The Old Man Told Us (New Edition) by Ruth Holmes Whitehead

The Mi’kmaq people have been living in what is now Atlantic Canada for two thousand years or more, yet written history has largely ignored them, presenting them merely as a homogeneous mass or as statistics. Renowned Micmac specialist Ruth Holmes Whitehead, formerly staff ethnologist and assistant curator in history at the Nova Scotia Museum, tries to redress that omission by restoring to the collective memory a true sense of the Mi’kmaq. In this rich collection, oral and written, Mi’kmaq accounts juxtapose contemporary European perceptions of native peoples, as documented in letters, journals, court cases, and much more. Above all, The Old Man Told Us is a historical jigsaw puzzle, a display of fragments of broken mirror in which one can capture moments in the lives of particular people. It is a book of excerpts from whatever scattered documentation has survived over the centuries.