And that’s how things stood until another man arrived in town one day by the name of Moses Coady. He too was a priest but instead of cozying up to the company he went straight to the people, holding kitchen meetings and putting a new concept before them: they could gain control over their lives, he explained, if they formed a cooperative. In short, the buying and selling of fish, the cost of fishing supplies – even the price of groceries – would be set by this cooperative that would be owned by the community.
For a village that had been socially and economically dominated since its birth, this was a difficult notion to grasp. How would this actually take place? Was the whole concept even legal? But the person proposing this was a priest – white collar and all – so there had to be something to it. It was this that my mother and her neighbour were discussing one morning as the three of us made the 45 minute walk on a dirt road on our way to the Robin Jones & Whitman grocery store. I was only six at the time, kicking stones on the road to relieve my boredom but tuning in to the conversation and trying to get my head around the possibility that the kind of store we were headed for might somehow belong to “us”.
But perhaps an even better example is the large black & white photograph pinned to the wall in the produce section inside the coop. It shows a packed community hall, taken back in the 40s, of people determined to do something to better their lives. It is this photograph that I long to see on my yearly visits back home. I gaze at the photograph over and over, going over every face that I can (several in the front row were my neighbours) and marvel at their resolve at the time to come together and say, enough is enough!
It is this resolve we seem to have lost. And as I reach my ripe old age and grudgingly try to make peace with it, it is this lack of people coming together to fight back that I find the hardest to accept. Yes, they’re fighting back all over the world – even giving up their lives for it. But here in Canada we re-elect a government that represents the wealthy versus the poor, the few versus the many, and then goes out of its way to frustrate the attempts of ordinary people and their organizations to create a better world. Instead of fighting this government tooth and nail we encourage it by giving it a majority.
So, much in the way I would take a shot of cortisone for my aching shoulders, I look forward to returning home to see that large photograph again at the “la Co-op” as it’s called in Cheticamp. To return to a time when fighting for human decency and human dignity was important enough for people to come together, talk it over and say, Yes, enough is enough!
Bert Deveaux
