‘The single largest case of forced removal'

Ronald Rudin, a professor in Concordia’s Department of History, has just published his seventh book, Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

The work explores both the history and memory of the establishment of the park, located on New Brunswick’s eastern shore. Its creation in 1969 led to the expropriation of over 200 (mostly Acadian) families.

The following is an excerpt from Rudin’s book:

In July 2007, I visited Kouchibouguac National Park for the first time. By then, I knew much of the story of how it had been created. The park covers 238 square kilometres along the east coast of New Brunswick and is a place of spectacular beaches, ever-shifting sand dunes, salt marshes, and dense forests. It is simply beautiful, and by all appearances offers nature pure and untouched by human hand.

Yet only forty years before my first visit, these lands were home to more than 1,200 people, members of 260 families, who inhabited seven communities.

For visitors walking on the beaches, camping in the woods, or cycling along carefully manicured paths, none of this human history would be readily apparent. As the singer-songwriter Zachary Richard, the narrator of a 2007 documentary about the creation of the park, observed, time had obliterated any traces of the communities that once existed where the park now stood:  “The official documentation from the park does not refer to the people who were living there — not a word, not a symbol; not even a photo or a small plaque.”

The removal of the resident population, the central element in the creation of the park, was dictated by a 1969 agreement between the governments of New Brunswick and Canada that set the terms for the expropriation of people’s lands. 
 

At the time in many countries, this was standard operating procedure for creating national parks, one that reflected a rather disturbing view that nature somehow exists apart from human activity. The logical (or illogical) extension of this view is that anywhere humans live is somehow outside nature — something that perhaps helps explain our often cavalier view of the environment, as if it somehow exists independent of human behaviour.

But some aspects of the removal of the residents from Kouchibouguac departed from the norm — this was the single largest case of forced removal in the history of the Canadian national park system.

Even more significantly, this case stands apart from all others because of the intense resistance from the residents, which led to the closing of the park several times in the early 1970s and to the occasional destruction of park property into the following decade.

Most of the residents were Acadians, the French speakers of Atlantic Canada, who were particularly sensitive about being forced to move, having been driven from their lands by the British in the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, some of them viewed the Kouchibouguac expropriations as “une deuxième [second] déportation.”
 

None of this story would have been obvious to a visitor to the park at the time of my first trip. However, I did come with some prior knowledge that allowed me to see several references to the story of the removals that others might have missed.

For instance, a bit off the beaten path for most visitors, there was the trailer where Jackie Vautour, the leading figure in the resistance to the creation of the park, still lived with his family.

While the other residents of the territory ultimately left their properties, Vautour remained. In 1976, provincial authorities bulldozed his house to get him out, but in 1978 he returned to squat on his land, where he remains as I write these lines.

A large sign on his property, in both French and English, strategically placed for rubbernecking historians who pass by, declares: “It is because of you that the government is making us suffer as you can see. Have a good look. Warning: Parks Canada are ordered not to trespass.”

This sign would be incomprehensible to an innocent visitor, as would a more accessible marker standing just outside the park’s Visitor Centre. This sculpture takes the form of a picnic table around which are bronzes representing individuals who once lived in the area.

Not far from the table, an explanatory panel rather blandly describes the presence in the region of “descendants of three cultures [Mi’kmaq, Acadians, and English speakers] that have long shared this environment and left their mark in this area’s beauty ... Today these people often share their table with a more recent arrival — you, the park visitor.”

But there is not one word about the fact that such people once inhabited the lands that now constitute the park, let alone the resistance that continues to be closely associated with the name Kouchibouguac.

I was bemused by this picnic table, not only because of how it concealed the process that had allowed the park to exist, but also because it was around another picnic table that I first learned the story. Otherwise, I would have been just another visitor, enjoying the park, oblivious to and untroubled by its origins.

Learn more about Concordia's Department of History.