Welcome to a magical island where the sea embraces the land and the sky; where people espouse the past the present and the future, with one foot on the sand of reality the other into the salty foam of serenity and their head into the breeze of imagination.

According to most scholars, John Cabot would have landed on our very own beach in June of 1497 even if some of our good neighbours across the Cabot Strait, in Newfoundland, disagree. It is well known nowadays that he and his crew were not the first Europeans to have visited our lands. The Vickings had sailed the northen coast of our big sister island and probably also the coast of Labrador.

What wonderful natural resources these sailors must have encounter. This little corner of North America was once covered with majestic red oaks and beeches, sugar maple and yellow birch trees. Brooks and rivers would have run all year round with pure, cold and cristalline water populated with trouts and salmons.

The ocean was so plentiful with fish that about one hundred years later, Jacques Cartier reported that his crew could cath cod by the bucketful simply by throwing them overboard. Whales and dolphins, sharks and sea turtles are still swimming in our waters although their population is declining dangerously.

There is rarely a day in summer when we don't see an eagle or two, owls and blue herons can be seen and loons heard between ponds and lakes. To have a look at one, two or three moose in winter is the easiest thing to do also.

For thousands of years our native brothers and sisters have lived in this region taking merely what they needed for survival with respect and reverence for nature; taking no more from the land than from the sea, from the air or from the ground.

Then the fair-skin, the sickly looking people from beyond the horizon arrived with their good will in many cases but also with their diseases and mostly their love of death and their adoration for the DEAD ONE.For them, our Life source, our Provider,had to be thorned apart, mutilated and abused until every particle of energy had been taken away, sold or exchanged.

The first ones to arrive and really settle down on this land were of French origin. Samuel de Champlain followed Cartier about 50 years later and was the first to really start founding colonies first around the Maritimes and then further up the St-Lawrence River all the way up to Quebec.

What a surprise it was for me to find out there used to be a little French settlement at the end of the very road we live on. Well craddle between the North and the South Mountains, just about in the middle on the periphery of Aspy Bay people lived. Were they descendants of some Louisbourg inhabitants, people that had stayed on what used to be l'Isle Royale after the British defeated the French?

This island was already the home of some First Nations People which we call Mi'Maq but they called themselves L'nu'k, meaning "the people". They could be found as far north as the Gaspé Peninsula to some New England States all across the Maritimes and as far East as Newfoundland.