Jul 29, 20116 min read

Traveling the Seven Fires--Nova Scotia

Updated: Oct 4, 2023

Centuries ago, the Anishinaabe People left the shores of Nova Scotia on an exodus to discover a new home described in prophecy. A decade ago, my wife and I hopped on a jet plane and replicated this spiritual journey in a rental car with cheese and crackers in our Wal-Mart cooler. Okay, so our experience lacked any of the “epic” qualities of the original, but in trying to understand what it means to be “Minnesotan,” I needed to understand the journey that helped shape one of the unique cultures of my home state.

Even though experts have various answers for when the migration began, the Seven Fires Migration is a fascinating journey to “Seven Stopping Places” between the Atlantic and the edge of the Great Plains, so I hope to share my experiences as I look back on my own journey.

While the Seven Stopping Places are clearly described, the origin of the migration is not as specific. The prophecy alludes to the fact that the prophecies were given by eight different prophets, including the warning that if they didn’t leave, there would be dire consequences. Those who “left” became a new people, the Anishinaabe; those who “stayed” are known as the Mi’kmaq People, the “brothers” of the Anishinaabe who live in Nova Scotia.

Battling Bunyan

Just as the prophecy predicted, those that stayed behind endured countless horrors over the next few centuries. French, English, Scottish, American, and Canadian invaders ravaged the land and the people to such an extent that the indigenous Mi’Kmaq people barely survived. The terrain of Nova Scotia is rugged pine and hardened stone, and the Mi’kmaq who survived exhibited these same traits.

Driving from the airport in Bangor, Maine to the peninsula of Nova Scotia, there are few visible reminders of the Mi’Kmaq culture, but we were able to find one shining beacon in the darkness of history. Located near Truro, the Millbrook Cultural & Heritage Centre tells the story of the people from the days of the Seven Fires Prophecy to the present. For me, who had no elders to teach the old legends, I spent years on the internet and at the library trying to study the stories, so visiting this wonderful collection of history and art was worth the trip. It is a magnificent complex with an even more impressive greeter—Glooscap, a towering forty-foot statue holding a torch in similar fashion to Lady Liberty.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Glooscap legends, you might recognize some of the themes from the Hiawatha legends, Saturday morning cartoons, or even Sunday school. In many of the tales, Glooscap is a deity that comes to earth to act as a mediator and a teacher to the local people. Aside from his size, he is also known for his wisdom, which he imparts during his short visit to our world. In other versions of the story, he is a shape-shifting trickster, able to take the form of various animals in order to teach through humorous lessons. Cultures from all over the world have similar trickster stories, with common animal avatars such as the raven, rabbit (Trix), and (Wile E.) coyote hiding the teacher.

When the museum guide learned I was from Minnesota, he teased that Glooscap once battled Paul Bunyan, who ravaged the land with his ax. After ending Bunyan’s reign of terror, Glooscap returned from whence he’d come. “And no one has seen Paul Bunyan since.”

(Meeting Glooskap)

Et in Arcadia Ego

(tin foil hat time). At one time, the Canadian peninsula was known as A(r)cadia, a wild region in central Greece that was home to the faun Pan and a Dan Brown conspiracy theory involving the Templar Knights and the Priory of Sion (Tyrion Lannister voice: “and I know things”). Renaming it Nova Scotia, or New Scotland, should have been a lot less controversial if not for more Dan Brown-Da Vinci Code-Templar Knights—Priory of Sion goofiness. Not sure what I’m talking about with this one either? Well, you shouldn’t always believe what your read on the internet or watch on the History Channel…but apparently, there is a theory that a real dude by the name of Prince Henry Sinclair (potential Templar connections) sailed across the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus copyrighted anything and landed in Nova Scotia in the 1300s. Do we have any evidence? Or any evidence that a historian would trust? For a fiction writer, I did roll up my sleeves as we drove around Nova Scotia since there is a Prince Henry Sinclair monument in Nova Scotia that proudly claims to be the sight where our towering Scot crossed the Atlantic while strapped to whales to teach the local—

Stop the presses!

Yes, the Sinclair tale insinuates that the original of Glooscap is none other than Prince Henry Sinclair, who sailed across the Atlantic, set up a colony, but failed to return as promised. Talk about Ego! While there is a bunch of speculative connections, the most interesting tidbit is that the Mi’Kmaq flag is the same as an inverted flag used by the Sinclair family in Scotland. I’m not sure if this “chicken or the egg” fact settles the issue, but pondering such tales made for good daydreaming as I ignored the posted dangerous moose crossing areas along the highway, cuz…moose aren’t real, are they?

(The Sinclair connection)

(Beware the Majestic Moose! (A Moose once bit my sister... No really!!))

The Curse of Oak Island

(more tinfoil required)

My travel-agent wife really outdid herself this time. First of all, she let me go on this mega-road trip. Second of all, she booked us a really cool hotel called the Atlantica, which overlooked Mahone Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. And for the hat trick…she got us signed up for the coveted annual tour of Oak Island. A few years before “The Curse of Oak Island” debuted, we got one of the #tvshowguys to give us a personal tour. So with “local guide” Charles Barkhouse, we were escorted around all the cool sites of Oak Island.

If you’re not familiar with Oak Island, buckle up. Apparently, it is a centuries old booby-trapped treasure vault built by mysterious builders to house a mysterious treasure. Seriously! Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to get to the bottom of this legend. So what’s in the vault? Oh boy, it depends on who you ask. The Holy Grail? A Templar Treasure? The Ark of the Covenant? The Crown Jewels? Shakespeare stuff? Captain Kidd’s loot? All of the above? Or none of the above?

Now, I pretty much drank my milkshake dry before even going to Oak Island back in 2011. Before our visit, I’d pretty much decided that if any puppet masters ever had used the island as a vault, they’d emptied it long before folks started poking around. Even so, it was still pretty cool being able to see firsthand all the things I’d read about in my dive down the rabbit hole. We got to see a museum with all the relics and items collected over the past century, visit the actual money pit, tour the false beach, walk among the oaks, and stand beside some of the Templar/Gnostic markings. Even then, I shrugged it all off thinking, “the vault is empty.” For ten seasons, the show has strengthened the notion that a vault did in fact exist, but it saddens me to see how the island has been absolutely trashed in the process. We got a tour before the bright spotlight was cast upon it.

The tour did give me a feel for how difficult it would’ve been for any returning ships to find a treasure vault, so the concept of the oak trees being planted did make a lot of sense. Along with the complexity of the Money Pit, it also gave me a sense of how technologically challenging it would have been for anything to be dug in the first place, which required a theory to develop that featured either the skills of the masons (not Charles, but old school masons) or some sort of mystical technology.

Having already stumbled across alchemy references back in Minnesota, the concept of the Philosopher’s Stone certainly could have been employed to open a chasm of solid stone, but in connecting all of the Templar lore, which led back to Jerusalem and King Solomon, I pictured my refugees with some stolen knowledge (like the Shamir) to do an “open sesame” magic trick like Aladdin to create and close the vault. Was it made by Prince Henry Sinclair? Could he have used some Templar trick to hide the stolen treasure. Heck, why not? If Henry Sinclair really did create a treasure vault on Oak Island in 1398…then what? Unlike the crew on the History Channel, I don’t think it would’ve been forgotten, and the 1799 and 1802 accounts were spurred on by the emptying of the vault by its puppet-master creators. Two centuries later, folks are scratching away at an empty vault.

So for historical value, conspiracy theories, and beautiful scenery, Nova Scotia was a great start to the Seven Fires Migration. If the Anishinaabe tale is to be believed, it also meant that scouts had to begin wandering from the Atlantic in search of megis shells and an island. Several hundred miles away, Montreal is built upon an island that looks like…a megis shell. How long did it take the Anishinaabe to find Montreal and move the entire nation west? Not sure. For Julie and I, it only took us a day to travel to Stopping Place #1.