Jajiktek: A trail from the past to the present

April 15, 2025

_{Two hikers descend one of the many steep and rugged valleys that are characteristic of the future Jajijtek-Seawall Trail.}

The idea of a trail had already been around for decades when it was identified and championed by the board of the then-named Northern Cape Breton Development Society, chaired by Ray Fraser. The trail will be open year-round and stretch nearly 50 kilometres from Pleasant Bay to Meat Cove, winding along clifftops and shorelines, down into valleys and up mountains for a multi-day, multi- hut hiking experience. It’s this varied terrain that gives the path its Mi’kmaw name. Jajiktek has a very specific meaning: crouching down and standing up as you move along a difficult route close to water.

Years ago, Ray Fraser was fishing off the northwest coast of Cape Breton when he looked up and saw the spectacular coastline sprawling north and south in front of him and saw what was possible. “From the ocean, you can see the landscape changing meter to meter and from every angle. You can see where everybody walked, the hunters, the fishers, the scouts, the settlers. It was just so obvious from that vantage point. I said to myself, ‘What a great place for a trail.’”

Ray felt that the key to success lay in making sure that all of the many communities on this part of the island were involved. He joined an earlier incarnation of the trail committee and members began contacting every stakeholder available. There were landowners, hunters and hikers, whale-watching guides, fishers and more to be consulted. A key individual in this process was David Williams who started out by emailing the Northern Cape Breton Development Society about trails in the wilderness area, and went on to be both vice president of the Seawall Trail Society and the driving force behind securing funding for the trail.

“This kind of project only requires three public consultations,” says Ray. “We did 15. But even meetings aren’t enough. When you have meetings you end up talking to community leaders. That’s good but it’s not truly grassroots. You’ve got to talk to the people who make the least money. You’ve got to talk about it with people at the wharf, at the gas station, in the grocery store parking lot.”

Importantly, Ray wanted to make sure that the Mi’kmaw community was involved. With that in mind, he got in touch with a Mi’kmaw tourism organization called NSITEN headed up by Robert Bernard.

N’SI’TE’N (pronounced “en-seh-dehn”) is a Mi’kmaw command to ‘understand.’ It also doubles as an acronym for Nova Scotia Indigenous Tourism Enterprise Network. The name came to Robert in a dream-vision. In the dream, he was a giant sitting on top of a mountain above Chéticamp. Far below he saw a festival with crowds dressed in costumes like they do for Mi-Carême. He catapulted from the mountaintop down to the party, shrank to normal size, and entered a building packed with revelers. A couple dressed in stereotypical “Indian” costumes with feathered headdresses walked by him whooping offensively like they were extras in an old-fashioned western. He asked himself, “what the heck is going on here?”

Suddenly the floor parted and a chasm opened up at his feet. Across from him, Robert saw an elderly woman. She flew over the chasm and grabbed him by the collar and said, “Look around, do you see and hear them? They’ve forgotten who we are. You must change this.” Nestimn? Do you understand? N’si’te’n – “understand”.

As he was waking from his dream, Robert heard the word ‘n’si’ten’ echoing in his mind and knew he had the name for the new Mi’kmaw tourism organization he was helping to get off the ground. As his vision implies, for NSITEN, indigenous tourism is, first and foremost, a tool for education rather than a means of profit. It’s with this in mind that Robert has led Mi’kmaw engagement with the Jajiktek Seawall Trail project. Among other things, he helped organize an Advisory Group of Mi’kmaw Elders to engage with every aspect of the trail’s development. It was they who gave the trail its Mi’kmaw name.

Led by the Municipality of Inverness County in collaboration with the Jajiktek Seawall Trail Steering Committee, the trail will be hand-built and provide a total of just 20 bunks at three hut sites to minimize environmental damage. There will be no tenting. The trail snakes around sensitive ecological areas, hunting grounds, as well as land belonging to property owners who chose not to be a part of the project. Archaeologists are at work

examining key sites along the proposed route. They seek insight into the historical significance of the area. That knowledge will help ensure that the trail doesn’t pass through culturally significant ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaw people – or that if it does, it will be with the participation of Mi’kmaw leaders, and that cultural significance will be honoured and highlighted.

The Seawall Trail Society was recently honoured with an Allyship Award from the NSITEN organization. As the name NSITEN suggests, for Robert allyship means that people and organizations make a genuine effort to listen and understand the perspective of the Mi’kmaw.

“We’ve been shunned long enough,” Robert says. “We’ve been excluded long enough. Many people want reconciliation, but you need truth before you can have reconciliation. And a lot of people are scared of the truth. Here’s a truth: that trail has been traveled for thousands of years. Old maps show the entire northwest portion of Cape Breton as Mi’kmaq hunting grounds and on those maps, every part of the island is labeled with a Mi’kmaw name. Where are those names now? They were wiped off the map. How and why that happened is part of the truth that we all need to acknowledge. The Jajiktek Seawall Trail project is part of the reconciliation of that truth because people like Ray Fraser understand, they get it, and they’re working hard to make sure that it’s heard and understood by others.”

For Ray Fraser, allyship is simple: “As far as I’m concerned, it means being a decent human being. It means taking time to listen, really listen, to what everybody has to say. It means going a little further, it means meaningful engagement, not just consultation.”

Time is the element that both Robert and Ray emphasize the most. Contemporary bureaucracy prioritizes schedules, timetables, and deadlines but listening to everyone takes patience, and projects like this can’t be rushed.

“When NSITEN has meetings,” says Robert, “we don’t have a schedule, we don’t have start times and end times detailed to the minute. We have topics and when we’ve finished talking about one topic, we move on to the next.”

According to Robert, decolonization isn’t just about place names. It’s also about rethinking our relationship to time and money. And reconciliation can’t just be about ticking a box to get funding. It has to be about understanding and seeing things from a Two-Eyed perspective. This means seeing through a western colonial lens but also through a holistic Indigenous lens and having true respect for each. We need to keep a strong focus on protecting the land and the resources, he says, while respecting our collective cultures and voices.

Robert passionately believes that it’s time for the Mi’kmaw voices to be heard again on their ancestral lands as it was for so many thousands of years. This is the way to true reconciliation.

“We are still here, we haven’t gone away and we are ready to work with everyone so we can build a better future together for all.”

“This project has been a really good journey,” says Robert, “the committee has set a standard. We just have to be careful that as more departments get involved, the work of decolonization doesn’t get diluted. The Jajiktek Seawall Trail isn’t just a hike from Pleasant Bay to Meat Cove, it’s a trail from the past to the present.”