50Things
milui’tm: a 4-part audio series, in four separate locations
Kespukwitk/Annapolis County
shalan joudry
You have arrived in Kespukwitk/Annapolis County. There are four places to visit, each has a separate audio piece to hear. There is a map indicating your proximity to each piece in the “View the Art” section. When you approach each location, the map will be replaced by the associated audio piece.
Find the recordings at the following locations:
Tuitnuk, “at the outflow” (newcomers called it Digby Gut) Point Prim at the end of Lighthouse Rd. Digby.
Instructions: Situate yourself just before you get to the end of the road (on the edge of the cul-de-sac), where you can look eastward, to see the tuitknuk ("Digby Gut"), while still paying attention to the 180 degrees of ocean water around you. If you decide to venture off the cul de sac, to the park surrounding the lighthouse, you can park in the parking lot. Be aware that the paths are uneven and not accessible to all.
L’sətkuk, “cutting through high rocks” (newcomers called it Bear River)
There is NO cell service in Bear River. Make sure to have the app open before you arrive and do not close it while you are there.
Behind the Legion (1877 Clementsvale Rd), by the "Democracy Park" next to the river. There is a gravel parking lot behind the legion.
Instructions: If you can, after you park your vehicle in the gravel parking area, walk on the grass toward the river. There are a few picnic benches where you can sit and watch the river slowly flow. The best time to see the flow of river is at high tide. Look downriver and upriver, watching the water and trees.
Apji’jkmujue’katik, “place of the ducks” (later named after a murderous British general). Currently home to the Annapolis Basin Conference Centre, this“Park”used to be the site of a Canadian Forces Base (CFB). You’ll find shalan’s sound piece beside the helipad/parade square on the eastern side of Marine Drive.
Instructions: If you can, park your vehicle and walk across the grass toward the edge of the shoreline, where you can see the bay of water on your east. You’ll hear the mechanical hum of the factory, here and in the recording itself. If you have them, bring your binoculars!
Nme’juaqnek, “the place of bountiful fish” (newcomers called it Annapolis Royal”) Downtown Annapolis Royal. It is on the waterfront boardwalk (which runs parallel to St. George Street), half-way between the lighthouse and the City offices.
Instructions: If possible, park your vehicle and walk past the Oqwa'titek amphitheatre onto the shoreline boardwalk. There is a wheelchair ramp closer to the police station/municipal office. Once you are just below the outdoor theatre you can gaze across the grass and the Annapolis Basin. There is also a bench on which to sit.
milui’tm: a 4-part audio series
There are four separate locations, all located in Kespukwitk (Annapolis County). Directions can be found in the “Location Info” section.
shalan says:
This 4-part audio series, milui'tm (i call it by different names), reflects on and celebrates the L’nu (Mi’kmaw) place names and history surrounding the Digby/Bear River/Annapolis Royal region of southwest Nova Scotia by telling alternative narratives of those places. Through a mix of poetry, music, soundscape, spoken word and conversation, artist shalan joudry seeks to not only reclaim the ancestral words, but also a consciousness of the long history of human occupation as well as different relationships to land and water. Against the backdrop of colonial changes to the landscape and memory, shalan invites us to turn to visit the location and listen.
Tuitnuk, “at the outflow” (newcomers called “Digby gut”) responds to the ocean and the idea of ‘flow’.
L’sətkuk, “cutting through high rocks,” (newcomers called “Bear River”) shares poetry about L’nu relationship to land and healing.
Apji’jkmujue’katik, “place of the ducks” (later named after a murderous British General) discusses the naming of places and reclaiming L’nu language. Nme’juaqnek, “the place of bountiful fish” (newcomers called “Port Royal/Annapolis area”) speaks of other ways to see human occupation and memory.
shalan is grateful for the many Elders who have shared the language of this landscape and the many stories it holds. She has learned many L’nu words and names through the work of Bernie Francis, and from the dedicated work of the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek: Mi’kmaw Place Names Project team and others endeavouring to increase our Indigenous language and voice. She urges listeners to spend time on the online Mi’kmaw Place Names Atlas.
The transcript or descriptive text for this piece can be found by touching the "Text" button in the bottom right hand corner of your screen in the "View the Art" section.
shalan joudry is an L’nu (Mi’kmaw) narrative artist and conservation ecologist who uses 'Two-eyed Seeing' methodologies to ground mainstream ecology in L’nu cultural perspectives. As an oral storyteller, poet, podcast producer and playwright, shalan uses her theatrical background to bring Mi’kmaw and ecological stories to new listeners, as well as recounting personally crafted narratives that follow Mi’kmaw storying custom. shalan is the author of two books of poetry: Generations Re-merging, Waking Ground and the play Elapultiek, inspired by work with species-at-risk . She lives in her home territory of Kespukwitk (southwest Nova Scotia) with her family in their community of L’sətkuk (Bear River First Nation), where she is currently working on reclaiming her L'nu language.
Photo credit: Dan Froese
What is environmentalism? What do we mean when we talk about “the environment” here on unceded Mi'kmaq territory? Who defines what's included in that meaning, and what's left out?
For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples around the world have engaged in active environmental stewardship and have protected their land and water. Black communities across Turtle Island have organized against pollution and degradation of their environments for many decades. And yet, the mainstream environmental movement is still predominantly led and defined by white people, and generally fails to recognize the environmental leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC).
The Ecology Action Centre is not an exception here. EAC recognizes that Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities are still underrepresented in our work and our community partnerships, despite years of diversity and inclusion initiatives. As the largest environmental charity in Atlantic Canada, we are uniquely positioned and privileged within the climate justice movement. We have a responsibility to use that position and privilege to lift up front-line voices who have experienced first-hand environmental and social injustices for hundreds of years, and who are also often at the forefront of positive environmental change. It’s long past time to listen, share our platform, and make space for the leadership of BIPOC communities within our environmental movements. The diversity within our communities is a source of strength as we build a united movement for a just and sustainable future.
As a part of this project, and EAC’s ongoing commitment to centering BIPOC perspectives, we created exclusive BIPOC artist commissions where the artists were free to conceive and create on any topic related to environmentalism, climate, conservation, climate justice, etc. that they wanted to address. shalan joudry received one of them.
Tuitnuk
[Nature sounds, then piano]
shalan joudry: Tuitnuk, at the outflow. Flow. Everything is in constant motion. Constant flux. This land mass has been created and moved through ocean space, longer than human memory.
[Ocean waves crash.]
This kta’n, ocean, has changed levels through time. What do we remember? What do we remember? Water is life, but it can also be fierce. The ocean has also buried many bodies.
[Piano instrumental]
Are we members of the land, Earth’s arms, like trees? Are we members of Mi’kma’ki, belonging to land? What did this flow mean to my L’nu/Mi’kmaw ancestors, hundreds or a thousand years ago? Where was the best place to catch food and find shelter? In around the coves? Where are those homes now?
[Ocean waves crash]
These archeological sites, that we call them now, some of them are washed from the breaking shoreline, crumbled out to sea. Some are now under water. Some are still here under our feet, in our language, L’nuisimk, we look at the ocean today and we worry, ‘Are you going to be more fierce?’ ‘Are you going to rise?’ ‘Are you going to challenge our homes again, now immovable?’
But water is still life. We sit here. We can imagine. We’re still members, part of this land and water and sky. [Piano] We hope our descendants will still stand here, still be member to land and culture, even if our footprints are underwater, or washed to sea.
[Ocean waves and seagulls]
L’sətkuk
These four poems are in "Waking Ground," shalan’s new book of poetry, published by Gaspereau Press. It can be found at or ordered from your local bookstore.
Apji’jkmujue’katik
[Instrument sounds]
shalan joudry: Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis remind us in their book, The Language of this Land: Mi’kma’ki, “Place names in Mi’kmaw also tell a story of the land. Place names not only tell the features of the landscape, historical events, and important resources, but act as pneumonic device to remind people of how to live right.”
[Instrument sounds]
shalan joudry: A conversation with Nadine Millet. And i’m shalan joudrey.
shalan joudry: Apji’j. Apji’j.
NM: Apji’j. Apji’j. So you hold. When you see an apostrophe, you hold that vowel just slightly longer. When I listen to Bernie Francis, I think about, ‘it might be easier to put the ‘j’, instead of thinking about what sound does J-K-M sound like together? Think of Apji’j...
shalan joudry: Apji’j.
NM: and then: kmuj…
shalan joudry: Apji'jikmuj.
NM: oo-eh [Mi’kmaq syllable ‘ue’]
shalan joudry: Apji'jikmuj-ue.
NM: If you look at the E-’-K-A-T-I, that is, it comes at the end of a word to mean, like, ‘the place of,’, and then what was before it. So, you see that a lot on the place names. Like S-k-pne’katik, like Shubenacadie. The ‘e’kati’ is our word-part that is also similar, like, related to, like, -a’kati, -a’ki, like Mi’kma’ki - so the place of the Mi'kmaq. Many of us say that that’s where ‘Acadie’ came from.
shalan joudry: Oh, right.
NM: Yeah, so Apji'jikmujue’kati and then at the end the ‘k’ denotes that that then is like ‘at,’ ‘at the place of.’ On the site, yeah, it says: ‘place of ducks.’
shalan joudry: Apji'jikmujue’katik.
NM: Ya, ‘gah-deeg.’
shalan joudry: ‘katik.
NM: So, imagine that the ‘k’ is in all of this word, the k’s are like g’s. And the ‘t’ is like a ‘d.’Apji'jikmujue’katik.
shalan joudry: Apji'jkmuj-ue-‘katik. Apji'jkmuj-ue-‘katik.
NM: Yeah.
shalan joudry: There’s power in a name.
NM: Hmm.
[Instrumental music]
NM: So, I think that there’s a lot of people who are afraid.
shalan joudry: Yes.
NM: They’re intimidated by the amount of consonants we have in Mi’kmaw, but it doesn’t mean that people can’t learn. It just means, you know, to be able to take a few classes in ‘What do those letters sound like when we use them in Mi’kmaq’?’ ‘How do you separate all these consonances in a row?’ Sometimes, it’s like there’s a very short schwa just as your tongue moves from one to the next. But I really have to listen to fluent speakers, and Bernie Francis, you know, when I get to hear some audio clips, in the way that…’Which consonant is attached to which syllable?’ and so I try to... I try to listen for that.
[Instrumental music]
shalan joudry: Aji' jikmujue’katik. It so rolls! It is just so beautiful.
NM: It sounds much more roll-y and beautiful than when you’re looking at those letters.
shalan joudry: Yes. The letters are scary, and then once you get the phonetics, then it starts rolling.
NM: Mm. These are actually borrowing the French letters, that’s why I think about the accent. So, an ‘I’ is an ‘ee’ sound. So, that’s not an English ‘I’,’ that’s a French ‘I...’ ‘ee’.
shalan joudry: Oh.
NM: And the letter ‘e’ there is an ‘et' sound, so it’s a French ‘e’.
shalan joudry: How come they’re doing that?
NM: That’s because of the French missionary, Father Pacifique. Because we don’t learn a little bit of basic Mi’kmaw in elementary school, in middle school, the way that we do with French.
shalan joudry: Mm-hmm.
NM: That we get intimidated, and so we need to change that.
[Instrumental music]
NM: When we’re standing here looking out around these curves of shoreline here, do we see any ducks?
[Instrumental music]
NM: Maybe?
shalan joudry: Hold on, yes. ...Those are ducks.
NM: I think they’re ducks, out on the water.
[Duck quacking, and then music]
NM: If this area had no name and we’re just sitting here and we’re thinking in Mi’kmaw about naming the place in the language now, what…. I don’t know if the ducks are the most obvious part. Or maybe, maybe if you were coming here specifically for the ducks... but you and I aren't here for the ducks.
shalan joudry: No, I’m not a big duck-lover. But this is also like a point, it feels like a point.
NM: It is, I think it was built up a little bit more, but, I mean that’s a point too. So, yeah, I guess it could have been...out. So this place here is a point, point of cut grass, point of grey buildings.
shalan joudry: It’s hard to name a place!
NM: Yeah, because then whatever you come up with, you have to get people to agree, so it’s gonna be different people calling a place differently. Like, just an informal, like, ‘How do you describe a certain place?’ Like, if you say your favourite place that you like to go for a walk, you’ll describe it. You’ll say ‘Well, I follow the tracks and then down through this trail, then I go until the big boulder, then I go the...’ You know, that you describe a place. And so maybe the more that you describe it, that, maybe, you know, your daughter will call it that way and your family will call it that way and your friends might call it that way. But then you might find that another group of people call that same path down to the beach or something, they call it something else. And so, what does having a name mean? ‘Name’ is a noun. Calling something - that’s a verb. So teluisi isn’t necessarily that my name, as a noun, is shalan. Teluisi shalan. That’s actually a verb, not a noun.
shalan joudry:: Oh, that’s neat.
NM: Ya. So when we speak of this place as the place ‘go to the place of ducks,’ we speak -- we speak of it that way, that we call it that, but somebody else might call it something else. We call places differently, but just like when we’re trying to communicate a place and make sure we all understand which place we mean, it’s easier if we call it the same thing. But what we don’t want are names glorifying people who committed racial, awful, atrocities. Can we agree on that?
shalan joudry:Oh ya. Absolutely.
[Instrumental music]
shalan joudry: Poet Rita Joe said, “Let them find land names, titles of seas, rivers, wipe them not from memory; these are our monuments.”
[Instrumental music slowly fades]
Nme’juaqnek
shalan joudry:
Nme’juaqnek.
Our story goes back thousands of years, even longer, farther back than the Egyptian pyramids. Ancestral L’nu’k were here. Here. Nme’juaqnek (‘Place of Bountiful Fish.’) Nme’juaqnek.
Our stories are not held between the parentheses of European colonial stories. Though we might not have made statues of stoic faces and puffed-up chests, we marked the landscape. We marked the landscape with story, song, ceremony, laughter, and temporary imprints of moveable wi’kuom.
Our statues are the land herself, the softly curved of long-ago mountains, rolled edges of shore. Our statues are the transplanted greenery of food, medicine, and material under your feet, right here, across your line of sight. The sound of water and wind along the blades and folds of our livelihoods.
Over time the land changed and our people along with it. Over time our people changed and the land along with them.
They let go of the ideas that no longer suited the people, the culture, the villages, the nation. They were inspired by new ideas. They traded for new things among the other other nations. They carved wampum to tell the stories, to tell the stories.
Our ancestors kept within their lives the things that were necessary to keep and pass onward, successfully for many, many, many generations. (So hard to fathom the number of people who have fished here before us!)
Into the bay the people came to build, to ask us to trade our ways. Along with them flooded a war our people didn’t know was brewing overseas, and the disease. The new people roped up foreign flags onto our homelands, cut the trees, carved the lands, stoned the walls and cannoned, cannoned, cannoned. Progress, they said.
It was just different, though. What was round became square. What was dynamic became measured. And what was gathered from biodiversity was cleared for monocultures. What was plentiful fish was gorged.
What was a place of L’nu’k (the Mi’kmaq) became European – English, French, Scottish. Came...everyone.
I don’t want us to be forgotten. I don’t want us to be forgotten. That’s why I'm telling you this. I don’t want us to be boardwalk-ed over and minimized into but pretext: “Yes, L’nu’k were here. Thank you. And now, for our story..” This is our story.
Our story is long and vast, and a different beautiful, important, memorable. A different worth celebrating and honouring. But our story doesn’t look like yours. It is full of verbs instead of nouns, full of greenery and fluidity. Our story takes time, a lifetime of remembering. Nestuita’simk.
Are you listening? Are you here by the grass? the water? and wind? Are you remembering with me? For this moment our statues will be alive in your heart.
Wela’lioq.
[Music swells and fades out.]