LCT JOURNAL 2020
Race in St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia Eva Wissting
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hat can a church’s list of baptisms tell us about the society of a Nova Scotian town two hundred years ago? It might seem like an impossible task to draw much information about the people and their lives from a long list of names and dates when there is no cohesive narrative on the pages. However, text can work in astonishing ways, even in scantiness––and not just through the words placed on the pages, but also through what has been left out. The list of baptisms from St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, from the emergence of the church in the mid-1700s up until 1869, may have been created with a different intention, but today we can read in them signs of inequality and discrimination. A combination of notes included in the list with names and other details that are omitted show us that even though people of different races were included in the congregation, those deviating from the white European norm were underprivileged, and their identities were suppressed. While a great majority of the names on the list of baptisms in St John’s church signal European descent, there are a few instances that tell us that there were people with other backgrounds in this congregation. Family names like Heckman and Wentzel, Moreau and La Grace, Richards and Bailey (1-2) suggest that these families stemmed from Germany, France and England. A few names, however, are accompanied by the note “Mi’kmaq” and the letter “(I).” On this list of approximately 6,000 names, there are eight baptized children on the list that, along with their parents, are identified as Mi’kmaq––all between April and December of 1764 (14). Interestingly, they are all identified with names that sound European, such as Margaret, Marianne, Peter and Paul––and even more interesting is that within this limited group of people (24 individuals), several names appear multiple times. For example, there are three each of Margarets, Mariannes and Peters and as many as five Pauls. This odd limited name variation, in combination with the lack of any traditional Mi’kmaq names, may suggest that these names either were used specifically when interacting with Europeans, or that it might even be the church that chose to use these names––possibly because that seemed more practical to the settlers, or more Christian––rather than that these names were an identifying choice of the people themselves. Apart from the eight baptisms of Mi’kmaq people in 1764, there is no other information in the list that shows any presence of Indigenous Peoples
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