by Peter Thompson
Pictou is a sleepy town of about 3000 people on the north shore of Nova Scotia. Despite its small size and its place on Canada’s margins, Pictou has been featured twice in the pages of ActiveHistory.ca over the past decade. First in Lachlan MacKinnon’s 2014 piece, “The Power-Politics of Pulp and Paper: Health, Environment and Work in Pictou County,” and then in Colin Osmond’s “A’Se’k — Boat Harbour: A Site of Centuries’ Long Mi’kmaw Resistance” (2019). In addition to its outsized presence on ActiveHistory.ca, the Northern Pulp site at Pictou County’s Abercrombie Point has also been the subject of Elliot Page and Ian Daniel’s documentary There’s Something in the Water and the CBC documentary “The Mill.” Each of these reinforce a central fact about Pictou: visual representations of the town found in tourist advertisements and in the memorial complex found on the waterfront itself elide darker elements of its history, including environmental racism and Indigenous dispossession. (See also Ingrid Waldron’s 2018 book, There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities.) In this post, I will look at how two sites on the Pictou waterfront—a plaque memorializing the passage of the Ship Hector and the Northern Pulp site itself—communicate ideas about history, progress, settler colonialism, and deindustrialization on the north shore.