Can a place have a soul?
The big sky was blanketed, the humidity thick, as I stood on the drumlin hill this week. From the parking lot of a plastics factory, I could see a muddy gash of the Shubenacadie River, and some unpainted, unadorned wooden houses.
Mostly what I saw, looking left and right and towards the horizon, was the kind of green, rolling farmland that makes a person think expansive, peaceful thoughts about the world in which we live.
Ah, the irony, because terrible things happened on that spot, between Highway 2 and the Shubenacadie River, where the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School once stood.
A Parks Canada website entry about the school, which opened in 1928-29, and was demolished in 1986, valiantly attempts to list the woes that residents endured there: “harsh discipline, malnutrition and starvation; poor healthcare; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; medical experimentation; neglect; the deliberate suppression of their cultures and languages; and loss of life.”
The latter is why Jonathan Fowler, who teaches archaeology at Saint Mary's University, and was the man I was there to see, has been walking that land for the past month, wielding his geophysical sensor and ground-penetrating radar, trying to answer the burning question of whether unmarked graves lie buried there.
And why, as he goes about his duties, he feels a “heaviness” that comes because “we are metaphorical creatures in our culture, and we apply weight to things that are consequential” and because every day a member of the community, on their private privilege arrives there, if just to stay for a few minutes.
What Fowler feels is not remotely what his co-investigator Roger Lewis feels at the 60-hectare former residential school property.
Lewis, a trained archaeologist, tries to stay professional up there, to focus on the task at hand, to keep the emotion out of it. But he was a resident at the Shubenacadie school for the last two years before it closed in 1967 and was finally demolished 19 years later. “Short of bulldozing that drumlin down, those memories will be with me forever,” he explained.
What Fowler feels is something else, a melancholy that attaches itself to places of woe, an ache so profound that all that is required to feel it is merely being a member of the human race.
This, at least, has been my experience.
In Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, where some 32,000 prisoners were known to have died and tens of thousands more were thought to have gone to meet their maker, the air seemed to ring with silence.
But also, in other places where tragedies have occurred — the site where Swissair Flight 111 went down, and a fireball shot through the Westray coal mine, the place where a gun-wielding slaughtered innocents.
If ghosts linger anywhere, it has always seemed to me as well as Fowler, they will live where something consequential has happened. If a place can have a soul, surely it would be a place where the torments of the dead call out through time and space.
Perhaps this is why, when Fowler looks back over his archaeological career, he sees a pattern: that he has mostly excavated places where “grim things” have occurred, shipwrecks, massacres, ethnic cleansings.
The latter, you should know, refers to the expulsion of the Acadians, a subject about which Fowler has a deep and abiding interest.
Because the old Acadian lands seem to be another of those anguished places, I have been drawn there as well, to walk along the dikelands where the Acadians built their lives, by all accounts living peacefully with the Mi'kmaq who had been there for millennia before them, but also across the terrain where they marched before English bayonets towards the ships that arrived in 1755 to enact George II'S “final resolution to the French Inhabitants of this his province of Nova Scotia.”
I feel the weight of history when I trudge there. If I listened hard and heard cries of anguish as if from a long distance away, it would not surprise me in the least.
Across the country, the sites of the former residential schools are affecting people the same way. In a moving essay in Maclean's, Alicia Elliott wrote of being physically ill upon stepping into the boiler room at a former Ontario residential school “where many Indigenous children were taken by staff to be abused, because the sound of the boiler would better mask their screams.”
In Shubenacadie, it has been 35 years since the brick building where the abominations took place was destroyed. But look carefully, and you can see fragments of its red bricks in the parking lot of the plastics factory parking that took its place, as well as chunks of the old foundation, now lying overgrown in the grass.
Listen hard, even on a day when a hot wind blows as it did one day this week. Is that air rustling tall grass? Is it, as someone recently posted on social media, a child's voice whispering,"they found us."