The Mi'kmaq people could not have known that their way of keeping history would hurt future generations of their people. They did not know they would need written proof for land claims. Their oral history was the only kind of history in Atlantic Canada before Europeans arrived.

The official version of history says the only native people who might have made a claim for land are the Beothuk. Mi'kmaq people are just immigrants, like the Irish and the English. They are asking for special status they don't deserve.⁸

What is this claim about the Mi'kmaq people really based on? Explorers and adventurers wrote accounts about what they saw. Government officials wrote reports. Settlers and priests wrote letters to relatives and friends. Newspapers published stories on current events. Historians take all of these "facts." They put together the parts that seem interesting or true to them. And they come up with what we call history.

So our written history is also a series of stories, conversations and guesses. If people in the past were as human as people today, then their stories—like ours—are coloured by their own likes, dislikes, fears and, in some cases, mischief. Their stories and reports are limited by what they saw, heard and were told.

But if all history is a series of stories, conversations and guesses, how do we know what really happened in the past? The short answer is we don't. What we do get are different versions of events from the view of the people who first wrote or told about the events. We also get the versions which historians choose to tell us. Perhaps the same "grain of salt" we use when listening to gossip about our neighbors should be used when reading history books. The history of the Mi'kmaq people of Newfoundland is no exception. Somewhere between the accounts written by the Europeans who met them, and their own traditional stories, lies the secret history of their past. And of ours.