by Silas Augustine, Larrah Francis and David Gordon Koch

Tim Bernard has dedicated his career to promoting Indigenous culture and self-determination.

Now, he’s working on what might be his most ambitious project yet: a cultural centre that will serve as a home for thousands of Mi’kmaw artifacts and research records, many of them currently located in the United States.

The Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is slated for construction in Debert, N.S., just west of Truro. Plans for the centre have been in the works for decades, part of a vision to protect ancestral sites believed to be around 13,000 years old.

“They’re 13,000 year old sites, but for a long time, our communities were disconnected from those sites,” Bernard said.

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