The words of Dr. Bernie Francis could have easily been looked over on this wintery Thursday night. The accomplished Mi’kmaw musician, storyteller, and translator spoke thoughtfully for an hour on language, land rights, Hunter’s Mountain, place names and more to a crowd expecting speakers to wax poetic about the virtues of our UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The town folks had gathered to recognize the 30th anniversary of Lunenburg being designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
During his talk, Dr. Francis stated clearly, “Get rid of it. Please.”
He wasn’t talking about the UNESCO designation, but about Cornwallis Street. Some folks might have mistook the ask as tongue-in-cheek, as Bernie cracked jokes with the audience all night. But we must address his ask seriously.
The discussions to rename Cornwallis Street in Lunenburg started in December 2022. I know government bureaucracy moves slowly but let’s be real. It is absurd that the street remains unchanged. Lunenburg, its council and its residents are not ready to discuss the true harm this process has caused.
That’s because this discussion is no longer about whether or not we should rename a street. It’s about why we don’t listen to Mi’kmaw voices. In fact, there are Indigenous voices across Turtle Island making the simple ask for place names and street names to be revisited. This is one of the MOST comfortable ways we can engage with reconciliation. We should oblige.
We didn’t need to spend three years, several thousands of dollars on surveys and consultants, and watch not one but two motions for Queen Street to replace Cornwallis, for this process to still not be completed. We need to ask more of our council so that never again does an Elder, who’s invited to our town, have to bear the responsibility of calling in our elected officials.
It’s easy. Get rid of it. Please.
Kwe Sal,
Thank you for covering Dr. Francis’s comments at the UNESCO gathering. To provide context for readers, I offered – as a Town Councillor – comments earlier in the evening: the Town is supporting a review of its designation as a National Historic Site by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (“HSMBC”) and Parks Canada to expand the designation to include the histories of the Mi’kmaw and Acadian cultures.
We expect that review to get underway, and community engagement with Parks Canada within the Town to be a strong component. I hope you and Barnacle readers will be able to join in.
Bernie is also currently a working member of the Indigenous Decade of Languages Working Group of the Canadian UNESCO Commission, a language consultant for the Grand Council, and a respected advocate and promoter of Mi’kmaw rights. What he had to say was important to hear from an Indigenous voice. That is ingrained in the process of reconciliation.
If folks look at Council’s “Motion Action List”, the renaming is current. It is my hope, and I’m not speaking for Council because I am only one member of that group, that Bernie will remain with us through this process and help us move forward as a community.
I feel it is important for folks who could not join us to know what Bernie also said (as covered by me in the Macdonald Notebook (12/13/25) as it is the place name that the Mi’kmaw have already given to the Town, but often misrepresented without an authentic and important Mi’kmaq voice to explain:
“Dr. Francis told the audience that if they took a close look at the signage outside the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, they would see that Lunenburg was known by Acadians as Merligueche, a Mi’kmaw name as per Father Pacifique, a missionary priest tasked by the French to interpret the Mi’kmaw language in the 1760s.
He then said that the letter ‘r’ disappeared from the Mi’kmaw language shortly after that time. Thus, any word that had an “r” in it assimilated into an “l”. Today, he said, it would be spelled ‘Malikewe’j” that means ‘place of the barrel’ because, he said, “my people made barrels for the fishing industry here”. He also noted that there is a special place in Cape Breton with the same name, which was also a “place where barrels were made by my people.”
The pronunciation of Malikewe’j is “ma-liga-whi-gsk.” A good lesson in pronunciation is in this Vimeo link.
We’lalin,
Alison Strachan
sorry … and here is the vimeo link https://vimeo.com/830597800