Like Lsipotog was not the community of
23 Richiboucto or the community of Big Cove or Indian Island

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1 on the Richiboucto River. Lsibougtou was that area where
2 the river of fire, Uktchibuchtao, as you will recall, is
3 the great fire and Lsibougtou, Richiboucto River, in our
4 context, L-S-I-B-O-U-G-T-O-U, refers to the path of the
5 fire.
6 When you travel along the river, it goes east to west.
7 Early in the morning as the sun is coming, it looks like
8 the river is on fire and in the evening, when the sun is
9 setting, when you are going back into the river, it looks
10 like the river is on fire as well. So they call that river
11 the path of the fire. Lsibougtou.
12 And it also bears significance to the Algimou family
13 that lived on the Richiboucto River. It also bears
14 significance to the Pierre Denys Algimou that moved to
15 Omamagi or Cape Breton in that there is a relatedness and
16 there's connection to the Pierre Algimou, who was in
17 Omamagi and Pierre Algimou is the Pierre Denys that moved
18 there and had the son named Thomas Denys and Tom. Toma
19 Denys had a great-grandson, his name was John Denys, who
20 happened to be the Grand Chief of the Grand Council is 1910.
21 Q. Anything further you would like to say about those two
22 legends?
23 A. It's the oral traditions are always speaking about our

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1 relationship and our connectiveness to the physical and the
2 spiritual world and it embodies all aspects of our life,
3 our daily life.
4 Q. Shall we move to Item 4, the wampum belts?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Perhaps I could start by showing you Defence Exhibit
7 17, volume 2, and the item that is found under tab 14.
8 Would you identify what that is?
9 A. Under tab 14, there are several photographs.
10 Q. Do you recognize those?
11 A. I took those photographs of the wampum belt.
12 Q. There's four pages in here?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Of photographs. I guess a total of eight photographs.
15 Or, sorry, seven photographs.
16 A. Seven photographs. The magic number seven. Yes,
17 these are seven photographs. The first one, I might show
18 here is an element of the --
19 Q. Could I ask if you have the belt with you?
20 A. I have the original wampum belt here, which is a
21 replica of the one that was entered into between the French
22 and the Mi'kmaq during Membertou's baptism in 1610 on June
23 24th. The occasion was recorded on a wampum belt some time

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1 after that period and our people, the Mi'kmaq, kept a
2 wampum belt that had a white background with purple beads
3 that represented the symbols on the wampum.
4 And a wampum belt was given to the French that had
5 purple background and white beads as the symbols, almost
6 reverse of what the Mi'kmaq had and kept among our people.
7 Q. Having identified these as photographs you've taken,
8 are you able to say that they're accurate representations
9 of the belt and the tape measure or the circumstances in
10 which they were taken?
11 A. Yes, I put the tape measure for the sake of offering
12 the size of it or dimensions of the wampum belt.
13 Q. Perhaps then for the purpose of your testimony now,
14 you might take the actual belt and use that.
15 A. Yes. These photographs are representations of the
16 original.
17 Q. How did the particular item that you're holding in
18 your hand come into existence?
19 A. How did this one come into existence?
20 Q. Yes. You said it was a replica or reproduction.
21 A. I made it. It took me about eight months.
22 Q. Show it to His Honour.
23 A. It's made out of glass beads, synthetic sinew and

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1 dental floss and it's a replica of the original that is
2 kept in the museum in Rome.
3 Q. It's in the Vatican?
4 A. In the Vatican, yes.
5 Q. Have you attempted to see the original?
6 A. I visited the Vatican two years ago and I was told by
7 the representatives there that the museum where the wampum
8 belt was stored had been closed. It was closed before the
9 Second World War and all of the collection that was in the
10 museum was placed inside the Vatican somewhere underneath
11 in what they called the catacombs underneath the Vatican in
12 -- and so after the war, they did not reopen the museum.
13 And so these objects were still somewhere in the catacombs
14 and they could not locate them.
15 Q. So you sought to see the original and you were
16 unsuccessful.
17 A. I was unsuccessful, yes.
18 Q. What made you think that it was there to start with?
19 A. There was an article that was published by David
20 Bushnell.
21 Q. Is that the article that's found at Volume 15 under
22 Tab 293?
23 A. Yes, it is. And this is an article written by David

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1 I. Bushnell, Jr., 40 American Anthropologist, Volume 8,
2 1908, on pages 243 to 255 and it's entitled North American
3 Ethnographical Material in Italian Collection. And in his
4 article on -- there's is -- I don't think a page number
5 attributed to it, but after -- two pages after 248 there is
6 a, oh, no, sorry, I missed a page.
7 Q. Are you looking at the page after 249?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. 249 is chopped off on the top right corner, but it
10 looks like it's page 249 and then there's a picture of two
11 or, sorry, well, there's a picture of two items called
12 "wampum stole in the Museum of the Propaganda Fede Rome".
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Fede?
15 A. Yes. And this is the photograph that Bushnell took of
16 the wampum belt that he physically saw when he visited the
17 Vatican in Rome and at the Collegio de Propaganda Fede.
18 Q. Is that a photograph, the -- what appears in the
19 "American Anthropologist" in those photographs?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. How do they compare with this item in Tab 14 of the
22 defence documents?
23 A. They're are similar.

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1 Q. It shows your belt folded?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. In a similar way?
4 A. In a similar way. I tried to replicate as much as
5 possible from the physical description as well as from the
6 photograph.
7 Q. Okay. Where's the physical description of it?
8 A. I believe it's on the following page, on page 250 on
9 the second paragraph or third paragraph, well, second and
10 third paragraph. It starts to talk about "The gem of the
11 North American collection is a piece of wampum which is
12 probably the finest existing example of that form of art."
13 And then it describes it's width and length and the number
14 of beads it contains and all. And it says here, "It was
15 probably made for some missionary in St. Lawrence Valley or
16 in the Iroquoian country." But he didn't have any specific
17 information. And where the document -- where the wampum
18 belt is stored, there was no information about the
19 provenance of the wampum belt.
20 Q. The provenance of it?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. And so he identifies it as being Huron?
23 A. He assumes that it was something that came from the

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1 Iroquoian-Huron.
2 Q. But you don't think it is.
3 A. No, I know it's not.
4 Q. Okay. Why do you know it's not?
5 A. From our elders' knowledge, oral tradition.
6 Q. And where did that come to you from?
7 A. From my grandmother, from my great grandfather or
8 great great great, whatever.
9 Q. Okay. And you were going to read the belt to us.
10 Where did you get the information that would allow you to
11 read the belt?
12 A. My grandmother shared a story about the significance
13 and the meaning of the belt. As well as members of the
14 Mi'kmaq Grand Council have information about the meaning of
15 the belt. And this information has been systematically
16 told in our Grand Council meetings.
17 Q. Okay.
18 A. Systematically -- successively, I meant to say.
19 MR. WILDSMITH Your Honour, we certainly could tell the
20 tale of the wampum belt now. I'm just looking at the
21 clock. I'm not sure what you might like to do. It will
22 certainly take us past 4:30.
23 THE COURT How long do you think it's likely to take?

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1 MR. WILDSMITH Ten minutes.
2 THE COURT I don't see any problem with continuing on.
3 MR. WILDSMITH Okay.
4 A. Okay. In the middle of the wampum belt there are two
5 figures. One individual holding something in his hand on a
6 string, it looks like, and it has a heart and a head and
7 two legs, a triangular body. The inside of it is kind of
8 white. They're holding a cross and the other person is
9 dressed in black with a hat and holding onto something in
10 its hand. And our elders tell us that this is Membertou
11 accepting the cross from the missionary, Jesuit missionary
12 who offered to baptize him.
13 Q. That's the figure that's to the left of the cross that
14 you said they're holding onto as you face the belt --
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. -- figures are in the upright position?
17 A. The figure in the black is the black robe or the
18 Jesuit missionary who baptised Membertou.
19 Q. And the cross, is that located in the centre of the
20 belt?
21 A. The cross is located in the centre of the belt, each
22 one is holding onto the cross.
23 Q. Okay. So the figures are on either side of the cross.

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1 A. We are told that the missionary was holding onto a
2 Bible and Membertou was holding onto a sacred bundle,
3 "sacred" bundle, not "secret" bundle.
4 Q. Yes, I notice the transcripts from New Brunswick kept
5 calling your bundle a "secret" bundle rather than a
6 "sacred" bundle. I hope they get it right in these
7 transcripts.
8 A. So in this agreement, Membertou and the missionary
9 priest offered each other an exchange, protection to one
10 another. The missionary priest showing the keys to heaven,
11 that's what they are supposed to represent.
12 Q. It looks sort of like "Fs" on the belt.
13 A. Yes. Accordingly, these were supposed to represent
14 the Vatican, keys to the Vatican in Rome. The Membertou,
15 the Grand Chief, offered the symbol of peace with the
16 cross, arrows.
17 And there are seven jagged lines here. The big one
18 represents the Grand Chief and then there are six smaller
19 ones that represent the captains of the seven -- the other
20 Grand Councils, I mean, the other mawiomis.
21 And the figure of an Indian holding onto a bow which
22 symbolizes in the way he's holding onto it that he doesn't
23 offer any sense of war or conflict towards the French.

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1 This is a peaceful symbol and that all the seven mawiomis
2 would gather together to protect the French in that same
3 context that the French came.
4 And these other figures are -- more or less present
5 the hieroglyphs that the -- that was asked of me in my
6 qualification. These are the symbols that are mentioned.
7 The dot over here represents Grandfather Sun and its
8 ray is shining on an individual giving him his shadow.
9 There are men and women that represent a group of
10 people which represent the Mi'kmaq people. And then for
11 the French, there is a person holding onto a cross where
12 Grandfather Sun is giving him his shadow.
13 And then another group of individuals signifying the
14 men and the women in that society, so it is the French
15 people that had the priest identified individually and the
16 connections and the men and the women represent the
17 families and together they form another group of
18 individuals and they come together as a new group of people
19 under this representation of a building with a cross. It
20 is a church, the Catholic church.
21 And we are told that the Mi'kmaq, upon accepting the
22 religion, baptism, that they would be able to come in and
23 out of the church as they pleased and that in the church

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1 the windows would be wide open. There would be no stained
2 glass windows to stop the Indians from seeing their world
3 alive and well outside, that their spiritual-related
4 connection to that world is still ever present.
5 And in the similar context, Membertou explains that
6 they will bury the hatchet, that they will allow, this is
7 the symbol here on this end is this is a tomahawk and the
8 symbols to bury the tomahawk has been very strong among our
9 societies. And to bury the tomahawk, they told the French,
10 "We will bury ours first and you put yours on top, so if
11 you take hold of your weapons, then we will have to take
12 hold of ours in our defence and that we would not be the
13 attackers ever in this relationship."
14 Q. Is the point of the tomahawk any significance to the
15 direction of it?
16 A. The direction towards Mother Earth is saying that
17 we're burying our weapons in the heart of our mother and
18 that we will not take them up. So also there is a symbol
19 of a pipe, and I was relate -- explaining the pipe ceremony
20 here and how we bring out the pipe to solemnize our words.
21 And in this way, this agreement was made and solemnized
22 with a pipe ceremony. And that is the wampum belt.
23 Q. So in an overall sense, what is represented by the

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1 relationship that's embodied in that belt?
2 A. It's a relationship of protection and respect for one
3 another between the French and the Mi'kmaq Nation. And
4 Membertou accepted baptism as a condition of that agreement
5 saying that I will accept the conditions of the church. I
6 will accept the baptism in respect of your culture and your
7 traditions and you will respect mine in the way that we
8 have our sacred bundles and that we survive and exist in
9 this world.
10 Q. Are you aware of any European documentation in and
11 about 1610 that records this from a French perspective or
12 that represents a treaty or agreement with the French?
13 A. Marc Lescarbot, who was a lawyer that travelled with
14 Champlain, wrote a letter about this baptism that took
15 place for Membertou who happened to be a very old, old
16 Mi'kmaq chief and was respected by everybody around him and
17 that he was baptised on the Feast of St. Jean Baptiste.
18 Father Biard also wrote about him and a lot of other
19 missionaries wrote about Membertou's baptism as well as
20 other historians like Beamish Murdoch in his three volumes
21 of The History of Nova Scotia makes reference to
22 Membertou's baptism as well as Bernard Hoffman, in his
23 thesis. He talks about Membertou's baptism and his

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1 relationship. And there are lots of other publications
2 explaining that as well as, I do believe, [Sagigh?]
3 Henderson also published a book on the Mi'kmaq [Concordat?]
4 also explaining the wampum belt then and the Membertou's
5 baptism.
6 Q. But you were saying there might have been or there was
7 a reverse wampum belt to that that had purple background
8 with white lettering that was presented to the French to
9 the priest?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Is that recorded anywhere in European documentation?
12 A. Well, Bushnell writes about the -- that wampum belt
13 and it's in the photograph. It's the purple background
14 with the white figures on it. And that's the one that is
15 in the Vatican in Rome. And the other reserve is -- has
16 been kept among our people, and for many years, whenever a
17 Mi'kmaq chief or part of his family died, pieces of the
18 wampum belt were buried with him and so there will be
19 elements of the wampum belt that have been buried all over
20 Mi'kmagy by our people and has disappeared over the years,
21 yes.
22 MR. WILDSMITH Okay. I think that, Your Honour, bring us
23 to the close for the afternoon.

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1 THE COURT All right. When would you suggest that we're
2 likely to get back to Chief Augustine tomorrow?
3 MR. WILDSMITH I'm hopeful it would be around the morning
4 break.
5 THE COURT Okay. So is it reasonable to ask come back for
6 11 or are you available --
7 MR. WILDSMITH I would think so, although there's no reason
8 why he shouldn't come back for whenever he feels like, at
9 an earlier point.
10 THE COURT All right. That's fine. Then we'll -- the court
11 will begin tomorrow morning at 9:30, but we'll be hearing,
12 first of all, from Dr. Wicken, and so you'll have to wait
13 for the conclusion of his evidence before you'll start
14 again. Okay? And I should have said this earlier, but, in
15 any case, I just have to tell you that during the course of
16 your testimony, you're not to discuss your evidence with
17 anyone.
18 A. Yes, Your Honour.
19 THE COURT All right. That's all then.
20 WITNESS WITHDRAWS
21 COURT ADJOURNED (16:40 hr)

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1 REPORTER'S CERTIFICATE
7 I, Margaret E. Graham, Court Reporter, hereby
8 certify that I have transcribed the foregoing and that it
9 is a true and accurate transcript of the evidence given in
10 this matter, taken by way of electronic tape recording.
11
12 ___________________________
13 Margaret E. Graham
14
15
16 DATED this 2 day of December, 1999, at Dartmouth, Nova
17 Scotia.
18

1999 Testimony in Court Case by Chief Stephen Augustine - Fascinating Historical Information.

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1999 Testimony in Court Case by Chief Stephen Augustine - Fascinating Historical Information.

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1 114

3 COURT OPENS (TIME: 0945 hours)

4 THE COURT Good morning.

5 ALL Good morning, Your Honour.

6 THE COURT Mr. Wildsmith.

7 MR. WILDSMITH The Defence calls to the stand Chief Stephen

9 CHIEF AUGUSTINE, sworn, testified as follows:

10 THE CLERK Please be seated and spell your full name?

11 A. Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N. Augustine, A-U-G-U-S-T-I-N-E.

12 DIRECT EXAMINATION ON QUALIFICATIONS

13 MR. WILDSMITH Chief Augustine, would you just indicate to

14 the Court where you live and your present employment?

15 A. I live in Rupert in Quebec, about 30 miles outside of

16 Hull, and I work at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in

18 Q. Let me show you Exhibit 44 that has been marked.

19 Could you identify what this is?

21 EXHIBIT 44 [ENTERED] - RESUME OF CHIEF STEPHEN AUGUSTINE

22 Q. Did you prepare that?

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5 Serving Atlantic Canada Since 1976

1 Q. Let me show you Exhibit 17, volume 3, which under tab

2 15, document 15.

4 Q. Could you indicate what that is?

5 A. That's a curriculum vitae.

6 Q. Have you prepared that as well?

8 Q. Is your resume Exhibit 44 an updated version of the

10 A. Yes, it's an updated version with a change of address

11 and more detailed information about past employment and

13 MR. WILDSMITH I should indicate to Your Honour that I seek

14 to qualify Chief Augustine as an expert ethno-historian

15 able to give expert opinion evidence on the aboriginal

16 peoples. I have this on a piece of paper which I can give

17 to you in due course. And the aboriginal perspective on

18 aboriginal European relationships in eastern North America,

19 including the language, culture, oral traditions and oral

20 history of the Mi'kmaq Indians.

21 My friend, Mr. Clarke, I believe, is able to go part

22 way with respect to those qualifications. Maybe I should

23 just let him speak to that before I provide my examination

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5 Serving Atlantic Canada Since 1976

1 of Chief Augustine, so that it may be a more restricted

3 THE COURT That's fair enough.

4 MR. CLARKE Yes, Your Honour, there's just two positions

5 at this time that the Crown is in a position to address.

6 One is the ethno-historian as an expert ethno-historian.

7 We would take or request the Court to consider that issue.

8 And the other one is able to give expert opinion

9 evidence on the aboriginal peoples and the aboriginal

10 perspective on Mi'kmaq European relationships in eastern

11 North America, including the language, culture, oral

12 traditions and oral history of the Mi'kmaq Indians. That

13 would be the other clarification the Crown would be seeking

14 in cross, is rather than all aboriginal European

15 relationships in eastern North America, it be specific to

16 the Mi'kmaq/European relationships in eastern North

17 America. With the caveat that there has been extensive

18 evidence before the Court from a number of other witnesses

19 in relation to the Wawanki Confederacy, which includes, to

20 the Crown's understanding, some of the Eastern tribes, the

21 Abenaki, Penobscot, the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy. Our

22 understanding is that's not the majority of his evidence,