For as long as I've known my husband Tim, the ship Hector, a 26-metre three-masted brig, has been part of his family lore. Some call it the Canadian Mayflower. Its harrowing eleven-week voyage from Ullapool, Scotland, delivered some 189 souls to the shores of Nova Scotia’s Pictou Harbour in September 1773, just over 250 years ago. Eighteen children on board were buried at sea. When they finally landed, it was too late for the growing season, with none of the promised accommodations, and only limited provisions. If not for the Mi’kmaq, those colonists who made it would have perished that first winter too. 

Tim’s direct ancestors were on that 1773 voyage, and while his siblings have dug into his family’s part in this beginning of New Scotland, Tim and I had a different family-roots pilgrimage in mind. Maybe it’s the moment we’re in as a country, maybe it’s that the impacts of colonization have finally become part of mainstream knowledge, or maybe it’s this one stark fact: Tim would not be here if not for the Mi’kmaq. As recent celebrations mark the quarter millennium of these Scottish colonists’ arrival, we found ourselves drawn to a very different guiding question for our journey: Is there is a part of Nova Scotia where we can imagine this Mi’kmaw homeland the moment before the colonists arrived, before everything changed? 

This episode reveals the surprising answers that we found.