During the past century, when collectors and
museums removed items from Mi’kmaw communi- ties, many of those links were broken. The National Museum of the American Indian has been working with the Mi’kmaw Nation for the past two decades to help heal that gap and bring the Mi’kmaw peo- ples’ objects in the NMAI collection back to share with their communities. Now that goal is becom- ing a reality, as the Mi’kmaw’s items are destined for the new Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre (MDCC) being built in central Nova Scotia.
Top: Anthropologist Wilson Wallis collected this hymnal from the Mi’kmaw community of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, in 1912. Here Michelle Marshall-Johnson (Esaksoni First Nation) is looking at its Mi’kmaw symbols.
Hymnal, collected by Wilson D. Wallis; bark and paper Inscribed with ink; 6.8” x 4.5”. 3/2409
Below: Wampum beads of shell were used to weave symbols onto belts to record important events such as treaties being signed between Native nations and Canada or the United States.
Wampum belt, collected for NMAI circa 1908; quahog clam and whelk shell beads, hide and sinew; 2.0” x 36.6”. 1/8677
Mi’kma’ki’s Extensive Reach The Mi’kmaw territory has 35 communities whose homelands, or Mi’kma’ki, stretch across what is now Canada’s Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Quebec. They have lived here for at least 11,000 to 13,000 years, as indicated by radiocarbon-dated charcoal recovered from ancestral sites located in Debert in the center of Nova Scotia. Archaeologist George MacDonald led the excavations of these sites during the 1960s, when he was pursuing his doctorate at Yale Uni- versity. While the excavations yielded information about Mi’kmaw history and culture, they also took it away, as many of the items found there ended up in museum collections. Seventeenth-century French explorers and missionaries recorded some of the earliest accounts of the Mi’kmaq. Many people have mis- takenly referred to them as “Micmac,” instead of Mi’kmaq (pronounced “meeg-mag”), and that misspelling is still seen today in some signage and archival records. Anthropologist Wilson Wallis visited Mi’kmaw communities from 1911 to 1912 and again with his wife and fellow anthropologist, Ruth, from 1950 to 1953. Together they wrote an extensive account of these communities in their 1955 book, “Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada.” Many of the objects they obtained during that time are in the NMAI collection. The key to connecting those items to Mi’kmaw
families today, however, was a collection of pho- tographs that young researcher Frederick Johnson made from 1930 to 1931, when he spent extensive time in seven Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. He recorded some 200 images of Mi’kmaw people and everyday life in Mi’kma’ki. As the Museum of the American Indian, the prede- cessor to NMAI, had sponsored some of Johnson’s research expeditions to Indigenous communities in Canada from 1924 to 1931, several of Johnson’s images are in the NMAI archives. Copies of the photographs were also in the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, Massachu- setts. The Mi’kmaw Nation first learned of the image collection in 1997, when Leah Rosenmeier, who was then an outreach and repatriation coordinator at
28 WINTER 2022 AMERICAN INDIAN
TOP: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MI’KMAWEY DEBERT CULTURAL CENTRE; PHOTO BY NMAI STAFF
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