Paul Chiasson

I was raised on Cape Breton Island, the small island that pivots off the northeastern tip of the Nova Scotia peninsula on Canada’s east coast. My father’s family arrived in Nova Scotia in the middle of the seventeenth century, one of the original Acadian families who first settled the region, so even as a young child I became fascinated by the island’s history. On long walks in the forest with my grandfather, I remember finding old grave markers of our ancestors in seemingly forgotten graveyards. My family would sometimes picnic on grassy fields along the coast that were still littered with the stone ruins of once grand eighteenth century buildings which had been built by the French when Cape Breton served as their main fortress in the Americas, and often in the morning I would watch fishermen unload their day’s catch on the wharf, the way visiting European fishing boats had done every summer since the early sixteenth century. The island is filled with such stories, so very early in my life I was made aware of the island’s multi-layered and often mysterious past. I left the island to attend university, moving first to Halifax and the Technical University of Nova Scotia for an undergraduate degree and then to Yale for a graduate degree in architecture. Over the next several decades I travelled, lived, worked and taught in Canada, the United States and Europe. Architecture continued to be my first love, but my interest in the profession was drawn consistently to the study of architectural theory and history, to the stories that buildings are able communicate in their unique and profound way. That is why I have come back to the fascinating early history of Cape Breton Island. There are ruins of built works on the island which suggest there may be a long forgotten history here. Traces of this ancient history can still be found in the legends told by the Mi’kmaq, the Native People of the region, and in reports and maps describing the island and its unusual early visitors, and in the ruins of walls and stone platforms which have never been fully understood. I now live in Toronto where I research and write about Cape Breton’s lost history and the stories that continue to be remembered in the island’s ancient legends, recorded in its early documents and written in its ruins.