Comments on the draft EIS guidelines submitted to the Panel Review
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White’s Point Quarry and Marine Terminal Project
Joint Review Panel
Scoping Meeting
Horton District High School
8 January 2005
Michael Corbett, PhD
School of Education
Acadia University
I read the parameters for the Environmental Impact Study of the White’s Point Quarry and Marine Terminal Project with considerable interest. I worked on Digby Neck for more than a decade as a public school teacher and my doctoral research was an analysis migration patterns from the 1950s through to the late 1990s. To my surprise I found that the majority (61%) of people who grew up on Digby Neck through this period actually remained in the local area (within 50 km of Digby Neck). My second surprise was the finding that on Digby Neck people were actually less likely to move beyond 50 km in the 1980s and 1990s than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. This has all led me to wonder about whether or not this particular part of rural Nova Scotia is as depressed as we are often led to believe all of rural Nova Scotia is.
Rural Nova Scotia and rural Canada generally are often presented in the media and in public discourse as an economic disaster. There is one level of truth in this analysis. While the Canadian rural-urban income gap has actually been shrinking nationally since 1980, here in Nova Scotia it is the largest in the country at nearly $6 000 per capita. Additionally, Nova Scotia also leads the nation in terms of incidence of low income. In most Canadian provinces poverty has acquired an increasingly urban face, in Nova Scotia this is not the case. Nova Scotia’s rural areas continue to contain more people officially designated as poor vis-à-vis our urban areas. It is a provincial shame that we have done so little to equalize incomes in rural Nova Scotia
The trouble with this analysis, which is derived from a recent Statistics Canada publication (Singh, 2004) is that not all rural areas are poor. This quarry project is slated for the western end of Digby Neck, specifically in the village of Little River. So is Little River, or even the Western end of Digby Neck a relatively impoverished area? I have actually studied this question as part of my research on Digby Neck (Corbett, 2001). Using 1996 Census Canada microdata I was able to analyze income levels for three sub-sections of Digby Neck. I found that average family income for the western part of Digby Neck is just over 40 000 which was about 15% below the Nova Scotia average family income, but about 14% above the average family income in the Municipality of Digby. In terms of the local economy, the western part of Digby Neck is an economic success story.
These statistics are borne out by a qualitative assessment of the community of Little River the village nearest to the location of the proposed quarry. I would encourage the panel to drive through Little River, look at the houses and the fishing operations around the wharf and see how the statistics I’m citing materialize in a living, working community. This community is a highly successful fishing village, one which draws a significant part of its living from the sensitive marine resources of the Bay of Fundy. The people living in this community rely on a close connection to land and sea and a stock of local knowledge that allows them to prosper from the fishery.
It is my profound sense that the guidelines of this inquiry must be broadened to incorporate accounts that document the traditional knowledge, oral traditions, life ways and spiritual connections held by the residents of the communities immediately and profoundly impacted by the proposed quarry development (particularly Whale Cove, Mink Cove and Little River). I would argue that that article 3.0 in the Draft Guidelines which focuses on aboriginal knowledge and the deep connection between people and place ought to be considered as a model opening up this inquiry to a broad range of data and testimony. In my own research on Digby Neck I documented the way that fishing families used local knowledge to achieve prosperity through technological change and the fluctuations of a capricious fishing industry. Local knowledge and a deep understanding of the importance of place are precisely what have allowed this community to survive and I might even say flourish.
The people who live in this part of Digby Neck appear to like where they live and appear not to want to see a development project that will bring disruption to marine stocks, noise, dust, siltation, possible groundwater contamination or interference among other certain and likely impacts. Let us be clear: what is proposed here is a massive, long-term open-pit mining operation. These days it is rare to even suggest such a project so close to well-established human settlement. Historically, similar projects developed near settled areas (e.g.. Deloro, Ontario) had environmental consequences that were unforeseeable at the outset. Minimally, the people in the most affected communities should be given the democratic opportunity to decide whether or not they want to jeopardize their current way of life in favor of this form of development.
Should considerations such as the ones I am suggesting not be included in the parameters of this assessment, and should this rock quarry project be allowed to go ahead, I think this panel is compelled to develop a protocol of recompense sufficient to compensate those who stand to lose:
1. Easily measurable things such as their livelihoods the fishery, tourism and in emerging ecotourism enterprises.
2. The less easily measured social and psychological damage incurred by the inevitable environmental degradation that will result from the insertion of a major industrial project within a mile of their homes.
I would like to conclude by returning to the point I made about Section 3 in the Draft Guidelines. As we are slowly coming to learn in First Nations land claims negotiations, the process of settling the score with people whose lives are built out of close connections to ancestral lands is an expensive and very difficult process. These are processes that never really end and frankly. In the end, there is no adequate compensation. Once a way of life is shattered, there is no going back.
Reference
Mike Corbett (2001). Learning to leave: The irony of schooling in a coastal community. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Educational Studies, UBC.
Vik Singh (2004). The rural-urban income gap within provinces: An update to 2000. Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin Catalogue no. 21-006-XIE Vol. 5, No. 7 (December)
Chapter 4
Study area and methodology
Digby Neck
Digby Neck is a 30 km long, narrow peninsula jutting into the Bay of Fundy in southwestern Nova Scotia. Never exceeding 5 kilometres in width, bounded on the North by the Bay of Fundy and on the south by St. Mary’s Bay. To the west are a narrow passage and two small islands and to the north are several small villages and the town of Digby. “The Neck” as it is known is comprised of nine villages which extend from the head of St Mary’s Bay in the east to East Ferry (so named from the point of view of the island joined from the east to the mainland by this ferry) at the western extremity. I refer to this collection of villages as a community because the discrete settlements that comprise the Neck are generally seen as belonging to the larger collective. Older residents remember the time, dating back to the mid 1950s before school consolidation and the paving of the highway when each village on Digby Neck had more of its own identity, but these days the “community” is generally meant to refer to the nine villages that comprise Digby Neck. These villages are similar in that they were all settled in the early to mid-nineteenth century to access the rich fishery on both St. Mary’s and the Bay of Fundy.
The houses along the Neck are predominantly wood frame and most are painted white and set close the main road (Highway 217) or one of the community access roads that branch off leading to a community wharf. The properties are generally well kept and neat in appearance. Some have the look of prosperity about them while others do not, but the norm is a modest respectability. Beside most houses are workshops and wood sheds. Many families in the community heat their homes with the abundant softwood that grows on family wood lots. A typical male Digby Necker is described by most informants as a man who likes to work hard, do things with his hands, such as cut wood, hunt, fish and spend his time on the water or in the woods. Most properties have signs of this kind of lifestyle. Four wheel drive vehicles and half-ton pickups are the conveyance of choice and motorized “four wheeler” cycles are seen around most houses. The interior spaces of the house and the landscaping that surrounds them tend to be managed by women. The typical Digby Neck woman is also seen as “a worker,” someone who is always “busy” keeping the house in order, doing the cooking, decorating, “running around” for groceries and ferrying children to “town” (Digby) for various activities not available on the Neck. Many women also participate in outdoor labour and work with their partners around the property and in the woods, but typically not on the water. Many homes show signs of a connection to the fishery. Lobster traps and assorted kinds of fishing gear are often stored near houses in the off season.
Most of the villages continue to have more or less active wharves. The wharves continue to the focal point of the economic life of communities on Digby Neck. During any given part of the year, there is some fishery in operation and the wharf is the landing and departure point for all fishing operations. Some wharves like those in East Ferry, Little River and Sandy Cove are equipped to handle small boat draggers which typically measure 45-65 feet in length. Centreville was a dragger port until the 1980s but the wharf has fallen into disrepair and washouts have filled the harbor with sediment making it impossible for larger boats to berth there. Other communities have smaller wharves in various states of repair. Fishermen in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy side of Digby Neck still winch their boats fully out of the water and up on a slip way at the end of most working days because of the volatile weather and limited shelter offered by their small wharf. Some wharves like the ones at the eastern end of Digby Neck in Waterford and Gulliver’s Cove are in disrepair and are virtually unusable.
The Neck is an extension of the Nova Scotia’s North Mountain which itself is a part of the Appalachian system. The North Mountain runs from Brier Island, just west of Digby Neck, to the Minas Basin near the far end of the Annapolis Valley.1 In fact, “the valley” is formed in the space between the North and South mountains. The land on Digby Neck is rugged and hilly and the soil is acidic and rocky, wooded primarily with spruce and fir. Digby Neck is connected by Highway 217 which begins in Digby and connects the sporadic communities most of which were established in the late eighteenth century around sheltered coves and harbours along the two bays. The Neck is strategically located for fishing because of its proximity to both the Bay of Fundy to the north and St Mary’s Bay to the south.
1 - See Cruise and Griffith (1997) for a poetic description of the natural history of the Annapolis Valley. Bull (1978) and Davis (1991) also offer descriptions of the natural history of Digby Neck.
Some houses on Digby Neck are clustered in central village areas while others are situated in a more scattered fashion along highway 217 and a handful of secondary roads leading to either the Fundy or St. Mary’s Bay shore. Despite the general consensus that the population and economic vitality of Digby Neck are both in decline, historic population figures show that the population has remained relatively stable from the 19th century into the 1980s when significant population decline began (See Tables 1 and 2).
Table 1: Pre 1951 Census Counts for Digby Neck Communities
1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1941 _________________________________________________________________ Rossway 385 514 431 391 343 376 318 355 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sandy Cove 738 708 687 754 711 683 668 687 and Centreville - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Little River 397 382 373 448 407 448 464 460 _________________________________________________________________ Digby Neck 1520 1504 1491 1593 1461 1507 1450 1502
While the enumeration areas used by Census Canada and the Dominion Bureau of Statistics changed over the years, the overall population of the communities of Digby Neck fluctuated approximately 20 percent between 1871 and 1981 as the population peaked at 1593 in 1901 and fell as low as 1234 in 1961. By 1991 the population had risen to 1366, its highest point since 1941, but fell dramatically to 1055 just five year later in the 1996 census. Generally the population has shifted “down the Neck” with numbers remaining far more stable in the western as opposed to the eastern part of Digby Neck. This is probably due to the decline of the small boat hook and line fishery and the rise of the small boat dragger fleet which has been documented by other studies of the area (Hughes et. al., 1960, Davis, 1991, Kearney, 1993). This population movement is also reflected in the state of wharves in the communities along the Neck. The further west one travels, generally the better the state of the community wharves.
Table 2: Population of Digby Neck Communities-1951-1991
1951 1956 1961 1966 1971 1981 1991 _________________________________________________________ Roxville n/a n/a n/a 23 52 64 29 -------------------------------------------------------- Rossway 237 214 127 137 117 142 137 -------------------------------------------------------- Gulliver’s Cove n/a n/a 65 89 93 94 91 -------------------------------------------------------- Waterford 94 87 87 74 62 68 72 -------------------------------------------------------- Centreville 293 297 304 278 266 257 206 -------------------------------------------------------- Lake Midway n/a n/a n/a n/a 35 33 n/a -------------------------------------------------------- Sandy Cove 210 178 169 176 170 173 129 -------------------------------------------------------- Mink Cove 63 66 82 82 86 84 56 -------------------------------------------------------- Little River 213 197 82 202 210 210 190 -------------------------------------------------------- Whale Cove n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a 33 29 -------------------------------------------------------- Tiddville 121 75 87 95 106 105 83 -------------------------------------------------------- East Ferry 129 117 131 131 123 111 129 _________________________________________________________ Digby Neck 1360 1318 1234 1287 1285 1366 1055The fishery has been, and continues to be, the economic lifeblood of Digby Neck. Digby Neckers remain close to land and sea, particularly the latter with the intensification of fishing in the last 30 years. This is obvious to travellers and residents alike. Communities are organised around fish plants and wharves and both land and sea show signs of fishing gear. Older residents of the Neck can still remember when agriculture was more important and the fishing/farming family was common.2 Many residents of the Neck have always kept household gardens and cut small amounts of firewood, pulp or saw logs. Recently though, the Irving company and the provincial Department of Natural Resources have begun to petition local residents to sell off their wood lots for saw logs and pulp in the face of an infestation of the spruce bark beetle. Some residents have decided to accept this analysis, and one can see clear-cuts driving along Highway 217 which runs the length of Digby Neck.
2 - Life Magazine published a photo essay in 194 that focused on one farming and fishing family living on Digby Neck. For another idyllic description of the way of life on Digby Neck prior to the paved roads and modern communication and trading links (see Bird, 1956).
Fish and lobsters are landed at seven different wharves in 6 different communities. With the decline in ground fishing, lobstering has become the main fishery on the Neck. This is almost exclusively a small boat, family-based fishery. Residents comment that the lobster fishery is the principal remaining viable fishery. Both traditional and modern methods of fishing for groundfish have been in decline on Digby Neck for at least the past decade and both remain a shadow of their former economic and social importance. Many lobster fishermen fish with handline and/or gill net (“fixed gear”)3 for ground fish from the end of the lobster season at the end of May until the late fall when lobstering opens again. Recently these fisheries have been so poor that many multiple license holders, “don’t even bother” hand-lining and gill netting. Other small boat fishermen who do not have lobster licenses also fish using traditional “fixed gear” (hand lines and gill nets mainly) during the spring, summer and fall. Small boats used in this fishery can be seen tied up at any of the seven operational government wharves on Digby Neck but these are declining in number as a combination of regulation, license buy-back programs and a scarcity of fish all combine to induce small boat fishermen to “sell out.” The two large government wharves in Sandy Cove and Little River also serve as home for a mostly offshore dragger fleet (“mobile gear”) which continues to operate on a limited basis despite restrictive government quotas and dwindling stocks. Several fisheries are also emerging in formerly ignored species such as, herring roe or diving for sea urchins sold mainly on the Japanese market.
Each community on Digby Neck has at least one church. The population is predominantly Baptist with significant minority of evangelical Protestants. Many churches continue to be active on Digby Neck although it is clear that in most cases their membership is aging.4 Ethnically, people on the Neck are almost exclusively of English extraction (via New England) and long ago assimilated Acadians (Bull, 1978). The English descendants emigrated to Digby Neck as part of the Planter migration following the deportation of the Acadians in 1760. These settlers established fishing settlements around family land grants in sheltered coves and these settlements grew slowly into villages. By the middle of the nineteenth century the current villages of Digby Neck were established and the bulk of the population was engaged in subsistence farming, ship building, fishing and the carrier trade. Bull comments in her history of Sandy Cove that this community was particularly cosmopolitan and the place of origin of many successful international sea captains (1978). A few Acadian families migrated across Saint Mary’s Bay in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially to the communities of East Ferry and Waterford. These families are now assimilated linguistically and culturally with the anglophone population of the Neck although they retain French surnames like Theriault, Thibodeau and Thibault.
3 - Fixed gear is the type of fishing gear normally associated with the small boat fishery. In fixed gear fisheries, nets, hooks and lines do not move through the water pulled by the power of a motorised boat. fish, therefore, come to the bait in a fixed gear fishery. Mobile gear, on the other hand is pulled through the water trapping fish in catchment nets or bottom raking apparatus. The distinction is somewhat arbitrary and does not always serve to distinguish between small and large boats and between more or less “technological” fisheries. For instance, longliners fishing offshore for swordfish are as large, powerful and have as much catching potential as large offshore fish draggers.
4 - Although it should be noted that Hughes et al., (1960) commenting on data from 1952 made the same observation. The population of this area remains remarkably homogeneous. The limited amount of immigration of full-time residents to Digby Neck which does occur comes in the form of women relocating to the area from surrounding villages in the Digby area or from Clare to marry or co-habitate with a Digby Neck fisherman. Few Digby Neck women bring husbands or lovers to live on Digby Neck. There is a well established and growing immigrant population of mostly retired and part time summer residents, particularly in the village of Sandy Cove. This group is said to be slowly but surely changing the way of life in the village, driving land and real estate prices up out of the reach of young Digby Neckers.
A handful of small village convenience stores and one small general store currently operate on Digby Neck replacing the community general stores which supplied virtually all community needs until the paving of the Highway 217 in the mid-1950s. Recently a gasoline outlet has been opened midway between East Ferry and the “head of the Bay” which marks the eastern end of geographic Digby Neck. Several fish plants can still be found on the Neck, but most of these are either out of business or operate for only very limited periods. Most of the local fish processing is now done on Long and Brier Islands to the west, or in the Acadian District of Clare across St. Mary’s Bay. These plants are owned by local “fishtocrats” who have been relentlessly expanding their operations buying gear and licenses and controlling an increasing share of fish production in the area particularly since the establishment of quotas and regulatory regimes in the mid-1970s. In the mid-1990s, a salmon hatchery opened in Mink Cove to supply the growing fish farming industry in the Annapolis Basin to the east.
Digby Neck has been a tourist destination for more than a century, and older residents remember several hotels and summer camps operating on Digby Neck to cater to tourists in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Tourism is now often promoted by community activists, local development authorities and state bureaucrats as an industry with unexplored and unexploited potential. An expanding modern tourist trade is developing, particularly during the warm months of May-October. Obvious examples of this modern ecotourism development are successful whale watching and bird cruise operations that have opened up since the early 1990s. The Neck also has a provincially operated tourist park.
In many ways, the local elementary school, Digby Neck Consolidated, is the focal point of the Digby Neck community. The school is the single institutional forum where all of the children of Digby Neck meet for at least a brief period of their lives and residents of Digby Neck and staff of Digby Neck Consolidated unanimously oppose any hint of school closure. School closure is a persistent threat because the student population has declined rapidly from peak enrolments of more than 200 students in the mid-1960s to the current student population of less than 70. This decline reflects lower birth rates, and out-migration of young people of child bearing age, particularly since the 1980s. The school serves students from grades primary to six. Beyond this the students are bussed to Digby or to Islands Consolidated School in Freeport on nearby Long Island. A number of community projects operate out of the school including an association of small boat, fixed gear fishermen, a local development agency, a learning co-op which promotes educational activity in the community, a community access computer centre, a day care program for working parents, various short-term state supported community develop projects, a hot lunch program, and periodic community suppers, socials, adult education, conferences and workshops. The school’s regular “events” such as the talent shows, benefits, Thanksgiving Dinner, Christmas Concert or Leaving Ceremony in June are, along with weddings and funerals, the premier social events in the community. Digby Neck Consolidated School is a genuinely rural school in a genuinely rural coastal community and the current principal has worked to expand the role of the school as a multi-service community site.
The community has been, up until very recently, the source of significant employment for certain youth. It follows that Digby Neck is not necessarily constructed by inhabitants as a place to leave behind, but rather as a place in which one might make a living, albeit a difficult one requiring a variety of skills and capacities. Significantly, this complex of abilities is rooted in the traditional community and despite its challenges it offers both rewards and the comfort of the familiar (Brandau and Collins, 1994, Porter, 1996). As Ursula Kelly comments, “without a vision of the future, the past beckons with its familiarity. However terrible the terrain was, one has already coped” (1993: 80). Indeed, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity are built around the toughness, native intelligence (work and survival skills known as “common sense”) and the resourcefulness needed to cope and prosper in the local environment.
Schooling and the Atlantic Coastal Community
Long after she had left him to sleep, Alan thought about what she had said. It was the first time he had ever heard her talk about going to some other place. At school the teacher had told them about boys from Cape Breton who had gone away from home to the States and become famous. But Alan did not want to go away from home (MacLennan, 1951: 168).
One finds in Atlantic fiction a strong sense of place and community, often counterpoised against the project of schooling. School sits in an ambivalent position in coastal communities. For more than ten years I have been driving Highway 217 from its eastern terminus in Digby to the village of Sandy Cove to teach at Digby Neck Consolidated School. Most people understand that not everyone can stay on the Neck, and that formal schooling is a preparation for life and opportunities elsewhere. Migration is very often linked directly with schooling in popular perceptions and it is commonly said that the ones who do well in school, leave.
The political economic context within which the migration imperative functions is crucial. Since the Second World War it has been explicit Canadian government policy to create a modern “efficient” Atlantic fishery (Barrett and Apostle, 1990; Matthews, 1993, 1995; Davis, 1991; Blades, 1995; Sinclair, 1995). This has meant supporting heavy capitalization of the fishery and moving to fewer boats using increasingly intrusive high-tech gear. This policy created an environmental crisis which peaked in the cod moratorium in the late 1980s on the Grand Banks. While no local fisheries have been closed, the impact on the fishery and the people of Digby Neck has been drastic. Many inshore fishermen on Digby Neck as well as former dragger fishermen bemoan the devastation they claim has been done by widespread and persistent fish and scallop dragging. A further bone of contention for inshore small operators is the Individual Transferable Quota system (ITQ) which is said to have allowed major corporate fishing concerns to buy out desperate small boat fishermen and corral quotas and access to the resource.5 As one fisherman put it, “them fullers own fish swimming in the water.” This situation flies in the face of the traditional common property notions which have widespread support on Digby Neck
among small boat inshore fishermen and their families. In the most recent incarnation of this policy the federal state is in the process of “retraining” fisheries workers in the Atlantic Fishery in the totally ineffective federal Groundfish Adjustment Strategy (TAGS). Those left running the high-tech capital intensive fishery are a small cadre of what are called “professional fishers.” Yet, through the fifty-year development of the present state of affairs, the small boat fishery has persisted and it continues to function, albeit in reduced circumstances. Some analysts contend that the very persistence of this fishery represents resistance to the logic of capital concentration (Brym and Sacouman, 1979; Kearney, 1993; Durrenberger, 1997).
5 - Individual transferable quotas (ITQ's) assigned quotas of fish to individuals on the basis of their historic catch between 1986 and 1993. Those with high catch histories were thus given larger shares of catchable fish in particular areas. These ITQ's may be bought and sold and so small operators who caught little fish historically were easily enticed to sell off their small quotas to larger operators. As large operators have grown it has become increasingly difficult for small scale fishermen to compete leading to still more consolidation. In this way it is generally recognized that the ITQ has played (and continues to play) an important role in the creation of the DFO's concentrated “professional fishery” with fewer fishermen chasing more fish. The obvious implication of this policy is that depopulation of coastal communities will follow as hundreds of “part time” or “non-core” fishers will no longer be able to “catch a few fish” and then fall back on social assistance. This policy rests on classical economic assumptions that people placed in this position will migrate to more prosperous areas. However, many displaced fisheries workers actually stay and move onto full time social assistance choosing to remain in their communities no matter what. My point is that the real battle will not be fought for the hearts and minds of displaced fisheries workers, but for those of their children. And the battle will be waged in significant measure in schools.
Coastal communities in Atlantic Canada have been depopulated at an alarming rate, particularly since the heavy industrialization of the fishery begun in the 1970s (Grady and Sacouman, 1990; Barrett and Apostle, 1990; Davis, 1991; Matthews, 1976, 1993, 1995). A Digby Neck residents suggested cryptically, “not everyone can stay.” In my view, the school, as a normalizing arm of the state, has supported the consistent and persistent policy of rationalization of the fishery by working to ensure that surplus labour is given the appropriate preparation for migration. As an increasingly large proportion of the youth population become surplus to commercial fishing, the pressure intensified to educate and mobilize more youth in coastal communities. Along with the development of what the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is calling a “professional fishery” the Canadian state has supported the development of a mobile work force and the schools are charged with a primary responsibility for shaping that work force and preparing it to leave. Formidable forces are aligned against coastal communities and many of those residents who want to remain. Yet coastal communities remain, and in them remain people who are committed to staying and passing on a local legacy to their children and grandchildren.
If state policy from the 1970s and particularly into the 1980s and 1990s has been designed to create a professional fishery, large numbers of traditional small boat and part-time fishers, fish plant workers and those who provide support services in and around coastal communities must be removed from the rural parts of Atlantic Canada. The massive federal TAGS program is the latest in a series of consolidation strategies which began in the 1970s and 1980s with low interest loans for capital expansion and “modernization,” and the institution of ITQs issued on the basis of individual fishermens’ catch history. But this is not simply a problem created by those already established in the small boat fishery. Young people aspiring to this way of life need also to be dissuaded from remaining in communities which have been effectively rendered dysfunctional by state policy. In this political matrix, school takes on an important role, a role which has been central for decades: helping to moving people elsewhere.6
6 - For an annotated bibliography of American literature on rural education and industrialization see Haas and Nachtigal (1998). In many of these sources the idea of depopulation and out-migration figures prominently.
With the downturn of the Atlantic ground fishery and Bay of Fundy scallop fishery in the early 1990s and the simultaneously instituted federal Stay in School Initiative, the link between schooling and migration became all too clear in Atlantic coastal communities. While studies of coastal communities in Atlantic Canada are not uncommon, there are no studies of schooling in such communities. Digby Neck is a typical example of an Atlantic Canada coastal community and so findings from this study are, I believe, generalizable to many other similar communities caught in the shift from a co-integrated fishing economy, to a modernized rural industrial economy. The “booming” industrial fishery was sustained for a relatively short length of time (at best equivalent to a single working life of forty or fifty years), and we now see emerging the discourse around a post-industrial fishing and tourism based economy. In fact, Sinclair has identified Digby Neck as having similar economic and social characteristics to Newfoundland coastal communities caught in a similar transition (1995).
Methodology
Let us return briefly to the research question set out in the first section of this study: how do some young people learn to stay in coastal communities while others learn to leave? I propose four basic methods for framing and answering this question: historical/documentary analysis; participant analysis of community life and the place of schooling in that life; a migration survey using school records; and, semi-structured interviews with a sample of migrant (leavers) and non-migrant Digby Neck natives (stayers).
As the crisis in the fishery has developed, gained complexity and deepened, the people of Digby Neck have come to talk about education differently. Most now recognize that their ability to make a substantial living requires not only hard physical work, but hard intellectual work as well. State regulation and complex negotiations between the various interest groups lobbying for influence in fisheries policy have traditionally worked against unorganized, individualistic, hard-working fishing families in Atlantic coastal communities. Without organization and collective voice, small boat fishermen have often been “out of the loop” of policy discussion. And as a result, their interests have been poorly served. Most small boat fishermen on Digby Neck now understand clearly the importance of organization and establishing a common front, and as a result, a number of new organizations have arisen in the 1990s. As fishermen meet and negotiate, it has become more apparent to them that education is crucial to the process of influencing state policy. As one fisherman said, “you have to be a lawyer to go fishing today.” Community survival which has always been a core value is now being linked with formal education in a way that is significantly new. My own interest in this project has arisen, in part, from fishermen approaching me with questions about how the school where I have worked can be “used” to support the struggle for community survival, and indeed, how my own education and that of others like me can be mobilized in that struggle. I have been in a sense recruited by some Digby Neckers concerned about their children’s future and the future of their way of life and it is these individuals who have been my chief informants. As a result, I have been educated by Digby Neckers about the precarious position they and their communities are in at the present moment.
While Digby Neck is a typical, single industry, fisheries focused Atlantic coastal community, this community was chosen for study because it is where I have worked since 1990, and it is where I continue to work. In my thirteen years of professional practice as a teacher in coastal communities it is obvious to me that significant levels of resistance to schooling continue to exist. On Digby Neck, community based fisheries opportunities for young men persisted until the late 1980s. As the fishery industrialized, an immobile labour force was necessary for periodic employment in peak periods. But a political economic analysis is by itself insufficient to explain the complex relationships between education and out-migration in coastal communities. The kind of “resistance” to which I am referring here is not necessarily opposition to the logic of capitalism or a “penetration” of how “the system” works to exclude rural youth. In fact, resistance to school seems to be an accommodation of individuals to the need for labour (in the case of working class youth), or opportunities for significant incomes (in the case of privileged youth whose families worked in fish dragging) in the industrializing fishery of the 1970s and 80s. In my view, place attachment is also at the root of resistance to school in local communities and it represents the incompatibility of integration into local culture and the migration imperative in rural schools. The decision to leave school and remain in the rural community amounts to the choice of a known, integrated rural subjectivity, one which is systematically demeaned and devalued in school (Creed and Cheng, 1997; Brandau and Collins, 1994; Porter, 1997).
To carry out this analysis I have employed multiple methods. In this study I have used participant observation, a survey and a series of detailed ethnographic interviews to gather data.
Participant observation
There is no way we can escape the social world in order to study it; nor, fortunately, is that necessary. (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1981: 15).
In addition to my years of teaching service on Digby Neck, I carried out participant observation in the community between August of 1998 and April 2000. This participant observation involved taking part in community activities of a wider variety including both formal and informal social functions, school related events, home visits, conversations in stores, post offices, kitchens, fish sheds and on wharves. I also participated in several commercial fishing trips on both small inshore boats and larger mid-shore vessels. These trips ranged from a few hours to a five-day voyage. I have been and continue to be in regular contact with many residents of Digby Neck both as a part of this project and as a normal feature of my personal and professional life. This participant observation might be described as what Stenhouse (1975) calls teacher-research, or the systematic, critical investigation of one’s professional practice. But I think there is more than my professional self in play here. My life both overlaps and interweaves with this research in a variety of ways. For example, while I am a participant observer, I may also at the same time be a teacher giving advice about a child’s reading or personal problem, or planning strategy with my informants/colleagues/friends about how to keep the school open in the face of declining enrolment, helping to formulate and coordinate a response to the provincial budget, or helping to clean up after a community supper. I might also be baiting traps on a lobster boat or shucking scallops on a 65 foot dragger, playing music at a social function, sharing coffee and conversation in a country kitchen, building a greenhouse with a group of children and their parents, or giving advice in the community computer centre. These kinds of activities have both contributed to my growing understanding of community issues, ongoing and changing fisheries struggles, educational problems, and the generalized social context within which all of these interconnected currents take place.
Throughout field work I used my field diary as a source of data, conceptual development and refinement, and as a forum for reflexive monitoring of my own understandings of both the community in general and of the connection between schooling and migration. These data were recorded through the study period following time spent on Digby Neck fishing, conversing with teachers and former students, at coffee shops, taverns and other gathering places “in town” (mostly in shopping places in Digby), or wherever else I found people to talk to. Most of these conversations were held with men in the oldest of the three cohorts. Because of my own social position as a middle-aged man, these informants were my most “natural” conversational partners. However, I also recorded numerous conversations with women manly in Cohorts 1 and 2 who are parents of my present and former students. The location of many informal conversations with men were held in “male spaces” like, fishing boats, wharves, and around fish sheds “down to the shore.” Conversations with women typically occurred in “womens’ spaces” such as the local elementary school, in kitchens which are the social hub of most families on the Neck, and in and around stores on the Neck or “in town” (Digby).
In this fieldwork, the reflexive character of the project became very apparent to me. My own observations blended in with my attempts at reconstructing conversations and the field diary became both a source of insight into the social circumstances I was investigating, but also into my own position in the community. I was constantly astonished at how my multiple roles as a fisherman, a teacher, a musician, a mentor, a friend, a tutor, an supposed “expert” on ideas and information technologies, were all integrated into the conversations I had with people. Indeed, it often occurred to me that I was playing the role of “informant” as much as that of “observer” as I continually explained my research, my work as a teacher and my own life history most of which unfolded in other places out of sight of my informants. Just as I was attempting to “place” my informants, I was being placed by them. Informants were intrigued by my interest in them and they wondered openly why I would bother paying attention to their mundane lives. But despite my alterity and the strange nature of my project, I also “fit” into the community because of my established and long-standing position as a teacher in the local elementary school, and to a lesser extent as a part-time fisherman’s helper and community volunteer. My social position as a teacher provided a ready-made explanation for both why I was “in the field” and why I was interested in educational questions. So my research integrated with other activities normally associated with my identity. Teachers of course, go to university and study things and it only makes sense that they study things about school. Thus, my conversations with informants were in many respects “natural” conversations that one would expect to engage with a teacher.
I recorded my impressions, those bits of conversation I could reconstruct, and my sense of how all of this was being understood by my informants. Many field diary entries were in the form of narrative reconstructions and I have included excerpts from this material in part C, and particularly in the chapter that documents the experience of Cohort 1 (Chapter 6). More than a source of data, the field diary served as a venue for developing my own sense of the problems I was trying to come to grips with and for verifying and refining the ideas I was using. For the actual constructions of the accounts presented in Part C, I wanted to preserve, as much as possible, the concrete statements of my informants. Therefore, the bulk of detailed illustrative quotes contained in Chapters 6-8 are verbatim quotes from the series of tape recorded ethnographic interviews I describe below.
Following Hammersley and Atkinson (1981), Carr and Kemmis (1986), St. Pierre (1997a, 1997b), Lather (1986), Czerny, Swift and Clarke (1995) and Van Manen (1990) I recognize and embrace my own involvement in the research setting. I am not an “objective” observer, not do I claim to be generating an unbiased account of the problems I have been investigating. Indeed these research problems are my practical professional quandaries and the line between working on them and doing this inquiry is very vague. My interest in the connection between schooling and out-migration in rural communities is a proverbial “stone in the shoe,” a central problem in my own teaching practice which spans nearly two decades of work in Canadian rural schools (more than half of it in Atlantic coastal communities). My field diaries are descriptions of people, places, situations and conversations , but they are also an ongoing exploration of educational questions about “what I think I’m doing” when I work as a teacher on Digby Neck. The field diaries have been a particularly focused component of a long term conversation I have been having with parents and students in rural communities, and with myself. Through my field work, I have shared this conversation with several key informants checking my own perceptions and definitions of the situation against their understandings, and recording my evolving conception of the research questions.
The Basic Data Bank, and the Community, Schooling and Migration Survey
To establish actual patterns of migration I have surveyed historic Grade 6 students who left Digby Neck Consolidated School (DNCS) between 1957 and 1992. I obtained school records from former administrators and teachers as well as from the Nova Scotia Provincial Archives in order to establish the target population. From these records I generated a list of all students who completed Grade 6 on Digby Neck between 1957 and 1992. These classes correspond with the potential high school graduating classes of 1963-1998, a 36 year period. In 1999, the individuals in this population range in age between 19 and 56. Using key community informants I then tracked each student in the sample to his or her present location, either on Digby Neck or elsewhere. I was able to locate 749 of the 756 students for whom I could find Grade 6 attendance records. Of this number 35 were removed from the sample because they are deceased, leaving a revised total of 714. This group represents 99 % of the total population or 714 out of a possible total of 721 individuals. This data is reported in Chapter 5 as the Basic Data Bank and it contains information on present location of the 714 individuals and their village of origin allowing for a clear analysis of general out-migration patterns from Digby from the early 1960s to the late 1990s.
A simple telephone survey was conducted with all which investigated work and educational histories for as many members of this population as possible given time constraints. The interviews were very brief consisting of 7 questions and focussing mainly on the level of education and current employment of respondents (see Appendix D). The data from this survey are reported in Chapter 5 and are based on 326 telephone interviews conducted between November 1998 and April 2000. Because respondents to this survey were often members of large families they were often able to provide information on other family members. Because of this, data were collected on 511 individuals from the target population. This represents a response rate of 71.6 percent of the total population. Through the Community, Schooling and Migration Survey, basic educational and work history data were gathered on 269 women representing 75.6 percent of the total female population, and 242 men, representing 67.6 percent of the total male population (see Table 3).
Table 3: Sample composition: Community, Schooling and Migration Survey
Male Female Male and Female
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Cohort 1 (1963-1974) 93 98 191
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Cohort 2 (1975-1986) 77 87 165
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Cohort 3 (1987-1998) 72 84 156
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TOTAL 242 269 511
Since this work is attempting to establish and understand the connection between education and migration, this survey was designed to gauge the extent of the migration/education connection.
From this data I established migration rates and correlate these rates with key variables such as high school completion, gender, and village of origin. The results of this migration analysis are reported in Chapter 5. One of the central purposes of the survey was to establish a sample from which to draw interview subjects for the ethnographic interviews which take up the greater part of this study in Chapters 6 - 8.
Ethnographic Interviews
In the Community, Schooling and Migration Survey respondents were asked if they would consent to taking part in more in-depth conversations about their educational, migration and work histories. An availability-based sample of thirty-six individuals was thus drawn from those who responded positively and who were identified by key informants as people who would “probably talk to me.” These ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) probed the experience of coming of age on Digby Neck investigating the central question concerning the relationship between formal schooling and migration in the coastal community (see Appendices A and B). The sample was purposively selected for current place of residence (i.e. leaver or stayer), gender, age cohort, and village of origin. In total eighteen men and eighteen women were interviewed, one half of whom had stayed on Digby Neck, the other half of whom were living further than 250 kilometres from Digby Neck at the time of the interview (see Table 4). I chose these groups because they were the clearest cases of “stayers” and “leavers.” While there was some question among my key informants about whether or not a person who had moved 50 or 100 km distant was a “migrant,” everybody agreed that people who were living beyond Halifax (approximately 250 kilometres from Digby Neck) had moved “away.” Likewise, there was disagreement about the status of people living in the nearby town of Digby or in villages within a short drive of Digby Neck. Some informants claimed for instance that a person living in Digby could still be considered a Digby Necker. But everyone agreed that a person who had remained living on the Neck was a Digby Necker. The distance of 250 km was chosen as a result of conversations from participant observation about “what counts as away.” Respondents saw Digby Neck as “here,” and the area within approximately 50 km as “around here.” The area between “around here” and the nearest major urban centre, Halifax, was considered to be “not far.” This area encompasses Southwestern Nova Scotia and the Annapolis Valley as well as metro Halifax and any part of it can be reached from Digby Neck in under three hours driving. People who have moved into this region are not considered to have moved very far, although they are beyond the range of casual visiting and dropping in for tea on a regular basis. Those who had moved beyond Halifax were considered to be “away” because it would take more than a comfortable afternoon’s drive to see them or for them to visit “home.”
Table 4: Interview subjects by place of current residence and gender
Cohort 1 Cohort 2 Cohort 3
M F M F M F
Stayers 3 3 3 3 3 3
Leavers 3 3 3 3 3 3
In terms of village of origin, I used Census Canada Enumeration Area designations which break Digby Neck into three regions which I call Eastern, Central and Western Digby Neck. Twelve informants were chosen for interviews from each of these three regions. In depth interviews were thus conducted with approximately five percent of the total sample (thirty-six individuals) or twelve individuals (i.e. six stayers and six leavers) from each of the three cohorts mentioned in the introduction: Cohort 1- 1963-1974; Cohort 2-1975-1986; and Cohort 3-1987-1998). These three periods roughly encompass three transitions in community life and in the fishery. The first period spanning 1963 to 1974 represents the end of the first period of the modernization of the fishery which occurred following World War Two. Through these years the dragger fleet developed slowly while the small boat inshore fishery remained vibrant (Clement, 1986; Davis, 1991, Blades, 1995; Apostle and Barrett, 1992; Kearney, 1993; Sinclair, 1995). The second period spans 1975 to 1986 and represents what is considered locally to have been the “boom” period in the fishery lasting into the late 1980s. This period is characterized by heavy industrialization of the fishery and most notably the state sponsored expansion of the small boat dragger fleet as well as the beginning of the decline of the small boat inshore fishery with the exception of lobstering. The final period comprising 1987 to 1998 represents what is known locally as a period of declining opportunities in all fisheries except lobstering and a few previously undeveloped fisheries. To identify individuals by their time period (or age) I use the year of potential, on-time graduation throughout this study. Table 6 shows the distribution of interview subjects in terms of age indicated by year of potential high school graduation.
Table 5: Interview subjects by community and cohort.
Cohort 1 Cohort 2 Cohort 3 ------------------------------------------------------ Eastern Digby Neck 4 4 4 ------------------------------------------------------ Central Digby Neck 4 4 4 ------------------------------------------------------ Western Digby Neck 4 4 4
In addition, I interviewed a sample of twelve key educators who have served the people of Digby Neck through the period of study. This sample included both elementary and secondary school teachers and school and system level administrators and guidance counselors. The interview schedule used in these interviews is found in Appendix C. Among the sample of educators, five of the twelve interviewees are currently working in the educational system, seven are retired, all but two within the last ten years. Nine of the twelve interviewees are women.7 The eldest among them began teaching in the mid 1940s, while the youngest began their teaching careers in the 1980s. The combined experience of these twelve educators is nearly 350 years, most of it spent either teaching on Digby Neck in the consolidated elementary school (and its one or two room community school predecessors before 1957), or in the regional high school which serves both children from Digby Neck as well as those from other parts of he immediate area surrounding Digby town.
7 - Four of the interviewees currently reside in the community, and of these three raised children who attended Digby Neck Consolidated School. Therefore, some of these interviews document experience as an educator as well as experience as a parent and community elder. In fact, the two roles played by these women seemed to blend in during their conversations with me. For this reason, some comments quoted in this section refer directly to these womens’ own children.
Table 6: Interview subjects by year of potential graduation
Cohort 1 Cohort 2 Cohort 3 1963 1977 1987 1965 1977 1988 1967 1977 1988 1969 1979 1989 1969 1980 1990 1969 1980 1991 1970 1981 1992 1971 1981 1992 1971 1982 1995 1971 1984 1996 1973 1984 1997 1974 1986 1998
All 48 interviews were conducted between November 1998 and March 2000. Informants were contacted initially by letter with the consent form included in Appendix A. The interviews were supplemented by follow-up interviews with key informants and further formal and informal conversations on fishing boats, in fish shacks, in kitchens, in meetings of various types, at the community school and at various community functions. The tape recorded portion of the interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes and focused on the five general themes: work, community, family, schooling and mobility. Follow-up conversations ranged in length from a few minutes to several hours and in frequency from one to six separate discussions. Most interviews with stayers were conducted in the homes of informants, but some were also conducted in coffee shops and restaurants. Typically the informant was alone with me during the live interviews, but occasionally a spouse, child, friend or extended family member was also present, though these people rarely spoke during the formal part of the interview process. Interviews with leavers were conducted via telephone. Virtually all live and telephone interviews were followed by extended general follow-up conversation (often lasting several hours) about educational, economic and social issues on Digby Neck among other things. Accounts of these discussions were recorded in my field diary. The interviews with educators were held in a variety of locations such as school offices, the home of the interviewee or in coffee shops and restaurants. In every case the interviewee was alone with me throughout the tape recorded and non-recorded follow-up conversation(s). The tape-recorded part of all interviews were transcribed and coded for analysis. Copies of transcribed interviews were offered to informants for verification. Only in one instance were any changes made to the text as a result of the verification process.
Integrated validity
An ethnography is a written representation of a culture (or selected aspects of a culture). It carries quite serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral (J. VanManen, 1988: 1).
For an existential insider a place is richly significant, even though its valued position is assumed and rarely expressed. Most commonly, existential insiders become aware of their strong attachment to place when it is disrupted and they begin to reflect on what their homes, neighbourhoods and neighbouring friends mean to them (Cochrane, 1987: 7).
It has become almost commonplace to describe social research as a political act. I do not claim to be a disinterested party. Nor do I claim to be testing a series of standard indicators. Whether or not this study is generalizable to other similar sorts of community is of secondary importance to me. I have a pragmatic interest in understanding and responding to educational issues on Digby Neck, and as I have indicated above, this research project is a reflexive inquiry into my own practice. Between 1990 and 2002 I worked on Digby Neck as an elementary school teacher, a school administrator, and as a consultant. The genesis for this project is my own dissatisfaction with my understanding of the impact of schooling in the community where I spent much of my professional career. With my colleagues I have challenged and attempted to understand the difficult, complex and often problematic relationship between community and school on Digby Neck. The questions that drive this research are the result of sustained reflection and conversations with educators who work on Digby Neck and people who live there.
Having located myself in this research, I believe that the study has validity. Digby Neck is a fairly typical Atlantic Coastal community. The most important test of vaildity for me has been the validation given by my informants themselves in preliminary and follow-up conversations before and after the interviews. I have also taken pains to secure the validity of this research by triangulating several methods and by taking care that I collect and record data as carefully as possible. Data from census records are combined with data from my own survey results to provide a detailed statistical picture of both the socioeconomic character of Digby Neck, out-migration patterns from Digby Neck, and data concerning the relationship between education and migration in the target population of historic graduates of DNCS. These data are based upon either 99% of the target population in the case of the Basic Data Bank, or 70% of the target population in the case of the Community, Schooling and Migration Survey. This data provides a background and support for participant observation and interviewing which have taken up the bulk of this project.
More importantly for me, though, key questions of research validity are caught up in the response of my “informants,” who are also colleagues and friends engaged in an ongoing struggle to make schooling make sense on Digby Neck in the larger social and economic context of the broader society. The statistical data and interview transcripts have served as the focus for discussions about education and its impact on Digby Neck, and these are questions which have had and will continue to have implications in my own practice as a teacher and, hopefully, in the general character of the community’s response to the challenges it faces.
I also see this work as a political act that is openly attempts to refute the ascendancy of the idea that schooling and schools are and should be standardized. The shift toward standardized notions of accountability always miss what is important about learning in particular places like Digby Neck Consolidated school. Standardized assessments force pedagogical practice into boxes that do not tend to fit very well, and indeed constrain the practice of committed teachers to accountability agendas and regimes of evaluation that fail to establish what children in “backward spaces” actually learn in the course of their lives.
I grew up in an Atlantic Canadian community, which I was actively encouraged (particularly in school) to see as a dying place, a nostalgic site of things that happened in the past, a marginal place whose dismal future was being dictated by developments elsewhere. Ursula Kelly writes that she remembers watching Hockey Night in Canada with her father on Saturday nights in Newfoundland and coming to understand through this experience that nation meant “somewhere else” (1993:57). Kelly goes on to argue the purpose of curriculum is placing Newfoundland students on a larger spatial landscape by presenting the concrete places in which they live as uninteresting, culturally backward and economically marginal. This phenomenon is not new and it has been expressed in anthropological literature (Gans, 19628 ; Hughes et. al., 19609) , as well as by contemporary social theorists like Bauman and Giddens who argue that there is something important about the way space and place are rearranged in modern (or postmodern) societies. Despite their differences, these and other theorists from Foucault and his followers and Raymond Williams have argued that key institutions in contemporary societies work to “disembed” (to use Giddens’ phrasing) individuals, drawing them into larger political landscapes and the discourses that sustain these “massified” or “global” spaces.
8 - Gans writes:
... young people are often forced to choose between their talents and their peers ... On the other hand, representatives of the outside world, such as teachers and settlement house workers, do offer incentives. They encourage the young person to develop his talent and provide opportunities for proper training. At the same time, these care takers also make special efforts to draw gifted West Enders out of the peer group society. (1962: 267)
9 - In an anthropological investigation of life in Digby County based on fieldwork done in the early to mid 1950s Hughes et. al. write:
People must migrate if they are to make anything of themselves. Such is the almost unanimous sentiment regarding chances for youth in the village. The main purpose of education as now conceived is to prepare students for the possibility of a successful position somewhere away from the island (1960: 222).
While the process of “re-placement” is not yet complete, it is well under way. As one longstanding former teacher put it: “well I would imagine that the ones that have done well are someplace else, what would they do here with an education?” Virtually all teachers and community members with whom I have spoken about the connection between education and migration leap immediately to the conclusion that (formal) educationally successful Digby Neckers have always moved away. The few notable exceptions are returnees who have taken post-secondary training, and/or who have lived in other places and returned to the Neck to work mainly as entrepreneurs, professionals or trades people.
Finally, I am deeply troubled by the ambivalent realization that my own teaching practice and the largely unconscious values embedded in that practice and even the routines and values of the institution I represent might be a key component in the demise of the very community they are supposed to serve. I am seeking (in part) in this research to come to know better the impact that my colleagues and I are having in the community we serve, while at the same time coming to know people in that community better and to work with them in their own struggle for community survival and an understandable future for their children. At one level this study is an attempt to understand and attempt to establish solidarity, recognizing the conflicted nature of my own social position as a community school teacher. At another level, it is part of an ongoing conversation with professional colleagues and community friends about educational and community development questions and the all important problem: what to do.
Given my position in the study and in the community, I am not an “objective researcher.” There is no “outside” position from which I can look at questions about schooling on Digby Neck. My interest in the role of the school and schooling in community was not seen by my informants as a passing or a disconnected interest, and they were generally anxious to “help out” a project that concerns the community school. Using Hammersley and Atkinson’s typology of the range of roles available to ethnographers ranging from pure observation to pure participation, my position is, no doubt, closer to participation. I disagree with Hammersley and Atkinson’s claim that feeling, “at home is a danger signal” (1983: 102), and that some level of estrangement, and what they call, “social and intellectual distance,” are necessary for good field research. My approach is closer to the kind of reflexive, practical and thoroughly “interested” practice described by Max Van Manen (1990), Carr and Kemmis (1986), Lather (1986, 1992, 1997), and St. Pierre (1997a, 1997b). Each of these researchers describe forms of educational research that rise out of personal, professional and political challenges of ongoing social life. My identity also has elements of physical work, teaching and community development practice that have a history and which will have a future. This research deals with genuine questions which have arisen out of my ongoing professional practice and my life with people on Digby Neck.
Max Van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience
Van Manen’s sense of social and educational research is admittedly and openly value laden, its purpose is to allow the practitioner, the person directly involved in developing a given practice in a given social situation, the ability to use research as a way to improve that practice (1990). Van Manen’s is a conception of action research aimed primarily at teachers drawing in part on the teacher as researcher movement (Stenhouse, 1975; Carr and Kemmis, 1986). The phenomenological stance taken by Van Manen is to meld the work of coming to know the social world with the practical work of being in the world, so that the research act itself is a “process of becoming” (Van Manen, 1990: 5). Van Manen is addressing teachers who are interested in becoming more skilled practitioners and who wish to develop a thoughtful, self-reflective stance aimed at improving practice. Drawing on Dewey, Van Manen imagines a practice that precedes theory inverting the typical equation which places theory in advance of practice (Van Manen, 1990: 15). We can only “know” in abstract following immersion in the lifeworld by assuming the “natural attitude” which is an attempt to see the world without preconceptions, and then thoughtfully reflecting upon what we find there (Van Manen, 1990: 9-12). The ultimate goal of the kind of action research Van Manen suggests is a return to practice with and new and deeper understanding; thus, practice comes to be transformed into a theoretically informed “praxis” (Van Manen, 1990: 128). This inverts the usual model which sees theory preceding and directing practice.
But the theory/practice inversion is not the only problem. Van Manen claims that another general problem with educational research is that it is out of touch with the lifeworld of schools and trapped in modes of analysis derived from other disciplines (Van Manen, 1990: 135). Education straddles a fine line between professional practice and assuming the status of an academic discipline, and so it has borrowed techniques and procedures from high status disciplines (notably the natural sciences and conceptions of the social sciences which rely upon natural science methods) in hope of securing legitimacy and power. One unfortunate result of this drift has been a loss of a clear sense that schools are about children and the relationships that children have with adults in coming to know the world. To cite Van Manen, In modern forms of human science research in education, children may once again be noticeably present; however, their representation often betrays a lack of true pedagogic commitment to them” (Van Manen, 1990: 139). Van Manen actually invokes concepts unfamiliar and uncomfortable to educational research speaking throughout the text of deep relationships and deep understanding of the bond of love and a relationship of hope which forms a foundation like the parent-child bond, and which by extension, ought to form the basis for the pedagogic relationship between teacher and child. The absence of this kind of deep connectedness and caring is for Van Manen symptomatic of the analytic distance demanded by the “objective” researcher or the “professional.”
Van Manen argues that this way of conceiving the relationship between students and teachers purges the notion of hope from the discourse around schooling replacing it with a nervous, clinical and technocratic language of what amounts to professional responsibility and not the kind of bond of responsibility that encompasses a genuine concern with the growth of a specific and unique individual in one’s care. In Van Manen’s terms, “The problem is that in an age in which the administrative and technological influences have penetrated into the very blood of our lifeworld, teachers and even parents seem to have forgotten a certain kind of understanding: what it means to bear children, to hope for children entrusted to their care” (Van Manen, 1990: 123). Only in a retreat from the narrow technical language embodied in the carefully “aimed” objectivist educational discourse of “administrative convenience,” and the empirical research enterprise which supports and accompanies it can we recapture something of the lifeworld of schools and begin to think about the kind of profound responsibility of nurturing children.
For Van Manen, the retreat from empiricism does not signal a slide into the irrational, the capricious and the purely subjective. Rationality indeed must be maintained on the grounds that its rejection would amount to the destruction of the basis for common understandings which are at the root of what it is to be a social agent (Van Manen, 1990: 16). Following Gadamer, Van Manen suggests that the idea of rationality needs to be broadened so that it might be of use in the human sciences. As such, rationality needs to be expanded beyond the narrow scope given it in the natural sciences. Thus, Van Manen accepts the possibility of rational discourse, but not of a singular, monolithic rational discourse. There are infinite ways of making sense, as many ways as there are people to make it. This presents a problem in terms of the traditional social research preoccupation with reliability, the idea that an objective scientist ought to be able to replicate a study such as this one. I am not convinced that any piece of social research is “replicable,” but I am quite certain that this one is not, at least not without significant investment of time, engagement and energy in a particular community. My past and my future have allowed me to frame questions the way I have and to be able to access the informants I have found. Just as importantly too, the sense that I have a future in the community and particularly in connection with the school has shaped the kinds of conversations I have had with the informants whose words support this research. This research is my story, a narrative told and organized from my perspective and sense of what is important, and the methods I have employed could only be carried out by and “insider.” Replicability of most parts of this study would require an intimate familiarity with a community like Digby Neck because my data was essentially given to me as a gift, and as information that people hope might be used to “help the school.” I had access to community conversations because of my identity as a teacher, and the way material was presented to me reflected local perceptions of what one says to a teacher. Another researcher whose social identity is different would quite probably find a different form of discourse.
This was often made explicit to me in interviews and people told that they were willing to talk to me because they believed I would not “twist” their words or misrepresent their community because I too am part of that community. The key informants who helped me to “track down” former students did so because they know who I am and because they trusted that I would handle the information with sensitivity. And this trust has forced me to think carefully about how I am to represent this community and these people who are my friends, colleagues, former students, and indeed my professional “clientele.” This is indeed, a bias I cannot escape. I will not be leaving the field, I remain there as an engaged participant in the social circumstances I describe.
Van Manen’s “human science” research is an engaged practice, indeed it can only be carried out by practitioners and must be rooted in action, an action which is transformed by research and as a result of considered judgment and reflection upon life in the world. As Van Manen put it, “Phenomenological engagement is always personal engagement” (1990: 156). Research is practice and practice is research.
Following Patti Lather (1986, 1991, 1997) and Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997a, 1997b) I propose that my work as an educator is intimately connected to the research envisioned in this project. In this sense I am proposing what St. Pierre calls “homework,” research among familiar people, in familiar places where I have longstanding commitments and day to day accountability. My colleagues and I are committed to the political work of community revitalization which has led us to think and act in ways that attempt to make explicit the link between rural education and community development. My research is a direct result of this reflective practice and questions about community and schooling raised therein. If schooling is finally about learning to leave the community, then I think we would all be better served by understanding this migration imperative and its implications, how it works and how it is resisted. In this way we might begin to connect this piece of sociological research back into practice rather than watching it used as a policy instrument. As Bauman writes, reflecting C. Wright Mills (1959), this has always been sociology’s best hope.
Freed from the backlash of legislative reason, sociology may concentrate on the task for which - due to the nature of its inquiry - it has always been best prepared. It may ‘come out’ - openly become what it was destined to be all along: the informed, systematic commentary on the knowledge of daily life, a commentary that expands that knowledge while being fed into it and itself transformed in the process. (1992: 144).
Chapter 5
Who stays, who goes and where:
Education and migration on Digby Neck 1963-1998
Education and migration: Demographics
They are great observers. They will walk and see everything. They didn’t move far so their eyes are trained to see the fine detail of a small place ... The old men can describe how the ploughing turns over in a particular field. They recognise a beauty and it is this which they really worship. Not with words - with their eyes. Will these boys be like this when they are old? I’m not sure. Nobody is trying to bring it out in them. Nobody says to them, ‘This is heritage.’ Somebody should be saying to them, ‘Let’s go and look ...’ (Emphasis in original: Blythe, 1969: 72)
The Economy
It is difficult to understand clearly the “rationality” of migration decision making without understanding the nature of the economy migrants leave behind. The nature of the economy on Digby Neck is very different from that found in most other parts of Canada, or even in Nova Scotia. Table 8 demonstrates the heavy concentration of the Digby Neck labour force in fishing
Table 8: Percentage of labour force working in fishing and trapping occupations, 1996.
and trapping related industries. In addition to the concentration that this table shows, the majority of other occupational categories which one finds on Digby Neck are in industries which support the fishery or distribute its products. For example, Digby Neck people listed in census data as working in processing and manufacturing, for the most part (if not exclusively) work in fish plants; those listed in transportation mostly haul fish. The Community, Schooling and Migration Survey shows that the majority (71.3%) of male “stayers” work directly in the fishing industry. This percentage includes the 58.1% of males who fish, the 7.8% who work in fish plants and the 5.8% who work in other fishing related occupations like trucking fish or aquaculture (see Table 9). Female “stayers” work almost exclusively as home makers and in service industries. A considerable number of respondents worked at a variety of different occupations and had some difficulty declaring a “principal” occupation. In a 1965 study of the economic base of Digby County, Harvey noted difficulties involved in investigating an economy dominated by a few
Table 9: Principal Occupations of Digby Neck “stayers” by gender, Community, Schooling and Migration Survey (70% sample, percentages in parentheses).
Male Female Fishing 75 (58.1) 0 Fish Plant 10 (07.8) 3 (05.6) Other Fishing Related 7 (05.4) 1 (01.9) Home maker 0 24 (44.4) Private sector service 15 (11.6) 14 (25.9) Public sector service 7 (05.4) 7 (13.0) Other 15 (11.6) 5 (09.2) TOTAL 129 (99.9) 54 (100.1)
fishing is of considerably greater importance to Digby Neck than to the rest of the county. In fact, fishing is practically the only source of income for Digby Neck if fish processing is also included (1965: 10).
As Davis found in his 1991 study, this concentration on the fishery remains consistent on Digby Neck. Tables 8 and 9 provide updated statistical support for the centrality of the fishery in the area. Table 8 also shows that a large segment of Digby Neck women define themselves as “housewives.” Approximately one-in-four of these women work outside the home and outside family fishing operations in the private sector service industry. Most of these women commute to Digby to work in the private service sector.
While the economy of Digby Neck is still dominated by the fishery, Table 9 shows an increasing reliance on government transfer payments as well as how Digby area incomes compare to those of other Canadians. There are two sorts of local myth surrounding this question. One myth is that fishermen earn a great deal of money although the income is sporadic and uncertain. The other is that fishing is a poorly paid occupation and most of the people working in the fishery are economically marginal. The reality is that the fishery contains its own class structure that has extremes like a few wealthy “fishtocrats” (who manage fleets of boats, large fish quotas, bait and processing facilities as well as trucking operations), and fish plant workers who struggle to find enough work to, “get their stamps” (qualify for Employment Insurance). Historical census data allows comparison of the Municipality of Digby (the municipal district in which Digby Neck lies), Nova Scotia and Canada. Table 10 shows that average incomes, both individual and family for the Municipality of Digby have been approximately one-third less than the national average and approximately 20% less than the provincial average since the early 1970s. In 1970, men in the municipality of Digby reported incomes above the provincial average and 87% of the national average. Women in the municipality earned less than half the provincial average and only about 40% of the national average income for women. By 1980, Digby area women saw their wages rise relative to provincial and national averages, while mens’ earnings decreased in relative terms. For instance in 1971 women in the Municipality of Digby earned one-fifth of their male counterparts income (see Table 10). By 1996 women’s average income rose to 56% of the male average. Since the 1970s, Digby area mens’ wages have remained fairly stable at around 70% of the national average and 80% of the provincial average. In the municipality, womens’ wages peaked between 1981 and 1986 and have hovered at around 75% of the provincial average and 65% of the national average for women.
Table 10: Income levels (in dollars) for Canada, Nova Scotia and the Municipality of Digby, 1971-1996.
Table 9 also shows that while in recent years the percentage of low income earners in the municipality has fluctuated, the percentage of income derived from government transfer payments was more than double the national average between 1986 and 1996. Many residents of the municipality are heavily dependent on government transfers. Census Canada micro data allow a closer look at Digby Neck itself. Table 11 shows unemployment rates for Digby Neck relative to regional, provincial and national rates. Unemployment rates are extremely high for women running at two to three times the national average and at least double the provincial average. As Davis (1991) points out, while the value of landed fish has been increasing fairly steadily since the mid-1970s, the development of a class structure on Digby Neck and nearby Long and Brier Islands (see Figure 1) has led to income disparity. This class structure has been created by the growth of the small boat dragger fleet situated mainly in the western end of Digby Neck. Average family income figures from the 1996 census micro data confirm this hypothesis. As Table 12 shows, average family income increases from east to west along Digby Neck. Still, even the wealthiest area of the Neck 1995 average incomes are significantly below the Nova Scotian and Canadian averages, but slightly above Digby Municipality averages. Eastern and Central parts of Digby Neck are relatively very poor, reporting family incomes of little more than half the Canadian average in the eastern region of the Neck.
Table 11: Unemployment rates, Canada Census micro data 1996.
Male Female Total
Canada 10.2 9.9 10.1
Nova Scotia 13.5 12.9 13.2
Southwest Nova 14.4 16.0 15.1
East Digby Neck 15.4 25.0 24.0
Central Digby Neck 10.0 30.0 16.7
West Digby Neck* 11.1 20.7 15.2
Table 12: Average family income as a percentage of the Canadian average, 1996
Average Std Error Percentage of
family (in dollars) Canadian average
income
Canada $54,583 36 100
Nova Scotia $46,110 138 84.5
Digby Municipality $35,311 1003 64.7
East Digby Neck $28,805 3704 52.8
Central Digby Neck $30,735 2814 56.3
West Digby Neck* $40,118 2203 73.5
Source: 1996 Canadian Census Micro data.
*This census enumeration area includes the communities on Digby Neck west of Little River and Tiverton and Central Grove on Long Island.
The picture is similar regarding individual income for residents of Digby Neck. Table 13 shows personal income data broken down by gender. For men, total income increases moving east to west along Digby Neck. For women, the pattern is different with women living in the eastern part of the Neck earning significantly more than other Digby Neck women, and indeed, more than men in all but the western region. This phenomenon is probably explained by the proximity of this area to the town of Digby and to service and professional jobs. Again personal income figures, like family income figures are well below provincial and and national levels with the exception of men in western Digby Neck and women in Eastern Digby Neck.
Table 13: Income by Sex, Canada Census micro data, 1996.
Total Male Female Canada 26,474 31,917 20,162 Nova Scotia 21,940 26,701 16,322 Southwest Nova 20,662 26,007 13,507 Digby County 17,828 22,517 12,998 Digby Municipality 16,932 21,642 12,038 Digby Town 16,418 20,833 12,809 East Digby Neck 15,345 13,732 17,779 Central Digby Neck 14,013 16,187 10,780 West Digby Neck* 18,648 24,098 11,391*West Digby Neck includes the villages of Tiverton and Central Grove on Long Island.
Given 1996 income and employment figures for women on Digby Neck one would expect their outmigration rates to be high. For men the picture is less clear. Men in the western part of Digby Neck may actually have little to gain economically through migration, particularly short range migration. Digby Neck is a case of a one-industry community where most available employment opportunities have been tied directly to the fishery. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suggest, that for men particularly, formal education had (and may continue to have) limited relevance and economic value.
Educational levels
Local lore suggests that education is not necessary for income security if one is going to stay on Digby Neck. Census Canada micro data also show educational levels for the Digby Neck enumeration areas seem to confirm this notion (see Table 13). Over seventy percent of the total population fifteen years of age and over living in the western section of Digby Neck reported no degree or diploma as of 1996.1 This is nearly twice the national average of 36.8% (Table 14).
1 This designation includes a high school leaving certificate as a “diploma.” Those in this category have not completed high school or any other form of certified post secondary education.
Table 14: Highest degree achieved expressed as a percentage of the population 15+ for Canada, Nova Scotia, and Digby Neck Census Enumeration Areas, 1996.
Yet western Digby Neck reported the highest average male income and the highest average family incomes in 1995, out pacing other areas of Digby Neck by thirty to forty percent. In other words, the part of Digby Neck which has the lowest rate of high school completion, men and families have the highest incomes by a significant margin.
This finding is consistent with the results of a recent analysis of the relationship between education and income in rural communities using 1981 and 1991 Canadian census data (Bollman, 1999). Bollman found a negative relationship between education and income in rural communities supporting the idea that there is a lower “payoff” for formal education in rural communities. Bollman also found that the more “rural,” the community, the lower the average educational levels. For those who wish to remain in their rural communities, the decision to forego higher education actually appears to be economically “rational.” Pittman et. al. (1999) also found something similar in their analysis of the relationship between education and income in rural areas using 1940-1990 United States census data. They found positive correlation between education and 1998 income, but one which was much weaker in rural as opposed to urban areas. Pittman et. al conclude that, “rural educators and citizens should treat as doubtful, claims that educational improvement will lead to improvement in rural economies” (1999: 29).
Other international studies confirm the tenuous link between education and income in rural areas. Jolliffe was also able to establish a similar negative quantitative relationship between schooling and income in rural Ghana (1998), and through fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Demerath investigated the dubious “value” modern rural villagers are attaching to education as a way to give their children better lives (1999). Banerjee found that in rural India, higher levels of formal education were related to higher incomes only for those who migrated to urban areas (1996). Rothstein argues that this disconnection of education and income is a recent phenomenon which is linked in the West to the fiscal crisis of the state (1996). Using the example of Mexico, Rothstein claims that the 1980s and 1990s have seen more youth out of school and forced into the productive economy as compared to the 1950s to 1970s period which saw significant state investment in raising educational levels. The result is a discourse which questions the value of education.
Whereas in the 1970s, the [rural Mexican] community was centred on increasing the education of their children, today the attitude toward education is less positive. People talk about unemployed professionals and comment on how some of the better off members of the community do not have much schooling (Rothstein, 1996: 369)
While education and income may be related in larger populations (for instance at the level of province or nation), the relationship may be one which “works” considerably better in urban areas. For those individuals who wish to remain in the rural regions, the link between learning and earning may not be as simple as simplistic propaganda suggests. Men in coastal communities seem to have been correct when they claimed that those who wished to stay, “didn’t need education” for economic success. When this sentiment and the economic reality it reflects is presented to young men in coastal communities it undoubtedly has clear consequences for school performance. And when these factors are compounded by the retreat of the state from funding the public schools and a general decline in public sector employment and the opportunity to access “government jobs,” it follows that higher education has not been seen as a high priority. In rural communities, particularly those with relatively limited occupational diversity, the strength of public sector employment is very often the basis of rationalising higher education. The question perhaps is not so much whether education is beneficial to people in coastal communities, but rather, what are its benefits for differently placed individuals? It may be true that education is very important for those who wish to migrate, and for women, but not necessarily for those men who remain. In this context, pro-educational discourse may paradoxically be read as an attempt to subvert the economic prospects of a young man and lure him away into an uncertain future away from known world of the community.
Mobility on Digby Neck
Given relatively low incomes, high unemployment rates and a heavy dependence on a single “declining” industry, Digby Neck ought to be a prime example of a community which is losing population to out-migration. Yet, in his analysis of national level 1996 Canadian census data, Finnie found that the smaller the community and the more rural it is, the less mobile are its residents (1998). But this data measures mobility in five year segments. It does not help understand the long term migration behaviour of people who may have left coastal communities never having lived as adults on Digby Neck for instance. My survey of migration from Digby Neck explores a somewhat different form of mobility data. The Community, Schooling and Migration Survey and Basic Data Bank tracked the long-term migration behaviour of all individuals ranging in age from approximately 20 through to 56 who originated on Digby Neck. Thus, we see a snapshot of the migration results for 36 years of students who reached grade 6 in the local elementary school, that is, virtually everyone who grew up on Digby Neck (see Tables 15 and 16). The population does indeed appear to be becoming slightly less mobile through the 36 year period this survey covers; an average of less than 30% of people who grew up on Digby Neck still remain there in 1999. Rather than becoming more likely to emigrate from Digby Neck in times of economic downturn, this data shows the opposite effect. Both the “boom” of the 1980s and the “bust” of the 1990s are accompanied by lower rates of out-migration (see Tables 15 and 16). This would also seem to support Finnie’s analysis of the Canadian Census data (1998). However, with a more than seventy percent out-migration rate, this does appear to be a highly mobile population.
The Canadian Census mobility data and the data presented here are not directly comparable. My data show a longer term of mobility than does the Census Canada data. People left Digby Neck
Table 15: Historic graduates of DNCS remaining on Digby Neck by percentage, Basic Data Bank (99 % data).
Table 16: Out-migration from Digby Neck by cohort and destination, potential graduating classes of 1963-1998, Basic Data Bank (99 % data)
2 - This figure was calculated by subtracting the “away” percentage (17.4%, i.e. those living farther than 250 km from Digby Neck) from the total percentage.
Some communities on Digby Neck also appear to have been more mobile than others. The most mobile community, Sandy Cove, is a part-time home to a mostly transient summer population and
Table 17: Outmigration from Digby Neck by community of origin and present location, potential graduating classes of 1963-1998, Basic Data Bank (99 % data: percentages in parentheses).
to economic rationality arguments about out-migration from Atlantic Canadian coastal communities, that the wealthier communities tend to produce the most mobile populations.
Given that the fishery presents a gendered structure of opportunity, it might be expected that women would have higher rates of migration. On the other hand, this gendered structure of labour and social relations in the community may also result in women being less mobile and less able to break out of gendered role expectations. In her focus group discussions with young rural Nova Scotian women Day actually found these women aspire less than young men to leave their communities despite the dismal future prospects they saw in these communities (1990). Table 18 shows that men were far more likely than women to stay on Digby Neck, but also that women showed a much greater propensity to migrate short distances in the “around here” and “not far regions.” As one school administrator put it: “the girls around here see that the pool of local guys is pretty small, but when they go to Digby or Weymouth there are guys there that look and act like their guys (i.e. the boys from Digby Neck).” The decision to move into the “away” region was taken by roughly similar proportions of each gender (18.4% of men and 16.2% of women).
Table 18: Outmigration rates from Digby Neck by gender and present location, potential graduating classes of 1963-1998, Basic Data Bank
(99 % data: percentages in parentheses).
Male Female Stayers 145 (40.5) 60 (16.9) Around here 101 (28.2) 130 (36.5) Not far 46 (12.8) 108 (30.3) Away 66 (18.4) 58 (16.2) Total 358 (99.9) 356 (99.9)
As work like The Master’s Wife reveals, ‘escape’ has been for ambitious young Maritimers what ‘success’ was for Richler’s Duddy Kravitz - escape not merely from the drudgery of the family farm or fishing boat, but also from the inevitable constrictions of Maritime society. Three avenues of escape have traditionally been open: running away to sea; finding work in New England factories or western cities; or getting an education and going not on, but out to university (Kulyk-Keefer, 1987: 211).
The results I report above are very similar to those found by Dublin in mining communities in the Pennsylvania anthracite region in the United States, where he found that only 15% of the high school classes of 1946-1960, “migrated beyond this narrow band reaching roughly 100-150 miles from Panther Valley” (1998:45). He also found that since the 1960s out-migration has stabilised and the bulk of the population have chosen to remain in the region despite declining economic fortunes. Residents of Dublin’s Panther Valley chose to reject opportunities available through out-migration in order to stay close to family and community networks. Even though they “persisted” in the region, Dublin reports that his study group, now presumably in their late 50s and 60s, encouraged their own children to migrate and pursue formal education.
Choosing to accept the limited economic opportunity available in the anthracite region, persisters indicated the value they placed on family and community networks as opposed to more strictly economic considerations. Still, even as they made these particular choices for themselves, persisters typically encouraged their children to gain an education and leave the area (Dublin, 1998: 52-3).
But Dublin also found that education was proving to be a dubious strategy for the children of his study group. While the relatively strong social safety net protected persisters through the 1980s, it became more “porous and unreliable” in the 1990s. The irony is that migration was also becoming a “less promising strategy” at the same time as recession constricted the economy and job opportunities in urban areas as well.
In the case of Digby Neck a similar pattern can be seen at work. Relatively more Digby Neckers migrated in the 1960s and early 1970s compared to the 1980s and 1990s. The 1960s and early 1970s was a period of transition in the fishery, but not necessarily one in which employment opportunities were significantly less than in previous decades. The population of the Neck was relatively stable and fish landings were on the rise (Davis, 1991). The introduction of the small boat dragger fishery and its consolidation in the 1960s led to increased work in fish plants, fishing support work and crewing on boats. Through the 1970s and 1980s the dragger fishery expanded as did fish landings and processing activity and the population remained stable with out-migration rates actually declining. However, when the fishery began its downturn in the early 1990s, the population of young adults does not appear to be significantly more mobile than were previous cohorts, especially when mobility is defined as moving out beyond the “around here” area. It is quite probable that declining opportunities elsewhere for unskilled labour created this situation exacerbated by cuts to social programs which made it more difficult for marginal young workers to sustain themselves independently away from their families and communities.
Out-migration is not simply leaving poor economic fortunes, it is also moving toward some form of “better” opportunity. It is also possible that education is becoming a prerequisite for migration to urban jobs, and without it, one is destined to remain in place in the coastal community. Without a family habitus that included prolonged secondary and post-secondary experience, young Digby Neckers (especially young men) from non-elite fishing families developed locally-focused socio-spatial identities (Jones, 1999a) in which formal education played little part. At the same time, many young people, especially young men, on Digby Neck see the weak or even negative relationship between earnings and education. Added to this experiential knowledge was widespread exposure via cable television to popular media of the 1980s and 1990s which was highly critical of the formal education system in terms of its ability to give students “marketable skills” even to highly educated
youth.3
3 - Many informants commented on how one was “always hearing” how even educated youth struggled to make a living in urban places. These stories came to Digby Neck largely through mass media, but also through the first-hand accounts of out-migrants who return to visit or to stay.
Tables 19-21 document the relationship between educational attainment and the propensity to migrate. The data for these tables was compiled from the Community, Migration and Schooling Survey. While the foregoing analysis shows some of the contours of the economic, educational and mobility profile of Digby Neck in comparison to trends regionally, provincially and nationally, the central problem for this work is the link between education and migration. Less than one-fifth of the population of Digby Neck has gone “away.” The rest remain within an afternoon’s drive of the Neck. The majority, both male and female, remain within what amounts to not more than a 30 minute drive from the Neck. Is it true that these people who have stayed closer to home have obtained less formal education than their counterparts who migrated “away?”
Comparing the two populations most easily defined as “stayers” and “leavers,” i.e. those still living on Digby Neck and those who have migrated to the “away” region, Table 19 confirms this basic hypothesis. On average, stayers have significantly lower levels of educational attainment than leavers. As anticipated, education is strongly linked with out-migration, particularly at the university level. Out-migrants who moved to the “away” region were more than eight times as likely to have attended university and thirty percent more likely to have graduated high
school.4
Table 19: Highest level of educational attainment and out-migration
from Digby Neck, “stayers” and “away,” Community, Migration and Education survey (70% data)
Stayers Away Less than grade 10 40 (23.8%) 5 (05.7%) Some high school 59 (35.1%) 20 (23.0%) High school graduation 62 (36.9%) 33 (37.9%) Post-secondary 7 (04.1%) 29 (33.3%) Total 168 (99.9%) 87 (99.9%)
4 - This claim is supported using Table 19 by combining the university group (which necessarily graduated high school) with the group whose highest educational attainment is high school graduation. Forty-one percent of “stayers” and 71.1% of “away” migrants fall into this category.
5 - This cutoff point was chosen rather than the Grade 9 division used by Census Canada because in Nova Scotia high school begins with Grade 10.
6 - High school completion rates are calculated by combining university and high school graduate groups.
Table 20: Highest level of education achieved by migration status and gender, Community, Migration and Education Survey (70% data).
One might speculate that educational levels will have changed significantly through the three age cohorts in this study. Table 21 shows a consistent rise in levels of formal education for women across the three age cohorts. High school graduation rates for women have increased from just under 70% in Cohort 1 to slightly over 90% in Cohort 3. The only anomaly in generally increasingly levels of educational attainment is the unexpectedly high percentage of women in Cohort 2 with less than grade 10. This is perhaps explained by the high availability of fish plant work for young women through the boom period. By the mid 1970s women were “getting into the fish” (i.e. fish plant work) more than in previous or subsequent generations. With increased demand for this work which required few formal educational credentials, a greater number of women dropped out before entering high school.
Table 21: Highest level of educational achievement by age cohort and gender, Community, Migration and Education survey (70% data).
Previous analysis has shown that those individuals in the “around here” area have educational profiles similar to those who stayed on Digby Neck. Those who moved into the “not far” region were also found to have educational profiles similar to those who migrated to the “away” region. When the three age cohorts are broken down by migration group the picture is more complex (see Tables 22 and 23). Table 22 shows that educational levels for women “stayers” and “around here” have generally risen. The striking anomaly in data for women in this migration group is the high percentage of women in the university group for Cohort 2. This seems to show that young women in elite fishing families were able to use family resources to access higher education, and that a considerable number of them were able to return to the local area to find employment in the expanding public service sector in nearby Digby. An alternate explanation is that these women acquired educational credentials and returned to the local area to traditional gendered occupations and family roles. The data in Tables 22 and 23 also further explain the anomaly for Cohort 2 noted in Table 21 with men continuing to be under-represented in the university level group. Table 22 also shows a relatively very high percentage of women in Cohort 2 who completed less than grade 10 live in the “around here” region. In fact, this entire population are still within 50 kilometres of Digby Neck.
Table 22: Highest level of educational achievement by age cohort and gender for stayers and “around here,” Community, Migration and Education survey (percentages in parentheses, 70% data).
Table 23: Highest level of educational achievement by age cohort and gender for “not far” and “away” migrants, Community, Migration and Education survey (percentages in parentheses, 70% data).
Summary
Perhaps the most striking finding from this survey is that out-migration flows from Digby Neck have remained stable through the thirty-six years of this investigation. Out-migration rates have actually decreased slightly from the early 1960s to the 1990s on Digby Neck. This seems to support Dublin’s finding that rural communities can act as havens during economic hard times, as well as the Marxist “reserve army” hypothesis. But since the out-migration rate remains remarkably stable throughout fluctuations in the economy of the fishery, it would seem as though economic explanations alone are not adequate and that we must take into account social and cultural factors. Both “good” and “bad” times seem to generate conditions conducive to staying for significant numbers of youth “born and bred” on Digby Neck. The Basic Data Bank data show that most who “migrate,” move only short distances to areas that are culturally and economically similar to Digby Neck. Women are also more mobile than men in terms of settling off Digby Neck. So while the large numbers of women who migrate to the “around here” region do not marry and settle on Digby Neck, they do tend to marry and settle in nearby communities much like those of Digby Neck.
Given the area “around here” is in many respects, a macrocosm of Digby Neck, these data suggest that short range migrations may not really represent movement into a significantly different cultural space. While the “village” no longer exists as an economic and social entity that holds many individuals (particularly women), the local area “around here” does. Short range migrations are not considered by most Digby Neckers to be migrations at all, and indeed, the educational profiles of short range migrants are similar to those who stay on Digby Neck. Nearly two-thirds of the population studied here remained within the “around here” area, within 50 kilometres of Digby Neck. This shows that a majority of Digby Neckers remain within easy reach of their communities of origin, suggesting that this coastal community remains resilient, albeit in a slightly larger geographic space. Digby Neckers are mobile, but at the same time they manage to retain communal bonds from a short distance. As several informants put it: “I didn’t want to go too far.” This phenomenon may itself be a product of an increasingly mobile society. Improved highway travel and communication technology in the past several decades allows individuals to remain connected to their “home” communities while living closer to services, employment and recreational opportunities for their children. It may also represent what Zybmunt Bauman (1998) calls “glocalization,” the mobilization of educated elites and the simultaneous localization and even entrapment of others whose knowledge and economic resources limit them to a restricted geography.
What I am describing above may be part of the fundamental changes in coastal communities which are now organised around small, remote “service centres.” The small town of Digby is the case in point. This community of slightly more than 2000 residents offers a wide and expanding array of services and large retail outlets which service surrounding villages which themselves are simultaneously losing infrastructure, but not necessarily “dying.”7 Fast food franchises and major grocery chains have noticed the potential for consumer business in Digby and through the decade of the 1990s have set up in the community. If postmodern social theorists are correct and contemporary culture is organised around consumption rather than production, then what I am describing here may be the incursion of consumerism into the rural margins. Digby Neckers are quick to point out that they can now, “get anything” one could find in a city in the town of Digby. Indeed, not all urban consumers can access a full range of shopping services within a half hour of their homes. By the late 1990s, it had become as easy to be a consumer on Digby Neck as in many parts of suburbia. Further expansion of the service sector in the Digby area created new (albeit marginal) working class opportunities.
7- For an analysis of the transformation of a rural village in Digby County in the face of industrialization, resource depletion and technological change, see Hornsby, 1996.
While women in the sample are better educated as a group, they are not necessarily in a better economic position, particularly if they stayed on Digby Neck. With the exception of women living in the eastern part of the Neck, all women earn significantly less than their male counterparts despite having much higher levels of formal education. This fact serves to illustrate the tenuous connection between formal education and income i