Steered by an entrepreneurial chief, Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia led the largest investment by Indigenous people in Canada’s seafood industry.
The trip through Cape Breton Island, on the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, promised scenic driving views. The island regularly appears in travel guides for the world’s best road trips, an agent at the airport’s car rental counter told me in September after I landed in Halifax.
I didn’t get to take in much of the landscape on my rainy overnight drive to Cape Breton from the other end of the province, where I had been reporting on a forthcoming story related to lobster fishing. Over the course of my interviews, several people suggested that I visit an Indigenous community on Cape Breton Island called Membertou First Nation.
Its entrepreneurial chief, Terry Paul, led a coalition of First Nation groups to make the largest-ever investment by Indigenous people in Canada’s seafood industry in 2021. The coalition acquired 50 percent of Clearwater Seafoods, a company in Nova Scotia, in a deal valued at 1 billion Canadian dollars. In September, Membertou partnered with another First Nation and made a deal to acquire one of the oldest shipyards in Canada.
Membertou is buying back land to expand the boundaries of the community, once a place where pizza delivery drivers and taxis wouldn’t venture to cross. Graduation rates have climbed. Mi’kmaq language revival projects are underway. Young people are staying.
After seven hours on the road, I didn’t quite notice my arrival onto the reserve grounds until a large red sign outside a convention center emerged through the fog: “Membertou: Welcoming the World.”
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