Chapter 10 The Great Spawn Aquaculture and Development on the Bras d’Or Lake

Will Langford

Throughout the long twentieth century, mining, milling, fishing, farming, and harvesting the woods were essential to livelihoods in Cape Breton. Yet the island’s rural and urban economies were precarious from the 1920s. People made do, often choosing to migrate or to defend their standard of living, as best as they could, through union, cooperative, or Mi’kmaw solidarities. From the early 1960s, efforts to shore up the island’s social relations and diversify its economic bases were given new strength by the government. Development programs involved people in efforts to better their circumstances. Hope, as historian Tina Loo has framed it, became a state project.1

This chapter explores the early history of aquaculture on Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, situating the alternative fishery within the context of development. Mi’kmaw fishers initiated oyster farming in Eskasoni in 1969. The practice spread as a way to create jobs and increase incomes in rural places along the lake. Mi’kmaw and non-Indigenous fishers were involved, though the delivery of development assistance largely emphasized a settler colonial distinction between the two groups. Still, until the early 1980s, oyster farming seemed like a promising way to address unemployment, poverty, and dispossession.

The St. Francis Xavier University Extension Department, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), and the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) provided funding and support, while fisheries scientists contributed expertise. In the process, oyster farming was informed by two development practices: community development, which tried to address local poverty by building peoples’ capacity to carry out self-directed socio-economic change, and regional development, which promised to rectify inequality by increasing economic activity and employment in have-not areas. I wrap my account of Bras d’Or aquaculture in an analysis of these development practices, their sponsors, and their constituents.

Development contains the idea that intentional action can improve the lives of human beings by reshaping unfolding economic, social, and cultural processes.2 Given its multiplicity, development is best understood according to what it sought to accomplish. Development is an important theme of postwar Cape Breton history, even if studies of development agencies on the island are mostly hidden away in unpublished theses.3 Where much of this scholarship focuses on policymaking, my interest is more in the practice and colloquial politics of development programs. Focusing on aquaculture also provides a bridge between the too-often-distinct Mi’kmaq and settler dimensions of the island’s historiography. On the one hand, historians have self-consciously noted the absences or marginal presences of Mi’kmaq in their studies, thereby emphasizing the exclusion of Mi’kmaq from the industrial economy, from working-class culture, and from popular memory and the heritage narratives informing tourism.4 On the other hand, separate historical work directly assesses Mi’kmaw political resistance and the detrimental effects of colonial administration.5 Yet attention to the history of development allows for analysis of some considerable intersections and tensions in the experiences of Mi’kmaq and non-Indigenous Cape Bretoners.

Bras d’Or aquaculture emerged from a convergence of three island crises—pronounced on-reserve poverty, falling rural incomes, and the uncertain future of the coal and steel industries—and the development initiatives seeking to provide responses. Mi’kmaw and settler fishers, fisheries experts, university professors, development workers, and government officials were determined to make oyster farming feasible. The collaboration was difficult, and it was shaped by conflicting interests, environmental limitations, and market constraints. The economic impact of aquaculture was slight, but it was in dreams of a “great spawn” that the ultimately unrealized promise of development was most clear. Development signified more than getting by; it held out the democratic promise of greater economic independence within capitalist society.

Aquaculture involves applying agriculture practices to produce finfish, shellfish, or plants in the aquatic environment. Though small-scale marine farming has a long history in human societies, the emergence of a large industry dominated by big business is a recent process.6 In Canada, state-assisted marine science was linked to the promotion and management of commercial fisheries from the 1890s. Encouraged by fisheries experts, the Prince Edward Island government enclosed Gulf of St. Lawrence oyster grounds in 1912 and promoted private oyster cultivation, only for Malpeque disease to ruin the scheme.7 Beyond the use of fish hatcheries, aquaculture remained mostly an academic pursuit until a 1978 breakthrough, when researchers at the St. Andrew’s Biological Station demonstrated how Atlantic salmon could be cultivated in steel cages suspended in the Bay of Fundy. From the 1980s, salmon farming was commercially viable. An expanded industry producing diverse species has since taken shape, albeit not without controversy. To be sure, supporters consider aquaculture an efficient alternative to the sometimes tenuous inshore and offshore fisheries.8 Latter-day trends in aquaculture, though, were preceded by the kind of start-up marine farming undertaken in Cape Breton.

Bras d’Or Lake is a large estuary at the centre of Cape Breton, fed by six rivers and two saltwater channels. Mi’kmaq named the body Pitu’paq (“to which all things flow”) and recognized that the lake served as a spawning ground for diverse fish species. Mi’kmaw fishing practices were informed by the concept of no’maq (“all my relations”), which acknowledged the spiritual and worldly interdependence of all things and emphasized taking only what was needed. Though never a staple food, mn’tmu’k (oysters) were collected to eat and sell as well as for ceremonial purposes. Mi’kmaw harvesters practised a modest form of aquaculture by moving oysters to deeper, cooler water and waiting for them to mature in “oyster gardens.”9 But as early as the 1930s, with settlers and Mi’kmaq drawing on Bras d’Or fisheries, overharvesting prompted a decline in naturally occurring shellfish.10 When a group of fishers in Eskasoni first envisioned oyster farming, they were concerned about their poor catches. But the aquaculture proposal was equally a response to the consequences of settler colonialism.

Their lands and resources were encroached upon by arriving settlers in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century, Mi’kmaq in Cape Breton faced increased legal restrictions and political disempowerment exerted through the force of the Canadian state and the attendant Indian Act.11 For example, as Martha Walls shows in chapter 5, Mi’kmaq who lived near Sydney, where they accessed waged work indirectly produced by the coal and steel industries, were coercively relocated to more distant Membertou in 1926. In political resistance often led during the 1920s to 1940s by Grand Chief Gabriel Sylliboy and Ben Christmas, Mi’kmaq challenged colonial policies, including hunting and fishing regulations, residential schools, and the sale of reserve lands. They viewed eighteenth-century peace and friendship treaties as a source of Mi’kmaw rights.12

In Eskasoni, life was profoundly shaped by the consequences of “centralization” policy. Department of Indian Affairs officials advocated the consolidation of reserves to cut costs and increase control over Mi’kmaw activities, supposedly to speed assimilation. Between 1942 and 1949, the policy was carried out through coerced relocation to an enlarged reserve at Eskasoni and another on the mainland, at Shubenacadie.13 Mi’kmaq protested through letters, petitions, and avoidance. Ben Christmas argued that centralization was “a great instrument to beat the Indians into submission” and that the Mi’kmaq “did not agitate for it, were not even consulted when the scheme was contemplated, and consequently had no choice in the matter.”14 Threats and promises pressured over one thousand Mi’kmaq (about half the demographic total) to move from twenty-two reserves. Even before the policy was abandoned, its detrimental impact on the quality of life was clear. Social and familial relations were disrupted, more so since a rising number of children were sent to residential schools. Housing and services were inadequate. And the selected reserves were remote, far from waged labour opportunities and hunting and fishing grounds. Outside of some seasonal employment, dependency on social assistance became nearly universal in Eskasoni.15

An Eskasoni band council was elected following the formation of five distinct bands in Cape Breton, an administrative reshuffling prompted by the financial rules in the Indian Act of 1951. The council lobbied for better services and housing yet by 1966 questioned “whether education and welfare programs, unless complemented by economic considerations, are capable of providing a positive environment from which allegedly better generations evolve.” Councillors insisted that the root economic sources of poverty be addressed.16

The Eskasoni Oyster Farming Association (figure 10.1) was mobilized in this context. This was a development partnership between the federal government and the Mi’kmaw community of Eskasoni. Instigator Fred Young visited Roy Drinnan, a fisheries scientist at an experimental station in Ellerslie, Prince Edward Island. They agreed that oyster culture techniques might be adapted to Bras d’Or Lake. At a December 1969 meeting, the association presented its plan to fisheries experts, DIAND officials, and members of the Extension Department at St. Francis Xavier (St. FX) University.17 Extension workers came to support Bras d’Or aquaculture—however, their relationship to the concept of development and to Mi’kmaw communities arose from a longer history.

The St. FX Extension Department emerged in response to the Depression in eastern Nova Scotia in the 1920s. Professor-priests hoped to shore up the bases of rural life and counteract the appeal of socialism by fostering a Christian economic and social order. From 1930, extension workers roused fishers and farmers through mass meetings and local study groups, urging them to form consumer cooperatives and credit unions. By building their purchasing power, male primary producers might regain their economic independence and dignity within capitalism. Women were marginal to organizing efforts, and Mi’kmaq were excluded entirely. As co-ops multiplied, the Catholic adult education initiative became known as the Antigonish movement.18 Yet the activism waned during the 1940s. After the war, many rural Cape Bretoners judged cooperative institutions as businesses just like any others and withdrew their small capital.19

Postwar economic pressures shaped a slow-moving rural crisis. Competition grew, commodity prices fell, and margins eroded. By the early 1950s, small farmers and fishers simply could not produce and market enough to secure a decent standard of living. Some responded by finding other sources of income or investing in new equipment, land, and livestock. Others moved away, helping accelerate rural decline by abandoning farms and fishing villages.20 In chapter 7, Ken Donovan illustrates some of these rural difficulties in Ingonish. Somewhat belatedly, St. FX Extension Department director John Chisholm proposed a new program of rural development in 1955. In advice that had become commonplace, Chisholm suggested that primary producers should not only increase their output and keep up with marketing trends but also diversify their production. Under the auspices of Eastern Cooperative Services (ECS), new processing and cold storage facilities were created in Sydney. But the investment was done without grassroots involvement and coincided with a late 1950s recession. Soon near bankruptcy, ECS leaders abandoned their attempt to revitalize rural life and instead sought to keep the wholesale cooperative solvent.21 Rural extension work in Cape Breton had stalled out.

The Antigonish movement retained some dynamism, however, if in a new field. Laudatory press reports brought the movement to international attention in the mid-1930s. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hundreds of North American missionaries and visitors from the Global South arrived to take Extension Department courses. These people subsequently set out to apply the principles of community participation, local leadership, and economic self-determination. Antigonish movement offshoots emerged in parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.22 In 1959, the Coady Institute was created at St. FX to meet the international demand for training.

Discernibly, the concept of community development crept into the department’s work in the course of its international engagement. Communitarian responses to rural poverty were prominent in the postwar decades, though often in ways linked to imperial rule. Attempts to promote local economic improvement took place within much deeper social relations of domination. The very term community development was coined at a conference of British colonial administrators in 1948. Arising out of mass education practices in interwar Africa, community development’s pedagogy insisted that once people learned about their common problems and identified their “felt needs,” they would use small-scale organization and democratic decision-making to carry out cooperative solutions. Practitioners imagined community as a site to build the capacities of individuals and as a bulwark of social and cultural cohesion. In 1955, the United Nations endorsed the practice.23

By then, support for rural self-activity had spread in the Global South. In Puerto Rico, Antigonish movement priest Joseph A. Macdonald trained agricultural extension workers each summer from 1945 to 1963. In 1951, the Puerto Rican government enhanced extension activities with a “community education program” ultimately aimed at redirecting rural people away from communism, agitation against land owners, and opposition to American imperialism.24 Elsewhere in Latin America, Antigonish movement–inspired cooperatives were tolerated where they did not challenge dictatorial rule.25 As the United States ramped up its anti-communist intervention in Latin America in the early 1960s, St. FX staff continued to train some of the community developers involved. Offering a Cold War perspective on this internationalism, one brochure proclaimed that the Coady Institute had “blunted the thrust of Communist subversion and shored up the ramparts of free enterprise democracy.”26

Given community development’s origins in empire, it is unsurprising that extension staff first applied it with Mi’kmaq in Cape Breton, through the Mi’kmaq Community Development Program (MCDP). St. FX figures were far from alone in this. As anticolonial movements prompted the rediscovery of Indigenous poverty in Canada, reformers suggested that community development would allow Indigenous peoples to achieve a self-directed adaptation to settler society—as opposed to the imposed assimilation of past racist policies. However, since community developers presumed that Indigenous peoples needed help to help themselves, the practice could be as much neoimperial as democratizing.27

Initially prompted by a Membertou band council request for assistance in studying reserve conditions, MCDP ran from 1958 to 1970.28 White fieldworkers reproduced the Antigonish movement’s gendered assumptions that women should focus on better homemaking and men should consider economic matters.29 As historian Martha Walls has analyzed, Mi’kmaw women faced the added paternalism of social work-style home visits from white fieldworkers, who laced their reports with racialized judgments on the alleged character of Mi’kmaw mothers. Nevertheless, Mi’kmaw women co-opted MCDP resources to organize and take a larger role in community activity. MCDP also came to partly intersect with Mi’kmaw political networks, as Sister Kateri, Noel Doucette, Joe B. Marshall, and Roy Gould, who worked to revive Micmac News in 1965, were among the activists eventually hired as fieldworkers.30 The push for local economic improvement became well established in the 1960s.

The idea of development also appealed to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development staff. From 1964, MCDP was subcontracted within the DIAND’s own community development program. Proponent Walter Rudnicki believed that community development had a subversive edge and would empower Indigenous peoples to seek change; other DIAND officials thought self-help would reduce welfare costs and shore up consent for the state’s colonial structures. As Indigenous peoples seized on community development to challenge Indian Agents and some band councils, DIAND shut the program down by 1968 (though MCDP funding lasted until 1970). However, both political resistance and advocacy by social scientists for reserve-based industry informed further shifts in policy. DIAND introduced economic development funding in the 1970s and devolved many program responsibilities to First Nations.31

Insisting that political, economic, and cultural freedom were interdependent, a younger generation of activists sought to invigorate Mi’kmaw politics through new means. In 1968, Cape Breton activists formed Ulnuegg Negonidike (“Indians, we go forward”) to defend Indigenous rights and demand a say in the decisions affecting Mi’kmaw lives. The white paper on Indian policy provided further impetus for resistance. Under the guise of nondiscrimination, the federal government proposed to abrogate treaty rights, repeal the Indian Act, settle outstanding land claims, and devolve service provisions to provinces. Mi’kmaw leaders formed the Union of Nova Scotia Indians (UNSI) in 1969 to ensure “one strong voice rather than the weak voices of individual bands,” as UNSI president and Potlotek chief Noel Doucette put it.32 In 1972, activists from several communities also founded the Nova Scotia Native Women’s Association, an implicit response to the male dominance of the Union.33 As historian Sarah Nickle stresses, Indigenous feminists opposed gender discrimination as well as racism and colonialism, and they often called on their political identity as mothers to demand improved community services.34 For its part, UNSI pursued treaty and land claims research, and it supported cultural revitalization, offered social services, and favoured reserve-based economic development.35

Mi’kmaq emphasized their control over that development. Riffing on an Antigonish movement phrase, Doucette informed the Extension Department, “We now have the leaders among our numbers prepared to be MASTERS OF OUR OWN DESTINY.”36 In 1970, UNSI took over community development programs on reserves and also held an economic development conference.37 Still, Membertou chief Lawrence Paul warned that overcoming poverty was not enough. Rather, the recognition of treaties “will provide the guideline toward the first steps on the road to equality and will also be a first step towards restoring the Indians’ pride and dignity because they involve such things as mineral rights and the reclaiming of lands and a variety of other things which vary from province to province.”38 Political rights and economic gains were mutually reinforcing.

Oyster farming was therefore launched in a context where Mi’kmaq, sharing the vision of Third World nations, saw development as a means of advancing their self-determination. Once two workers were trained in 1970, Eskasoni fishers implemented a Japanese oyster culture technique. Scallop shells were strung along vinyl-coated cables fixed to moveable rafts in Crane Cove, which abutted the reserve (figure 10.2). Oyster spats would attach themselves to the suspended shells, feed on phytoplankton, and mature at a distance from predators (such as starfish) on the lake bottom.39

For Eskasoni’s twelve hundred residents, the transformation of the cove was a sight to behold. In the pages of Micmac News, Rita Joe captured the mood in her poem “Oyster Farming.” In the middle two stanzas, she wrote,

The sense of emancipatory possibility was palpable.

Eskasoni fishers and Mi’kmaw political leaders saw little alternative but to pursue a kind of dependent development. With 96 percent unemployment among Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq did not have access to the capital needed for oyster farming or similar ventures.41 Mi’kmaw developers came to the same strategy as Indigenous reformers elsewhere in Canada during these years: they needed government support if they were going to counter poverty and press for inclusion in the presumed socio-economic benefits of capitalist society.42

Government funding arrived gradually. Through sustained lobbying for assistance, Eskasoni fishers persuaded DIAND authorities that aquaculture could be a significant job-producing industry.43 In 1971, the Crane Cove Oyster Farm—a DIAND-funded cooperative, owned in trust by the band council—was formed at Eskasoni. In other Mi’kmaw communities, federal employment programs provided money and organizational support. In 1972, Micmac Fisheries Development Cooperative (MFDC) was formed with the assistance of the Local Employment Assistance Program (LEAP), a work experience initiative targeting “chronically unemployed” and “disadvantaged” workers.44 MFDC was an umbrella organization for oyster farming co-ops established in Eskasoni, Wagmatcook, Potlotek, and Whycocomagh (We’koqma’q). Job-creation grants from the Local Improvement Program (LIP) allowed for the start of oyster farming in We’koqma’q and Potlotek.45 Eventually, in 1974, DIAND and the Department of Regional Economic Expansion announced a funding package to sustain MFDC operations.46 Eskasoni fishers also met several times with DEVCO officials. And in an unexpected progression from its roots in another island poverty problem, DEVCO soon became the development agency most deeply involved in aquaculture on Bras d’Or Lake.

The Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) was a federal Crown corporation created during a crescendoing coal and steel crisis. Miners and steelworkers had high hopes for reconstruction after World War II, as David Frank explains in chapter 6. Yet Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (DOSCO) responded to competitive and transportation challenges, as well as coal quality and steel-making limitations, with a strategy of planned obsolescence.47 Mine closures and layoffs began in 1953. Workers demanded that the government nationalize or help modernize the industries, sharply politicizing the future of the industrial economy.48 The federal government twice sponsored studies of the situation. In 1960, a royal commission report by Justice Ivan Rand argued that government coal subsidies be continued to avert community collapse but steps be taken to diversify the regional economy.49 In 1966, J. R. Donald agreed that Cape Breton was too dependent on coal, adding that the industry should be phased out.50 The federal government moved in 1967 to nationalize the mines located in Industrial Cape Breton. The decision was shaped by Allan J. MacEachen, a Liberal cabinet minister, Cape Breton member of Parliament, and St. Francis Xavier University economist who believed that regional economic inequality necessitated a state remedy. DEVCO was tasked with slowly ending coal mining and creating alternative bases of employment on the island.

Development was central to DEVCO’s purpose, and it was something that appealed to many who lived in Sydney, North Sydney, Glace Bay, and New Waterford. Less than two weeks after DEVCO took over the coal mines, DOSCO shocked residents by announcing plans to close the steel mill. At a public lecture held in Sydney, Xavier College economist Doris Boyle noted rising expectations around the world: “The old economic fatalism—that nothing could be done about poverty, unemployment, gross inequalities and inequities in income and opportunity—are gone [sic]. Citizens want their conditions improved and rapidly and they want to use the power of the state to improve living standards.”51 Indeed, on 19 November 1967, about twenty thousand Cape Bretoners marched in the Parade of Concern to demand government action. When the provincial government established Sydney Steel Corporation (SYSCO) to run the steel mill (a plan that had already been in motion), it seemed to the public that regional solidarity had succeeded. Historian Andrew Parnaby has argued that the popular mobilization against an absentee capitalist foe foregrounded the government’s growing interest in countering regional inequalities. Believing that regional development programs offered an alternative to industrial ruination and community attrition, people invoked the island’s history, culture, and landscape to craft a Cape Breton regional identity imbued with moral and political force.52

As part of a newly activist welfare state, regional development programs promised to deliver a social right to a decent standard of living no matter where citizens lived. They aimed to do so, in Canada as in new nations in the Global South, by stimulating economic growth and lessening unemployment in disadvantaged regions.53 DEVCO’s initial practice fit within a consensus that job creation depended on attracting secondary manufacturing. Industrial Estates Limited, a businessmen-run provincial agency created in 1957, used financial incentives to entice firms to locate plants in Nova Scotia.54 DEVCO’s Industrial Development Division replicated the strategy by reaching incentive deals with nine companies new to Cape Breton in 1968 and 1969 as well as aiding six existing operations. But subsidizing off-island capitalists and easing deindustrialization with reindustrialization were not reliable development strategies. With the onset of a recession, most of the firms DEVCO had attracted went bankrupt in 1970 and 1971.

DEVCO’s regional development strategy was put into question, something that fit a larger trend. In the early 1970s, disappointment with larger-scale modernization projects prompted a transnational re-evaluation of development thought.55 For historians and social scientists applying dependency theory and neo-Marxist analyses to explain the underdevelopment of the Maritimes, better incorporating the poor into capitalist processes was unlikely to remedy poverty.56 For Reverend Greg MacLeod, a professor-priest at Xavier College, the overproduction of manufactured goods meant “it might not be wise for us in Cape Breton to pin too many of our hopes on competing in the ‘manufactured good’ market.” Detecting a postindustrial future, MacLeod favoured social investment in the community and, with allies, went on to foster small-business activity through a community development corporation, New Dawn Enterprises.57 Among other developers, there was growing support for development rooted in small-scale, intermediate technologies adapted to local people and environments.58

In late 1971, new president Tom Kent reworked DEVCO’s regional development program. He insisted that diversifying the island economy would not succeed unless the coal and steel industries continued to provide a solid base of employment. Therefore, he overturned DEVCO’s plans to end coal mining, instead pursuing targeted modernization measures. In chapter 9, Lachlan MacKinnon considers the labour conflicts and mine disasters that marked the subsequent history of DEVCO’s Coal Division. As for alternative employment, Kent dismissed using capital incentives to attract “footloose” industries. He reasoned that the “only development that is worthwhile is concerned with people, with how people live; especially, with how they earn a living.” This thinking led Kent to consider rural and urban places and the problems of underemployment and joblessness. Suggesting that income would increasingly come in the service sector and through specialized production, Kent identified the island with “a slower, gentler style of life,” where authentic development would be issued from natural resources, presumed Scottish traditions, and rural roots.59 These values recalled the romantic Scottish pastness that shaped Nova Scotian tourism promotion since the 1930s and the Gaelic song collecting described by Heather Sparling in chapter 8, and they were also felt within the Cape Breton cultural revival that emerged from grassroots responses to insecurity in the 1960s.60

Kent’s regional development policy turned toward tourism, fishing, forestry, and farming, as well as associated secondary productions—from spinning wool to building yachts. DEVCO provided loans and subsidies to private businesses, entered public-private partnerships, and started up Crown corporation–owned commercial ventures. DEVCO staff also helped primary producer associations get started by offering financial and technical assistance. In aquaculture, Kent pictured that DEVCO would deliver development assistance to a Bras d’Or Farming Association, itself comprised of oyster farming groups formed in lakeside places like Iona, Boisdale, and Baddeck. Kent initially suggested that Eskasoni fishers could access support as one community among others.61 But as DEVCO ramped up its support of aquaculture, the corporation omitted reserves. The only relationships DEVCO employees had with Crane Cove operations unfolded informally, through exchanges of technical and practical information.62

In fact, an exclusionary settler colonial logic tacitly ran through DEVCO’s entire regional development program. A couple of further examples indicate the pattern of projects overlooking Mi’kmaw communities. In the early 1970s, a grassroots handicrafts revival spread on the island. DEVCO created Island Crafts to help producers market their goods, but its operation remained apart from concurrent handicraft production among Mi’kmaq, including at the DIAND-supported Eskasoni Crafts Centre.63 In the tourism sector, the corporation provided funds to the Micmac Festival in 1972 to repair the hall in Potlotek.64 But the grant was a token when compared with DEVCO’s extensive investment in accommodations, attractions, and food services across the island. Much of the tourism infrastructure came with a Scottish theme (providing one foundation for the Celtic Colours International Festival, described by Del Muise and Anne-Louise Semple in chapter 11) or recalled a French colonial past rather than a Mi’kmaq present. DEVCO assisted Cape Breton municipalities, entered fields of provincial responsibility, and worked with several federal departments. Yet that collaboration effectively stopped when it came to DIAND jurisdiction over Mi’kmaw communities.

In a more discursive sense, characterizations of the poor were applied differently to Mi’kmaq and settlers yet with underlying similarities. By 1960, as the behavioural analysis of the “culture of poverty” concept was used to update older paternalism toward the poor, it became commonplace for those surveying Cape Breton to argue that the problem had as much to do with psychology as economics. An MCDP report asserted that Mi’kmaq were “living aimless, inefficient and what we may call wasted lives” but might “move forward with a new self-determination” if they organized with outside help.65 Descriptions of Mi’kmaq were distinguished by racialized tropes, but other islanders received comparable commentary. Ivan Rand insisted Cape Bretoners required a new “outlook and spirit”; J. R. Donald lamented that residents had been psychologically conditioned to expect government coal subsidies; Douglas Fullerton, an economist on DEVCO’s board, felt islanders had a “dependence syndrome” and there lacked “people with steam in their boilers—the entrepreneurs who start small enterprises on borrowed money, but who work hard to build the business up—creating jobs and wealth.”66

More sympathetically, Kent thought long-time economic exploitation by foreign capital had prevented Cape Bretoners from seizing “real opportunities” for entrepreneurialism. That Kent was English born added freight to his narrative: his colloquial nickname, the “laird of Cape Breton,” gestured to the history of absentee English capitalist control of the coal and steel industries as well as the migration of Scottish Highlanders displaced by English imperialism.67 Yet the popular allusion to imperialism ignored settler colonialism. And while Kent enhanced the credibility of DEVCO’s regional development staff by hiring prominent Cape Bretoners, Mi’kmaw leaders were not among them. Development practices sought to increase opportunities to earn a living on the island but left settler colonial, racial, and class inequalities as they were.

Bras d’Or oyster farming took shape on multiple fronts. Eskasoni fishers spearheaded operations in Crane Cove. Fledgling efforts were undertaken under the MFDC umbrella at Wagmatcook, Potlotek, and Whycocomagh (We’koqma’q). DEVCO fostered cooperative aquaculture in non-Indigenous communities and aided a few privately held farms.

At the outset, DEVCO was assisted by the St. FX Extension Department, which therefore had a role in both Mi’kmaq and settler aquaculture. In 1972, John Chisholm organized cooperatives for DEVCO’s scheme. Farmers, labourers, and small businessmen packed meetings held in homes, community halls, and church basements. Residents along the Bras d’Or had a sense of urgency, and they were expectant about a possible new way to earn income. In all, about three hundred people were involved in forming a dozen community cooperatives. DEVCO officials helped the cooperatives secure the underwater leases needed to begin farming. Robin Stuart, a twenty-three-year-old fisheries biologist, was hired as the liaison person with the co-ops.68

DEVCO also created a subsidiary, Cape Breton Marine Farming (CBMF), in 1972. Based in Baddeck, CBMF assisted production and conducted research. Its technicians did a lot of the legwork: they furnished cooperatives with aluminum rafts and supplies, oversaw spat collection, monitored hydrographic conditions, ran a laboratory, and so on.69 Some labour was contracted out to communities, including the production of shell strings during winter months. Philip Drinnan, a technician (as well as Roy Drinnan’s son), recalled a scene in Washabuck, where people were so keen for a little bit of extra income that they packed the community hall “full of wires, stinky shells, women of all ages and tea, busily making the strings.”70

DEVCO aimed to make aquaculture profitable. The low price of oysters—five to ten cents per choice shellfish—was a considerable constraint. Bras d’Or farming had to compete, in part, with wild oyster collection in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, where fishers supplemented their seasonal activity with unemployment insurance payments. The break-even analyses conducted by financial staff and consultants pointed away from small-scale cooperative production. Profitability appeared to require steeply increased cultivation. So CBMF sought to ramp up production to a commercial scale. At the late 1970s peak, there were 1,780 rafts spread among the co-ops at close-to-shore sites. Annual output reached about two million oysters. Yet many oysters did not grow to a marketable size and quality. CBMF workers changed strategies, removing juvenile oysters suspended on shells and letting them mature on the lake bottom.71

Efforts to improve production were linked with marketing. DEVCO officials believed that reaching gourmet food markets was necessary to improve margins, since low-quality shellfish could only be sold to processors at cut rates. From its first harvest in 1975, the best oysters were sold to food stores and distributors as far away as Toronto and Halifax. There were hopes tourists would come to eat Bras d’Or oysters rather than imported American ones.72

CBMF staff also tried to diversify production. Experiments were undertaken with European flat oysters, Pacific salmon, trout, mussels, clams, and seaweed. Apart from mussels, the efforts relied on introducing new species to the lake. For example, a fish hatchery was installed, and research was conducted on acclimating trout to salt water and winter temperatures. Though a shipment of imported trout was destroyed (unnecessarily, it turned out) because of concern over disease, CBMF’s stock grew sufficiently by 1977 that it sold fish to a processor in North Sydney. Yet production eventually fell short of expectations.73

For their part, Eskasoni fishers equally tried to build up to a commercial scale. Using locally available materials, they packed Crane Cove with rafts, cables, and boats. Just as Rita Joe’s poetry captured, band manager Albert Julian felt that the intensiveness of the operation was essential: it gave local Mi’kmaq a purpose and a reason to dream.74 The first crop was harvested in November 1973 (figure 10.3). But there were already concerns about the sustainability of the farm. The overstocking of the cove strained the local aquatic environment. Lacking food or covered by silt, oysters did not mature at the expected rate. The farm, too, remained well short of profitability.75

The scientific dimensions of aquaculture interested federal, provincial, and university fisheries scientists. Jacques Cousteau, a well-known advocate of marine research, even visited Cape Breton in 1975 to see work overseen by Roy Drinnan. Scientists joined industry practitioners to form the Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia in 1977.76

Professors at Xavier College and its successor institution University College of Cape Breton (UCCB) also became involved. After meeting with oyster farmers in 1972, science faculty created the Bras d’Or Institute to study aquaculture and catalyze development efforts. Chemistry professor Donald F. Arseneau argued that the goal was for faculty to stimulate “research, development, and enquiry relevant to Cape Breton Island.” The institute hosted workshops, offered continuing education and technical assistance, and collected studies relevant to the development of the island.77 It also had an institutional twin. Driven by Greg MacLeod, the Tompkins Institute took its name from the progenitor of the Antigonish movement and encouraged humanities and social science professors to address the social, economic, and philosophical dimensions of development.78

Scientific, environmental, and market challenges were not the sum of the issues aquaculture stimulated. Political contestation occurred on questions of democracy, the beneficiaries of development, and the role of expertise. At Crane Cove, a set of conflicts centred on community control and its purpose. Despite strong Mi’kmaw participation, the oyster farm was managed by a St. FX extension worker, Lawrence Day, and its board was chaired by a white store owner, Irving Schwartz. DIAND regularly involved non-Indigenous people in the management of reserve development projects, justifying the practice with reference to business know-how. Signalling a militant critique, a circular sent around the Eskasoni reserve in the fall of 1971 raised issues about local welfare and a sense of powerlessness. It also demanded, “What about the oyster farm?? Who owns it?? How are the workers hired over there???? How come the chairman is not an Indian on the Board of Directors???” The circular announced a meeting and declared, “POWER TO THE PEOPLE.”79

The issue came to a head in 1974 thanks to a labour dispute. Fifteen workers staged a three-day wildcat strike, and their spokesperson, Charlie J. Dennis, presented an ultimatum: either Day is dismissed, or the workers would quit. (Joe B. Marshall, Micmac News editor, commented that while Day did fine with the oysters, workers did not like his management style.) Additional demands included better pay and working conditions, the hiring of a Mi’kmaw manager, and greater Mi’kmaw and worker representation on the board. At an emergency meeting, the Eskasoni band council asserted its control over the oyster farm. Day and Schwartz were removed from their roles, and a new board of six Mi’kmaq and one DIAND official was formed.80

Greater control over the project did not allay all concerns. When DIAND cut its funding for austerity reasons in 1975, Marshall questioned the “mere token” of development funding, as it was inadequate compensation for the loss of Mi’kmaw lifeways and was an instrument of devolution. In 1967, DIAND introduced a system of program grants to band councils. By 1972, the department had removed all of its personnel from Eskasoni. But while DIAND officials no longer managed Mi’kmaw affairs directly, they retained the financial mechanisms to push their bureaucratic objectives.81 By municipalizing the band system, Marshall argued that DIAND would relieve itself of the need to address the fundamental issues of Indigenous rights and title. He suggested that if the Crane Cove project succeeded, the band would be left to reinvest the profits in reserve services. If aquaculture failed to turn a profit, as would be the case, DIAND officials could simply discontinue their development funding.82

The alliance between fishers and experts could also be uneasy. At a Bras d’Or Institute conference in 1975, the tension was both aired and exemplified. Two hundred delegates attended, but just six were working fishers. Charles MacPhail of the Seal Island Marine Cooperative noted that, whereas the presence of officials and experts was underwritten by their employers, fishers who attended would lose a day’s pay and also would have to cover the conference fee. MDFC manager Peter Bernard believed that while the discussion was constructive, much of it went over the heads of fishers. Moreover, Bernard felt that the conference was being used to advertise DEVCO’s work and ignored the fact that Mi’kmaq “fathered the concept of oyster farming.” The conference resolved to improve communication between scientists and fishers.83

Bernard, a musician and bush pilot from We’koqma’q, went further in his attack on DEVCO in the wake of the production and profitability problems at Crane Cove. In the pages of Micmac News, he was aggrieved that, “not satisfied in dealing with small groups of non-Indians,” DEVCO had appropriated the Crane Cove project for promotional purposes. But Bernard predicted that any difficulties were bound to be blamed on Mi’kmaq and used as a pretext to make future funding conditional on the stewardship of experts. Bernard felt that DEVCO’s own undertakings had led to a utopian belief in oyster farming, the “exorbitant expenditures and subsequent financial failures of oyster associations,” and a farming method that, it turned out, “cannot and will not produce the choice oyster forecasted.” The upshot was Bernard’s belief that other MDFC cooperatives would keep their distance from “mass production and pro-establishment thought.” Smaller-scale oyster production would foreground the work of “naturally-made professionals” who knew the environments in which they lived.84

At one point, Noel Doucette insisted that Bras d’Or was big enough for everyone; this may have been wishful thinking. There were multiple conflicts over the use of the estuary. Mi’kmaq repeatedly warned that in the absence of treatment systems at three reserves, sewage seeping into the lake endangered oyster farming. Concerns were also voiced over the damage inflicted to the lake bed by fishing trawlers. Producers were equally alarmed when the province agreed to allow insecticide spraying in the major timber lease on the island, something that threatened to lead to chemically contaminated run-off. Oyster farmers joined a successful environmental campaign to block the spraying. DEVCO’s own efforts to turn Bras d’Or Lake into a tourist destination for pleasure boating, too, had the potential to disrupt aquaculture. DEVCO installed boat ramps, published a boating guide, and planned a marina. By the late 1970s, the greatest resistance to aquaculture came from urbanites who had relocated to the countryside and were upset that their lake sightlines were marked by buoys, rafts, and lines.85

Aquaculture created needed employment, but there were limitations. Oyster farming was not labour intensive, and the pattern of work was seasonal. In 1972, Crane Cove employed 390 people during the busy season. In 1974, MFDC employed forty people, and DEVCO generated fifty full-time and three hundred seasonal aquaculture jobs. Fisheries biologist Ken MacKay noted that while employment expectations had been high, experience showed that cutting down on labour costs was necessary to be “economical” relative to markets. He concluded that oyster farming was “not going to be a large industry.”86

DEVCO designs for a cooperative-based industry were also vexed. The dozen cooperatives ranged in size from about 125 members at Aspy Bay to as few as 4 elsewhere. The co-ops were formed several years before CMBF was really ready to involve local people in production. And since DEVCO provided capital and CMBF most of the labour, perhaps one hundred total cooperative members sustained their involvement. Following a period of attrition, the co-ops were dissolved about ten years after they had been created. Already by 1978, CBMF looked to convey young oysters to individuals rather than cooperatives.87 Aquaculture could not completely reinvigorate the economies of the reserves and rural communities along the lake, nor could it benefit all residents. Occupational pluralism remained essential to rural livelihoods.

The efforts to build an oyster farming industry on Bras d’Or Lake were considerable in the 1970s. But economic and ecological sustainability were elusive. The limited success should not have been curious given the early consensus that the prospects of aquaculture were uncertain and unknown. Consultants hired by DEVCO in 1972 even warned that oyster culture prototypes in Asia and Europe had been pursued only on a family farm basis.88 Nonetheless, the hope that commercial aquaculture was possible led to experiments on a significant scale. In time, scientific, environmental, and market limitations or accidents as well as conflicting interests adjusted expectations. The curtailed reality was perhaps less remarkable than the sense of disappointment and anger it generated for Peter Bernard and others. Marine farmers expended years of effort and pursued a collaboration with fisheries scientists as well as community and regional developers without realizing their anticipated designs.

Development invited dismay because it suggested future economic improvement, not immediate socio-economic equality. Far from transforming capitalist social relations and settler colonialism, development initiatives in Cape Breton acted within and often reproduced hierarchies of race, class, gender, and political power. Oyster farming turned to organizing an alternative fishery and merely reinserting Mi’kmaw and non-Indigenous residents into market processes, ostensibly on improved terms.

However, the aquaculture story does demonstrate a distinctive period of state-supported optimism in Cape Breton. Development programs sought to address urban, rural, and reserve poverty crises: community development, by increasing peoples’ capacity to better their local circumstances, and regional development, by generating industry and employment in an underdeveloped area. Developers believed that people had a right to a decent income and an improved ability to shape their own lives. They therefore set out to democratize liberal society with Cape Breton–specific action. Supported by those working for a Crown corporation, a few federal departments, and two public universities, oyster farming involved residents in an industry intended to lessen poverty in places bordering Bras d’Or Lake.

As the global economic stagnation of the 1970s lapsed into a pronounced early 1980s recession, state commitment to the idea of development thinned. Community and regional development were gradually abandoned as a means of addressing poverty and deepening liberal democracy. Development programs lingered, but they involved more deferential forms of business incentives and boosterism. Promoters updated their “culture of poverty” analyses to argue that the dependency of islanders was issued from an ingrained reliance on government programs. They more forcefully restated the idea that what individual Cape Bretoners lacked and what they really needed were entrepreneurship and innovation.89 Where development turned on “helping people help themselves” in the 1960s and 1970s, the consensus from the mid-1980s stressed incentivizing those with a bit of self-help aptitude to boost economic productivity through small-business endeavour.

In the 1980s, new leadership at DEVCO adopted a fiscally conservative and gradually neoliberal approach. They viewed CBMF as costly to maintain and also an instance of public sector intervention where private business initiative was preferred. In 1984, the corporation began to sell off and privatize its development assets, ending its direct involvement in aquaculture. DEVCO progressively withdrew from development activities entirely, supplanted by the tax incentives and small-business loans of the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency from 1987.90 DEVCO, or one of its succeeding agencies, later destroyed the corporation’s files, erasing a dozen years of CBMF aquaculture research.

Mi’kmaw oyster farming withered by 1980. And as repeated cuts undermined reserve social and economic programs, DIAND funding initiatives pushed Mi’kmaq, too, toward small-business promotion. DIAND touted community development corporations—an organizational form disavowing the bureaucratic direction of the welfare state and devolving business promotion to select local directors.91 From 1986, Ulnooweg Development Corporation tried to incubate Mi’kmaw entrepreneurialism through business training and loans, though one UNSI critic noted that since most Mi’kmaq received social assistance, they hardly had the equity needed to qualify for a loan. Alternatively, the Eskasoni Economic Development Corporation sought to entice investors into joint business ventures in the community.92

Oyster farming on Bras d’Or Lake was kept up by a few private operators, including former CBMF fisheries scientist Robin Stuart. As the price improved, something of revival took place in the 1990s, including in Eskasoni under the leadership of Charlie Dennis. Yet production was disrupted by the Multinucleate Sphere X (MSX) parasite in 2002 and Malpeque disease in 2007.93 Oyster farming remains a small-scale industry, still commercially and ecologically tenuous, and absent the hopes of the “great spawn” that development had inspired during the 1970s.