Dear Editor:
True Canadian history should be taught to our children. I hope someone in the teaching profession will respond to this letter.
When I asked my granddaughter if she was taking history lessons, she said yes. I asked her, “What history was being taught?” She said “Les Voyageurs.”
It is my belief that the minister of education should refrain from imposing through the school system any false rewritten history to our English children. New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are blanketed in past British history. It was the British, not the French, who originally settled here. This history cannot be truthfully changed.
It was the Hudson Bay and St.Lawrence River area the French settled in. The fact remains, I am concerned about the destruction of our British history concerning Canada, and especially the Maritimes.
A heavy equipment operator was to demolish a building in Weymouth, N.S. He was told there was a pile of books in there which was to be put in the dump along with the building. He checked out the type of books, and he picked out a beautiful book on the history of the Seven Year War in Canada, 1756-1763.
He loaned that book to me and I read it. It is worth its weight in gold. Why was this book being destroyed? How many more books of this type are being destroyed for sinister reasons?
True Canadian history should be taught to our children. I hope someone in the teaching profession will respond to this letter.
When I asked my granddaughter if she was taking history lessons, she said yes. I asked her, “What history was being taught?” She said “Les Voyageurs.”
It is my belief that the minister of education should refrain from imposing through the school system any false rewritten history to our English children. New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are blanketed in past British history. It was the British, not the French, who originally settled here. This history cannot be truthfully changed.
It was the Hudson Bay and St.Lawrence River area the French settled in. The fact remains, I am concerned about the destruction of our British history concerning Canada, and especially the Maritimes.
A heavy equipment operator was to demolish a building in Weymouth, N.S. He was told there was a pile of books in there which was to be put in the dump along with the building. He checked out the type of books, and he picked out a beautiful book on the history of the Seven Year War in Canada, 1756-1763.
He loaned that book to me and I read it. It is worth its weight in gold. Why was this book being destroyed? How many more books of this type are being destroyed for sinister reasons?
The letter was signed: Melvin A. Smith, Fredericton
I am the last person to agree with burying, burning or otherwise wilfully destroy books. If what Mr. Smith relates is truly what is in those books slated for burial, then perhaps they should have been buried.
However, I think Mr. Smith may actually have always believed the British came before the Acadians, and those books slated for burial happened to confirm what he always believed. Yet, anyone who has taken the time to read about Maritime history, especially the more recent and objective books, must clearly realise that the French settled the Maritimes as surely as they settled the St. Lawrence.
The British clearly settled the Maritimes as well, but only after the Acadians had been forcibly removed from their lands. Indeed, propaganda at the time had many British colonists believing that the Acadians lucked out in finding present-day Nova Scotia as they didn’t have to work all that much to earn their living from incredibly fertile ground. The Acadians were “indolent,” they would say.
The colonists who “replaced” the Acadians soon came to realise that the Acadians were far from indolent. One of the Acadian agricultural strategies, reclaiming marsh land from the sea and rivers, required building and maintaining dykes called aboiteaux. The silt left there before the aboiteaux and during extreme flooding is what made the land so rich. When the aboiteau started to break down, the new colonists from New England had no idea how to fix them and would call upon authorities in Halifax to send some Acadian prisoners to have them make repairs.
Thus continued their love-hate relationship with the Acadians, whom the English settlers wound up needing more than they cared to admit.
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