In Canada, too, people remember a feast with settlers and Indigenous people

Paul Lalonde adjusts his glossy beaver felt hat and welcomes the visitors gathered around a long table to his Order of Good Cheer.

The year, he explains, is 1606, and winter is coming to the banks of the Bay of Fundy. He and his French compatriots barely survived their first winter, unprepared for the harsh conditions that blast through these parts of Canada. They only survived here, in present-day Nova Scotia, with the aid of the Mi’kmaq, the Indigenous people of the area.

That’s why the colonists and Mi’kmaq, he says to the guests watching him bring this history alive, are seated around this table set with pewter plates and cups, about to dig in to a hearty moose muffle stew or perhaps beaver tails seared over a burning hearth.

Mr. Lalonde is an interpretive officer for Parks Canada, and part of his job is to reenact, or “interpret,” events that happened at the Habitation at Port-Royal, a full-scale replica of one of the first European settlements in North America four centuries ago.

Today, in his wood-buttoned black wool doublet, he’s playing the part of a 17th-century French colonist and member of L’Ordre de Bon Temps (the French name), an eating and entertainment club established with a royal charter, like similar orders in France. These rotating feasts are also considered an early Thanksgiving – a holiday most Canadians today experience more as a harvest festival in early fall, but that some historians also trace to the meals in Port-Royal’s common room.

The story shares similarities with the American narrative of Plymouth Rock. The Mi’kmaq, who had lived here for thousands of years, brought the sick and starving colonists both food and their ways of healing.

“We’ve always operated with the understanding that everybody in the world is in relation with one another, whether we admit it or not, and our job is to make those relations good,” says Mercedes Peters, Sharing Our Stories coordinator of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia.

But there the similarities mostly end. In the United States, the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock is part of America’s founding lore, a moment that commemorates the birth of a people. In Canada, the holiday is not wrapped up in the colonial narrative, nor is it as fraught with controversy over the reality of colonialist violence against Indigenous people.

The story of Port-Royal’s L’Ordre de Bon Temps, one of Canada’s early Thanksgivings, recalls a moment in history when French colonists and Mi’kmaq chiefs shared a relationship based on respect and reciprocity. That distinct relationship would evolve over time with the descendants of those first French colonists, a people who would come to be called Acadians.

Mr. Lalonde, an Acadian, looks across the Habitation’s common room at his guests here today. “Who do you invite to sit at your table? You invite your friends. You invite the people you trust.”

Shared traditions: Indigenous peoples express gratitude for the harvest

A half hour drive from the Habitation sits the Mi’kmaw community of Bear River First Nation, which is called L’sitkuk in the Mi’kmaw language. Each October, L’sitkuk, at the edge of the fertile Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia’s breadbasket, holds an annual Harvesters’ Gathering, just as their people have for thousands of years.

This year the annual celebration began the day after Canada’s official Thanksgiving Day, which is designated as the second Monday of October.

But the Harvesters’ Gathering is not a date on a calendar, says Gerald Gloade, a Mi’kmaw elder and educator at the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre.

Instead, it’s the time of year when the tides in the Bay of Fundy, which has the largest tidal range in the world, are at their peak. It is the time of year when hunted game are large and healthy, and at their nutritional peak.

“Our fish stocks are at a premium,” Mr. Gloade says. “The bass are in; the salmon are back, and the sea-run trout.”

At this time of year, the Mi’kmaq always listen for the singing of grasshoppers and crickets to stop, he says. It’s a sign of the end of humidity and an indicator to start drying fish for the winter.

“Everything is based on pattern recognition and our connection to the environment,” Mr. Gloade says. “So that’s part of our traditional and ecological knowledge based on where the planet is. That’s when we celebrate. It’s not a specific date.”

This Harvesters’ Gathering starts with a sunrise ceremony and the lighting of a sacred fire, which will burn continuously for four days. Over that time, community members give thanks to the land. They also honor those who hunt, fish, and gather throughout the year.

Community members roast traditional foods like moose, deer, and salmon. They also serve turkey and luski, a Mi’kmaw bread, and boil corn and lobster. At this year’s gathering, participants were taught how to use the atlatl, a spear-throwing hunting tool that predates the bow and arrow.

The Mi’kmaq recognize modern Thanksgiving too, as do Indigenous peoples across Canada. But it’s at the Harvesters’ Gathering where they express gratitude.

“It’s about enjoying the year’s bounty,” says Carol Ann Potter, a councilor at Bear River First Nation. “It’s to truly give thanks to land, to mother earth, and to harvesters.”

For L’sitkuk and other Mi’kmaw communities, the Harvesters’ Gathering is a celebration of a way of life based on Tpi’tnewey, a concept that expresses their values of giving, especially during the harvest.

“Tpi’tnewey is when people generously give away what they have hunted, gathered or made, honouring the intention of doing good things for others,” one poster at the cultural center explains.

With an understanding of the interconnection of all peoples and their value of Tpi’tnewey, the Mi’kmaq gave generously to the first French colonists in Nova Scotia as they struggled to survive.

When the first feast put on by The Order of Good Cheer was organized at Port-Royal in 1606, the Mi’kmaq would have just concluded their own seasonal gathering to mark the harvest.

The famous French explorer Samuel de Champlain was one of the founders of the settlement at Port-Royal. (He would later settle Quebec City in 1608.) He believed the colonists’ survival depended not only on access to food, but also on “good cheer,” which he was confident would help stave off scurvy and give colonists the fortitude to endure the winter.

So he obtained a royal charter to found The Order of Good Cheer for the “gentlemen” of the colony, which came with a coat of arms. Its first recorded feast was Nov. 14, 1606.

At each gathering, one member was appointed chief steward. Wearing a special collar around his neck and the order’s medallion, the chief steward would march in with serving plates he filled with mallard and partridge, moose, caribou, beaver, otter, even wildcat – whatever might outdo the previous week’s host.

The order’s practices were set down by the first chief steward, Marc Lescarbot, a lawyer and poet in the colony at Port-Royal. According to his book “Histoire de la Nouvelle-France,” or “History of New France,” the meals served here rivaled the offerings on the Rue aux Ours, a Paris street known for its rotisseries.

At that first feast, Lescarbot also composed and directed the first European play performed in North America, “Théâtre de Neptune,” an ode to the promise of New France in a new world.

But what set this eating club apart from the chartered establishments in Europe was the presence of Mi’kmaq as guests.

As Lescarbot explains, “As for Sagamos [Grand Chief] Membertou, and other chiefs, who came from time to time, they sat at table, eating and drinking like ourselves,” he wrote. “And we were glad to see them, while, on the contrary, their absence saddened us.”

The first feast at The Order of Good Cheer is described by Canada’s National History Society as an early first Thanksgiving. But the story goes well beyond an account of colonists’ friendly encounters with local peoples who provided food and helped colonists survive, says Andrew MacLean, a writer and podcaster who recalls the history of Atlantic Canada.

The Order of Good Cheer “explicitly flipped the old world order on its head,” he writes in his book, “Backyard History,” a compilation of the columns he has published about the history of the region. “All were treated as equals. Men, women, children, Catholics, Protestants, Mi’kmaq people, white people, and black people.”

“There was definitely a business side to things,” says Mr. MacLean in an interview. “There’s a mutual benefit rather than just one side being nice for the sake of it.”

The two groups were bonded by pragmatics. The French traded metal tools, fabric, blue dye, and weapons. The Mi’kmaq taught the colonists their nutritional and medicinal know-how that essentially kept them alive.

Indeed, it was not the “good cheer” of the eating club, but likely the vitamin C in the Mi’kmaw recipe for pine needle tea that helped colonists survive, says Ms. Peters at the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre.

“There is a friendship there, in the beginning,” she says. “But when I hear people looking at Eurocentric points of view and how things are presented as French people and Mi’kmaq, or European settlers and Indigenous folks getting along – this isn’t just ‘Everything was hunky-dory,’ because it wasn’t. It was difficult and it was hard.” Simplistic and rosy narratives ultimately serve only to reinforce the mythology of colonization.

And it should never be forgotten, she adds, that Mi’kmaw perspectives went unrecorded.

French settlers and Indigenous peoples: Thanksgiving’s darker histories

After a century of blood-soaked wars between France and Britain in North America, in 1755 the British began to forcibly remove Acadians, who had already evolved with their own dialects and cultural traditions, from the region. Acadians remember the expulsion as Le Grand Dérangement, or The Great Disturbance.

Over 11,000 of an estimated 14,000 Acadian inhabitants were forcibly removed and scattered throughout the 13 Colonies and Europe. Thousands died en route.

(Descendants of these expelled French settlers also include Louisiana’s Cajun people, whose name is derived from an evolved and quickly spoken version of “Acadian.”)

The Mi’kmaq, who suffered the same grievances as Indigenous peoples across Canada as victims of colonial land grabs, forced assimilation, and residential schooling, assisted Acadians during the Le Grand Dérangement.

And while the relationship has faltered since colonization, Mi’kmaw leaders acknowledge the close relationship they once had with Acadian settlers.

“We had similar ideals,” says Tim Bernard, executive director of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre. “The French weren’t coming here and saying, ‘Move out, we’re moving in.’

“The Mi’kmaq and the French had a better relationship because of the reciprocity that the French showed to the nation,” Mr. Bernard continues. “And that’s part of what the culture has been built around. The British didn’t have that. The British said, ‘We’re going to conquer you.’”

Acadian people still recognize how crucial the Mi’kmaq were to their very existence. “The Acadians owe much to the Mi’kmaq, since the beginning,” says André-Carl Vachon, a prizewinning historian who has written 11 books on Acadian history. “Many recognized this, and recognize it even today.”

The two peoples exchanged ideas and intermingled. Mr. Vachon cites the words of Champlain in 1633 to underline French attitudes toward the Mi’kmaq: “Nos garçons se marieront avec vos filles et nous ne serons plus qu’un peuple.” [“Our boys will marry your daughters and we will be one people.”]

In a key moment that brought the two groups closer, Grand Chief Membertou converted to Catholicism in 1610, receiving the baptismal name Henri in honor of the French king.

When Robert McEwan, a member of the Bear River First Nation council, thinks about how the British burned down the Habitation, he gets unsettled. But it’s not the way a Native American might feel unsettled about Plymouth Rock.

His mother worked at the Port-Royal replica for 25 years. He worked special events and then took over for his mother for two years before being elected as a councilor in 2021.

A craftsman who builds boxes with porcupine quills and traditional games made with carved wooden pieces, Mr. McEwan has also taught traditional techniques inside a tipi on the site. He says he has made visitors cry telling them the story of Indigenous dispossession over the centuries.

His own tenure at the Habitation at Port-Royal included building a traditional community drum. He’d sing so loud – “loud and proud,” Mr. McEwan says – that he swears the music could be heard across the bay.

But the story of The Order of Good Cheer is not a story that is central to his own narrative or identity – or to any of the Mi’kmaq interviewed for this piece.

Still, Mr. Bernard recognizes that moment when his people sat across the table from the first French colonists. He comes to the same conclusion that the Acadian interpretive officer Mr. Lalonde does about the feasts once put on in the dining hall of the Habitation at Port-Royal:

“I think it’s safe to say that everybody felt safe around that table,” Mr. Bernard says.