Empire, the Maritime Colonies, and the Supplanting of Mi’kma’ki/Wulstukwik, 1780-1820

Abstract

The Supplanting of Mi'kmak'ki/Wulstukwik 79 along with the absence of support from potential diplomatic allies in France and the United States -ensured that by the 1790s "the Mi'kmaq and other tribal nations on the Atlantic seaboard were painfully aware that the old times were over." 2 Depictions such as these are consistent with the more general historical narrative of an ongoing, far advanced dispossession of Native peoples in eastern North America as a whole.As Timothy J. Shannon understandably commented in a 2007 review of Alan Taylor's The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, Taylor's study of the partitioning of Iroquoia between British North America and the United States brought out "the same problem that confronts other historians of Native Americans in this period, the sense that we have all heard this story before and we know that it is not going to end well." 3 This article will suggest, however, that the supplanting of Mi'kma'ki and Wulstukwik by the Maritime colonies, while certainly entering a critical phase during the waning years of the "long" 18th century, was characterized by a complex and distinctive pattern. 4 In this substantial portion of northeastern North America there were discrete though intertwined lines of development in, on the one hand, 2 Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi'kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Survival (Fort Worth: