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Ties that Bind

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A Shared History and Culture Make the Eastern US and Atlantic Canada as Close as Kin
By Darcy Rhyno

"Ten years ago, a man came over from the Massachusetts area with his wife in search of his roots. He had almost given up," said Kim Walker. She is the office manager at the Shelburne County Archives and Genealogical Society in southern Nova Scotia. "He came in and within five or 10 minutes, we handed him a booklet on the family." Since then, the American has met distant cousins, attended weddings and helped out at family gatherings. When he and his wife visit, they stay at a cottage belonging to a newly discovered relative.

Kim Walker's story demonstrates how deep the ties are between New England and the Canadian Maritimes. The story is repeated millions of times over a history that predates European settlement and saw large populations flowing back and forth across the border. It's history on a grand scale. When the British expelled 11,000 French Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, starting in 1755, families and individuals found refuge primarily in Louisiana. Their descendants are known today as Cajuns. Many eventually set down roots in Maine and the Maritimes. In the 1760s, 8,000 New England Planters (the American term for "colonists") settled in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. About 20 years later, Loyalists and Black Loyalists followed, both during and after the American Revolution.

Of course, the region's aboriginal peoples, including the Mi'qmaq, Maiseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot, have shared Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI for thousands of years. Together, these five nations are the Wabanaki Confederacy. Except for usually minor differences in dialect, they share a common language. And though the Maliseet tended to live further inland where they depended more on an agrarian lifestyle than fishing and hunting, these groups also shared a common culture.

The largest of the crossborder cultural groups in terms of population are Acadians. Almost half a million still live on the lands they originally settled that stretch today from Maine throughout the Maritime provinces. Taken with the drama of the Acadian deportation, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a famous son of Portland, Maine, wrote Evangeline, an epic poem about the plight of the Acadians. Evangeline is the story of a young woman who, after being separated from her betrothed during the chaos of the expulsion, crosses America in search of him. The famous fictional Acadian lives on in songs, stories, celebrations, street names, monuments, and dramatic interpretations. Whole interpretive villages in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick now recreate those days for visitors.

With such deep historical connections, it's no surprise that Americans and Atlantic Canadians are fast friends. For the past hundred years, Americans have spent summers in such communities as Chester, NS, and St. Stephen, NB. Calvin Trillin, one of these summer migrants and a regular contributor to New Yorker magazine, has written articles and books about his decades in Nova Scotia.

Even sports were born of the shared history. The 500-year-old fishing industry had men traveling back and forth between great fishing centres like Lunenburg, NS, and Gloucester, Mass. Races to and from the fishing grounds led to the construction of ever faster schooners, such as the Bluenose, and to formalized races complete with trophies. The fishermen challenged each other to international dory races that continue to this day, alternating between Lunenburg and Gloucester. For over a century, yacht clubs from Massachusetts, New York and Nova Scotia have gathered in Marblehead, Mass. to run the biennial Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race. In 2007, more than 100 boats made the journey across the Gulf of Maine and up the coast of Nova Scotia.

Still, it's in times of disaster that the ties between New England and the Maritimes are the strongest. Early on the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc collided in the Halifax harbour with the Imo and caught fire. When the Mont Blanc exploded half an hour later, 2,000 people died and 9,000 were injured. The blast flattened 1.2 square miles of the city. By 10 pm, the Red Cross and Massachusetts Public Safety Committee departed Boston for Halifax with medical supplies, doctors, nurses, and orderlies.

Every year since 1971, Nova Scotia shows its gratitude by shipping a 50-foot Christmas tree to Boston. The tree, which is often donated by a private citizen, is erected and lit during a ceremony in the Boston Common as the city's official Christmas tree. The selection and cutting of the tree is so important to the people of Nova Scotia, it has become an annual media event. The public waits to hear just who has been chosen by the organizers to supply the tree. The cameras follow the story from the selection and cutting of the tree, shipping it to the U.S., and finally to the lighting of the tree in Boston.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Nova Scotia had a chance to repay some of its debt to Americans. Passenger planes landed en masse in Atlantic Canada, particularly in Halifax, where the runways became airplane parking lots. Nova Scotians set up emergency shelters and opened their homes to detained travelers for as long as they needed to stay.

Kim Walker is clear about why such strong ties, which have developed over hundreds of years, continue between New England and the Maritimes. Huge historical events, the movement of large populations back and forth across the border, and centuries-old family ties all contribute to a long-standing tradition of helping each other during troubled times and celebrating together when times are good. Today, Americans travel to Grand-PrČ, the site in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley that commemorates the Acadian deportation. They visit Birchtown near Walker's town of Shelburne to learn about the migration of former slaves from the United States through Nova Scotia then back to Sierra Leone in Africa. Descen-dants of the Planters and the Loyalists are just as curious about their cultural history. For Walker, people are driven to explore these powerful historical and cultural ties for one reason. "It's about family," she said.