The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1959, Blaðsíða 26

24
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1959

by CAROLINE GUNNARSSON
A visitor sees Nova Scotia as an aristo-
crat basking in the afterglow of history
as old as the nation.
CAROLINE GUNNARSSON
But to the native Nova Scotian
early Canadian history is a living mem-
ory, flowing from generation to gen-
eration like the blood in their vein?
Sometimes the past comes at them out
of the soil at their feet and there can
be no feeling of life beginning with
each new generation.
In the Annapolis Valley families
have farmed the same land for un-
broken generations since they took
over from -the Acadians, and have in-
herited the stories of their plight with
the dykes and apple orchards which
were to become the foundation of a
way of life for the new settlers.
Every summer, too, pilgrims from
Louisiana come to Grand Pre to lay
sentimental claim to the land of Evan-
geline. Descendants of the Acadians,
they’re born with a ready answer for
sophisticates who dismiss their heroine
as -a romantic figment of Longfellow’s
imagination. There wasn’t ju-st one
pair of Acadian lovers separated by
their cruel expulsion from the land
they’d tilled and toiled for. There
were many. They’d heard the stories
from their parents, who heard them
from their parents, right back to the
generation who had lived out the or-
deal.
They pause beside Evangeline’s Well
in the little park dedicated to her mem-
ory and gaze at her statue -with its two
symbolic profiles. On one side the face
is that of eager, hopeful youth. On the
other it is deeply etched with weary
age and the disillusionment of -a life
spent in fruitless search for a -lost lover.
The pilgrims worship in the chapel,
and sometimes their reminiscing en-
riches local lore with bits of the valley’s
early history.
They’re telling their children’s child-
ren the stories they’ve heard from their
grandparnts, stories of ancestors herd-
ed into their own church to hear the
fateful British proclamation ordering
them to swear allegiance to the British
crown or be gone from their homes in
the valley.