This is a translation of the eleventh blog post in the Wetland Wednesday series, edited by Gabrielle McLaren. The piece was originally written and posted in French.

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A particular place-name has survived in historically francophone North American territory: the barachois.¹ Imported with European colonization, this word evokes a brackish wetland with a retro littoral zone, separated from the sea by a barrier of pebbles, sand, or mixed substrate but connected to it by a channel (a goulet, or grau). 

The French archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off the Grand Banks in Southern Newfoundland, still holds several traces of this particular geomorphological formation, found on the low-lying coasts of the Atlantic Provinces, Québec, and this archipelago. The barachois were once protected harbours suitable for small merchants and fishing fleets, while also being idea for the establishment of trading posts and colonies. They are also habitats, rich in a variety of exploitable flora and fauna species. Over the centuries, coastal micro-socio-ecosystems have developed and evolved with the barachois at their core. These barachois have undergone a variety of changes, and are complex, dynamic systems undergoing numerous socio-economic, political, and ecosystem changes. Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon is an open-air historical laboratory for observing and analysing these changes—an overview of which I will give in this blog post. 

Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon est un laboratoire historique à ciel ouvert pour observer et analyser ces évolutions.

The barachois: a colonial front from land to sea

When settlers (particularly Basques, Bretons and Normans) arrived from France to the fish and game-rich waters of the archipelago from the 1600s onwards, they sought low-lying, protected coasts to establish fishing posts and colonies. Several barachois suited their purposes, such as the Saint-Pierre barachois, where the headquarters of the local French colony were established. Wharfs, quays and slipways were built at the bottom of the barachois, protected from swells (and the English) by a series of barrier islands, islets and flats that were more or less out of the water depending on the tides. The Navy’s Newfoundland and Iceland Naval Division and the Colonial administration (that is to say the Governor of the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon) played an increasingly important role in understanding and controlling the barachois. 

The barachois was spatially fixed by human hands when a harbour was built in Saint-Pierre: the interface between land and sea, which had been relatively fluid, was solidified. As hydrographic engineers began to map them, the list of barachois begins: the Saint-Pierre barachois, the Savoyard barachois, the Grand barachois de Miquelon, the Petit barachois de Miquelon, the Petit barachois de Langlade, and so on. 

The emergence of a multiplicity of ‘barachois’ 

The barachois was increasingly associated with a range of categorical attributes and meanings, political and socio-economic as well as ecosystemic and geomorphological. “Barachois” was to evolve from a linguistic category (in which “barachois” is a toponym used in the French-speaking colonies of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, also of uncertain linguistic origin²), to a cartographic category, to a category of colonial intervention, and more. Settlers began demarcating the archipelago’s barachois and observing them, while at the same time continuing to develop them. A great deal of work was done to understand the barachois. They were especially photographed, as they constituted a particular type of coastal formation uncommon for the French metropole. In 1903, Doctor Michaël Dhoste (1877-1948), who had studied medicine at the Naval and Colonial Health Service School in Bordeaux, was appointed as health officer on the archipelago. An avid documentary photographer, he corresponded regularly with the Bordeaux medical school museum, to which he sent numerous glass plates. In 1904, he photographed the barachois at Miquelon-Langlade, which had become picturesque under the winter snows and ice.³

The geological and geomorphological complexity of the archipelago’s barachois also began raising questions. Instabilities in these ecosystems, particularly in terms of the circulation of sediment and currents, caused problems for infrastructure and could potentially jeopardise settler developments. The barachois at Saint-Pierre was closed off as far as possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a system of dykes built on the barrier beaches and islets. In 1965, an airport was also built on the eastern marsh connecting the upper reaches of the Saint-Pierre barachois to Etang Boulot (in the Graves district, where cod was dried on the rocks). Filling in the upper reaches of the barachois and channelling the gullies helped settlers tame local nature. 

Geomorphological studies were undertaken as of 1979 to decipher the archipelago’s barachois, led by the geography department of the Université de Sherbrooke.⁴ Coastal profiles were drawn up, and the shoreline and its sedimentary drifts, accretions, and erosions were mapped. Locally, barachois became a relatively comprehensive geomorphological category, since it applied to lagoons of varying sizes, with or without associated watercourses.⁵

The Grand barachois between Miquelon and Langlade was particularly intriguing because of the complexity of its currents, with internal tidal channels and an external emptying delta. Two major threats to the barachois were identified: the break-up of the isthmus that protects it on its western side (especially through storms and rising sea levels),⁶ and its filling in through sedimentation and eutrophication in certain tidal channel heads.⁷

These surveys and expert studies continue to this day. Ongoing environmental and socio-economic changes have led local authorities to classify barachois as grounds for public intervention: public authorities must protect barachois in the interests of nature conservation, but also to ensure that certain human uses continue. Barachois have become a political category, caught up in Nature-Culture controversies that often go beyond them. Here, the coastline must be protected to combat erosion, rising sea levels and storms that are more violent as a result of climate change. There, the barachois should be used as a resting place for birds. Over there, the barachois must be preserved as a fishing site during low tide, while elsewhere we may need to regulate the proliferation of seals as their faeces accelerate the filling in of the sea, and could cause a large-scale zoonosis in the future… 

This political category is mirrored by a distorted scientific category, which now goes beyond the solely geomorphological: the local socio-ecosystems of the barachois need to be understood in their entirety, and so attention needs to be paid to the complexity present in all its dimensions. Several contemporary multidisciplinary projects are underway, to this effect.

Les barachois deviennent une catégorie politique, ballotée dans des controverses Nature-Culture qui les dépassent fréquemment.

The barachois “before” the barachois

The barachois have also long been used for more extractive purposes. The archipelago’s settlers were long and well aware that these backshore wetlands are important reservoirs of biodiversity which could be exploited for food. The barachois areas of the archipelago are visited year round as human use follows the natural cycles of the seasons, animal migrations and related vegetative growth. Hunting huts (particularly for water and sea game) and fishing huts are set up seasonally, leading to a popular category of barachois.⁸ People go there to fish for shellfish at low tide, and to harvest boëtte, which is used to bait cod lines for Miquelon’s small-scale fishermen. In summer, people also go to the barachois to pick fruit and berries in the Buttereaux, the large fixed dunes that frame the Grand barachois to the west, especially around the Butte aux Berrys. The barachois is a local cosmological category, associated with the free, seasonal and wild (as opposed to domestic) uses of nature for food.

Indigenous people had long integrated hunting in the barachois in their seasonal activities. They historically hunted birds, fished, particularly for shellfish, and also hunted marine mammals, as evidenced by a number of local archaeological sites.⁹ The Mi’kmaq community used the Grand barachois de Miquelon for seal hunting, which they included in local seasonal hunts for whales, birds and other animals.¹⁰

One of the first ways of thinking and understanding the barachois was therefore an Indigenous cosmological category. In the Mi’kmaq language, barachois were originally called ipsigiaq, reflecting the barachois’ categorical anteriority, even before the arrival of the Western toponym. The Mi’kmaq community of Conne River (NL), the Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi First Nation, presented the people of Miquelon with a traditional canoe in 2004, which now hangs in the village church. It is sculpted, painted and engraved with a number of non-humans emblematic of the coastal bestiary of this sub-boreal region: whale, bear, duck, eagle, fish, some of which populated or still populate, the archipelago’s barachois. 

Dans la langue mi’kmaq, barachois se dit, originellement, ipsigiaq, traduisant l’antériorité catégorielle de la représentation des barachois, avant même l’arrivée du toponyme occidental.

All these elements reflect forms of spatial, temporal, and categorical continuity and discontinuity within the coastal socio-ecosystems that are the barachois. They demonstrate that barachois are important sites of dynamic interactions between humans and nature, which are constantly evolving in their intrinsic complexities. Over and above these factual interactions, these coastal wetlands play a part in local identities, and are symbolic spaces for the coastal communities that have used them for centuries.

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References

1. Rayburn, A. (1972). Caracteristic of Toponymic Generics in New Brunswick. Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 16(38), 285-311. ↩︎
2. See the hypotheses formulated by Massignon et Brasseur : Massignon, G. (1947). Les parlers français d’Acadie. French Review, 45-53 ; Brasseur, P. (1986). Quelques aspects de la toponymie des îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. 450 ans de noms de lieux français en Amérique du Nord, 541-549 ↩︎
3. On this topic, see the diachronic comparison of photographs carried out by Roger Etcheberry, in association with the Ethnography Museum of the University of Bordeaux.: Etcheberry, R. (2019). Photos de Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 115 p. ↩︎
4. Dubois, J. M. M. (1980). Géomorphologie des îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon : premier rapport d’étape. Université de Sherbrooke, Département de géographie. ↩︎
5. Guay, R. (1970). Choronymie thématique : le Barachois. Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 14(32), 252-256 ↩︎
6. Cerema Eau Mer Et Fleuves (dir.), Sylvain Lendre, Boris Leclerc, Amélie Roche, Alain Le Bars, et al.. Dynamiques et évolution du littoral : Fascicule 11 : Synthèse des connaissances de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. [Rapport Technique] CEREMA. 2020, pp.233 ↩︎
7. Le Moine, O., Geairon, P., Robert, S., Coudray, S., Fiandrino, A., Goraguer, H., & Goulletquer, P. (2019). Rapport 2018 Ifremer. Evolution des lagunes de Saint Pierre et Miquelon. Dynamique de renouvellement des masses d’eaux du Grand Barachois.  ↩︎
8. Joncas, G. (2001). Barachois : Quand étymologie savante et étymologie populaire se confrontent…. Québec français, (124), 99-101. ↩︎
9. Le Doaré, M. (2019). Rapport de prospection archéologique. Analyse des données par télédétection par LIDAR de l’archipel de Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, SRA Bretagne, CNRS UMR 6566 CReAAH, Rennes, 312 p. ↩︎
10. Martjin, C. A. (1989). An eastern Micmac domain of islands. Algonquian Papers-Archive, 20. ↩︎