Today, they took the statue down

in Kjipuktuk, or Halifax town

in Mi’kmaki, mapped as Nova Scotia

along the stormy Atlantic Ocean

Where did it begin? This need

to raise up monuments to men

who call for deaths of other men

and women and children and ways

and lay a bounty on our scalps

Where did it begin? The tale

that Indians Take Scalps, when

all the while, Cornwallis

and his English colonial thugs

paid silver for our lives, small change

traitors to humanity, and to treaties

Where did it begin? the notion

that people from beyond the ocean

should be welcomed here, and given

Treaties of Peace and Friendship, under which

they were granted a place for cod houses, a place

to land, to work the sea, to prosper in their way

in trust that we had more to gain, by such

alliance than by destroying them, as…