Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park par Ronald Rudin (review)

The creation of Kouchibouguac National Park in Kent County, New Brunswick, in the 1970s led to the removal of 1,200 local residents, the largest such dislocation in the history of Canada's national parks. The story gained national attention in large part because of resident Jackie Vautour's high-profile and militant refusal to vacate his land, where he remains to this day.

In this well-written and well-researched study, Ronald Rudin explores why and how the relocation took place, how some residents resisted removal, and how people have interpreted and remembered the story over time. In doing so, he makes two main arguments. First, the best way to explain the state's management of park development and its relocation of residents is in terms of what anthropologist James C. Scott has described as "high modernism." Believing in state planning and accepting modernist assumptions about what constituted the "good life," government officials were unable to see or account for local subsistence strategies and dismissed the value of community structures and local knowledge. The resulting plan for relocation and rehabilitation ignored community input and led, in some cases, to considerable local resistance. Second, Rudin shows how Vautour and a new generation of Acadian activists and artists transformed the Kouchibouguac story from one of poor people forced off their lands to one of Acadian resistance to a "second deportation." By looking closely at the residents and their stories, he shows a more complex reality. Not only were there many anglophones among the expropriates but most residents relocated peacefully, though reluctantly. The first part of Kouchibouguac examines the origin of the park and the implementation of the relocation process. Louis Robichaud, Liberal premier during the period 1960-70 hailed from Kent County and played a key role in convincing Ottawa to build the park in what was widely viewed as a poor region. Planners arbitrarily established park boundaries, ignoring the people who lived there and the resources they used. Adapting the Yellowstone model of park creation, which held that true wilderness was devoid of human presence, the planners insisted on relocating residents and prohibiting commercial use of resources. Relocation also allowed state planners to embark on a short-lived high-modernist social-engineering project to "rehabilitate" the expropriates. Informed by a series of "expert" studies that found "social disintegration" and poverty in local communities, they sent home economists and used social-animation techniques to convince residents to embrace modernity and relocation.

Rudin then explores two examples of resistance and reshaping of state plans through existing community organizations (which experts had dismissed as ineffective) and a state-funded Regional Development Committee that morphed from a vehicle to promote modernization and relocation into a forceful and effective voice for the residents. The first example is the occupation and barricading of park offices, which led to better compensation packages for full- and part-time fishers and, in some cases, continuing access to the resource. The second is Vantour's high-profile campaign to remain on his land. After his house was bulldozed in 1976, Vautour came to symbolize the plight of all expropriates, transforming relocation into Acadian resistance. Rudin portrays Vautour as a complex figure, variously a hero, a victim, a calculating and sophisticated manipulator, and a bully. Equally complex is the response of other residents, some of whom embraced Vautour's militancy while others were clearly uncomfortable with it. Particularly fascinating is the book's final part explores how the artistic portrayal of Kouchibouguac has evolved over time. Except for the eponymous National Film Board production of 1978 that, due to "Québcois imperialism" within the film board, portrayed the relocation story largely in linguistic terms, early plays, poems, books, and songs situated the story in the Acadian-deportation narrative and celebrated a new spirit of Acadian resistance exemplified by Vautour. The relocation—and Vautour's story in particular—thus became part of the Acadian renaissance of this period. More recently, however...