Mi'kmaq Place Names of Nova Scotia at Bill Casselman's Canadian Wordof the Day at www.billcasselman.com

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The foods that Nova Scotians or Bluenoses cherish most were brought to the “wharf of North America” by immigrants. The original inhabitants were a people speaking an Algonquian language, the Mi’kmaq, who arrived, based on archaeological evidence, at least 10,000 years ago. They’ve been in the neighbourhood quite a while then ― long enough even to make place names from some of their food words, for example, the Nova Scotia town of Shubenacadie.

Groundnuts

The Nova Scotia town, lake and river of Shubenacadie is a French and English attempt at a Mi’kmaq phrase signifying the presence of sequbbun (groundnuts). The tasty groundnut, Apios americana, is a member of the pea family, and its dark-red or brown flowers resemble those of the sweet pea. They thrive in damp ground from Nova Scotia to Ontario and are found in much smaller, endangered stands as far west as Wisconsin.

Mi’kmaq people prize the sweet tubers of this plant which has a chestnut flavour and they call it sequbbun. Sequbbunakade is Mi’kmaq for ‘groundnut-place.’ Groundnut is also called Micmac potato, bog potato, Indian potato and travellers’ delight. The botanical genus name is Greek apios ‘a pair’ because the tubers on an individual rhizome seem to grow in pairs. One healthy plant may have ten or twelve tubers. Mi’kmaq people taught the first white settlers that these tubers were a good source of starch. As early as 1613, Biencourt and his followers at Port Royal went on foraging trips around the colony and along the nearby shores digging for groundnuts.

The flower of the groundnut displays the typical form of blossoms

of the pea family of plants.

The Mi’kmaq locative suffix -akadi,-akwadik shows up in other regional place names like Quoddy Harbour, from Mi’kmaq nooda-akwade ‘seal-hunting place,’ and Tracadie, from tul-akadik ‘camping place.’ A bit south, Maine’s Passamaquoddy Bay is from a Mi’kmaq phrase that means ‘pollock place,’ referring to a marine food fish called pollock in English.

Other Nova Scotia places indicating food location include Antigonish, from Mi’kmaq n’alegihooneech ‘broken-branches,’ a reference to a place where bears came to forage for beechnuts.

Baccaro, east of Cape Sable Island, is from a Basque word for codfish. Bakeapple Barren, named after the delicious little berries, is in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Bass River explains itself. The Canard River was just ducky for hunters of wildfowl. Framboise abounded in wild raspberries. Big clams lurked in tidal flats offshore at Grosses Coques. Ostrea Lake once had oyster beds. The Latin word for oyster and its zoological genus name is ostrea. Later and more layful English place names based on food words in Nova Scotia include Pickle Bay, The Beefsteak, and Cheese Factory Corner.

Later immigrants, who came long after the Mi’kmaq, included John Cabot who made landfall at Cape Breton Island in 1497, and more than a century later, de Monts and Champlain who founded Port Royal in 1605, the first farm settlement by Europeans on land that eventually became part of Canada. The French named it Acadia. In 1621, King James I granted Sir William Alexander land officially dubbed New Scotland or, in Latin, Nova Scotia.

Molly Muise, a Mi'kmaq woman in a mid-nineteenth-century photograph

Governor Cornwallis founded Halifax in 1749 and arranged an influx of German Protestants, more than 2,000 of whom were settled near Lunenburg. In the years that followed, pre-Loyalist New Englanders came to Nova Scotia, along with Irish and Yorkshiremen. Significantly, the first Scots reached Pictou in 1773. The outbreak of the American Revolution began a flow of more than 20,000 Loyalists. African-Americans came first as slaves of some Loyalists, as free people from Jamaica, and as free citizens after the war of 1812. Today, people from England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland make up 70 percent of the population of Nova Scotia, while roughly 8 percent are of Acadian and French origin. Ninety-four percent list their mother tongue as English, 3 percent as French. But all enjoy the local comestibles that comprise the bounty of Nova Scotia.