Don’t make promises you don’t keep: Gaspereau Lake was Henry Dorey’s piece of heaven

Henry by the hydro dam

 

Henry Dorey was a kind of father figure to me after I met him a decade ago. Generally I don’t jump in trucks and drive out to random lakes with strange men, but he conveyed a sense of quiet urgency. Sadly Henry had a mission that wasn’t completed before he had to leave this mortal coil.

Occasionally I check the obit pages in the daily paper, but I found about Henry’s May 11 passing because the Kings County Museum posted the news three days after his death. Immediately I felt as bereft as the museum staff, who’d correctly termed him, “A long-standing member of the Kings Historical Society and a proud Mi’kmaq.”

Henry had reached the age 85, but his last project in life was not fulfilled. I know because a recent drive out to Gaspereau Lake proved the provincial government had not erected the sign he was promised. That’s just wrong.

A resident of Waterville, Henry was born in 1934 in South Alton. His parents, Arthur and Annie (Knockwood) Dorey, raised him beside Gaspereau Lake, where his mother’s ancestors lived before him. He told me about having polio and attending a one-room school despite the lack of transportation.

Henry described an elderly Mi’kmaq woman who came and camped by the lake each summer. He told me about how his mother’s people spent the cold months inland and how they’d buried their dead by the side of the lake.

Archeological work

The provincial government expropriated the Dorey farm to create Highway 12 after Nova Scotia Power constructed a dam adjacent to the cemetery in 1929. The visible presence of his people was obliterated.

But he couldn’t forget. After years of talking to politicians at various levels and leading individual tours to the lakefront, one day he just turned up at The Advertiser office offering to show me the place he believed in so passionately. Sometimes reporters are a last resort.

So I got in his truck and we drove out the New Ross road. As we got near the lake there was a homemade sign saying ‘Dorey’s Landing’. Henry showed me a beautiful, shallow lake that today attracts paddlers.

From the waterside, he led past the dam and close to a little island. We stopped to talk near an area where digging had recently taken place. Archeologists had been there. He deemed it a sacred place.

Ellen Hunt

It is commonly accepted that for centuries the lake was a winter dwelling place for the nomadic Mi’kmaw. Jim Legge of Greenwich has assembled 12 flawless spear points that he found on the shores of the lake. Spear points, but not foundations, were left behind.

My second visit to the edge of the lake occurred one March day with snow on the ground.  Ellen Hunt, of the Mi'kmaq Burial Grounds Research and Restoration Association, burned sweet grass there in a spring equinox ceremony.

She said unequivocally the burial ground should be a recognized site. "I mean, you have Louisburg, a French site that's protected,” she told me. “We lived on this land many, many years before the French came here. Why can't we have our heritage and our burial sites protected as well?"

Elder Gerald Toney of the Annapolis Valley First Nation told me that potential flooding to increase the dam level would destroy artifacts that hadn’t been removed yet.

"If we as Mi'kmaq people got together and went digging up a graveyard or a heritage site of the French, the English or any other nationality, the feelings they would get from that is the same way we feel about it," he said.

Henry getting smudged

The oldest archeological site in eastern North America, for example, was only discovered shortly after World War II, near the Debert military base close to Truro. It stretches back ten centuries.

In 2013, I was told by then culture minister Leonard Preya’s staff that final decisions on land use and potential additions to the dam were coming. Preyra paid lip service to the notion that protecting Mi’kmaq heritage resources is important to all Nova Scotians. To date nothing has resulted to respond to the obligation of history.

A member of Sipekne’katik Band, Indian Brook and an Elder for the Native Council of Nova Scotia, Henry continued to be a patient man. He supported his church and was a 17-year Veteran of the Waterville and District Volunteer Fire Department.

Long retired as a civilian employee at DND Greenwood, Henry would drop into The Advertiser office to touch base when he was going to cardiac rehab classes at Valley Regional Hospital. Over the years I wrote a couple of stories and probably two columns about the lack of recognition for Gaspereau Lake.

Early last October, I nudged the politician in charge about the simple sign that Henry had been promised. All he wanted was a sign that acknowledged who historically had made a home by the lake.

Looking out toward the burial site

“I will inform you when the work is complete as I have been told it will be installed by the end of October,” was the message I received. Excited, I called Henry. He counseled me, “Wait and see”. Now we know lip service and a wall of bureaucracy stymied Henry Dorey in the end.

Now when I hear, ‘We are located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. We are all Treaty people,’ the words ring hollow.

If that phrase was more than tokenism Henry would have known before he died that a sign existed at Gaspereau Lake acknowledging his ancestors and protecting their sacred burial ground by the water.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report came out in 2015. The words “truth and reconciliation” continue to be bandied about too. Why are Nova Scotia school children made to mark Mi’kmaq history month when so little genuine reconciliation happens? As Henry once told me, “we’re standing still.” Yet back in the 70’s, the Supreme Court recognized that Aboriginal title to land was based on "historic occupation and possession" of traditional territories.

Mi’kmaq theologian Dr. Terry LeBlanc talks about who owns the land. When he spoke in Wolfville, he stated that his people still live under a colonial form of government, whereby “the Indian Act treats us as wards.”

We saw more of that attitude this winter with the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests all across the country. There has to be a better way than the oppressive yoke our First Nations bear. Years of advocacy should have earned Henry his acknowledgement, but Indigenous peoples also deserve decent medical services in a pandemic, potable water and access to food.

The Mi'kmaq once lived in dispersed interior winter camps like Gaspereau Lake and larger coastal communities during the summer. A number of old arrowheads have been found at Gaspereau Lake or Pal'tuek. There is also a burial ground beside the lake and Bernard noted that archeological work is on-going.

Note: a portion of this blog was published earlier in the Valley Journal Advertiser