Everything you ever wanted to know about Pomquet!

We sat down with Colette Rennie and Charlie MacDonald to talk about Pomquet's past, present, and the salmon-supper-fille future!

This episode marks something of a first: Justin and Anuj pack up the recording equipment and head out of town — fifteen minutes down the road, as it turns out — to chat with Colette and Charlie inside the Pomquet Community Centre. It’s a fitting location. The centre itself is part of the story they’ve come to tell.

First, Some History

Pomquet is a small, predominantly Acadian community of roughly a thousand people, nestled around two harbours — Monks Head Harbour and Pomquet Harbour — and St. George’s Bay. It was settled in 1774 by five founding Acadian families, though the Mi’kmaq were living there long before any of that. The name “Pomquet” is of Mi’kmaw origin and translates ‘hitting bumps in the water’, referring to the beginning of the formation of the dunes that form Pomquet Beach.

The Acadian origin story requires a little untangling, and Colette does it clearly. The Acadians were not French. They were descended from the first French-speaking settlers to arrive in the Maritimes in the early 1600s — people who, over five generations, developed their own distinct culture, language, and identity entirely separate from France. Then came the British deportations between 1755 and around 1762, when they were expelled back to a country (and to other parts of the world) that was no longer theirs. After years of difficult resettlement in France, a group came back to what had been their home. They likely initially arrived in Arichat, Cape Breton and then travelled to Havre Boucher and Tracadie, before moving westward to settle in Pomquet.

The Language Inside the Language

Pomquet is still a French-speaking community, but the French spoken here is Acadian French — a distinct dialect that preserved old words and expressions long since lost in France, and absorbed some Mi’kmaq vocabulary along the way. Colette offers two examples: bitan or hardes, the Acadian word for clothes, which a standard French speaker would not recognize, and porc-épic — that’s the standard French for porcupine — which in Pomquet is still called madouesse, from the Mi’kmaq word, because the Acadians had never encountered the animal before arriving here and simply adopted whatever the Mi’kmaq called it.

The dialect is, however, slowly changing. Surrounded by English-speaking communities and with decades of outmigration and intermarriage, the level of daily spoken Acadian French has diminished. Charlie is candid about it: Pomquet is not Chéticamp or Île Madame. The community holds its own Development Society meetings in English because some members don’t speak French. The language is still present, but it lives more with the older generations now, and the community has largely made peace with that — or at least, is finding a way to work with it rather than against it.

The School Is the Anchor

The most important institution for the language’s survival is École Acadienne de Pomquet, the Acadian school that operates under the CSAP — the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial — with schools scattered across Nova Scotia. This is not a French immersion school. It is a French school: everything happens in French, announcements included, with a single English course introduced after grade four. The school drew nine graduates in Charlie’s graduating class. This year’s graduating class numbers twenty-six — the largest in the school’s history.

Families are coming from beyond the community to enrol their children here. Some have Acadian roots they want to reconnect with. Others are multicultural families who simply want their children to have a genuine French education in smaller classes with more individual attention. The emerging challenge, as Charlie notes, is that when parents don’t speak French, they can’t help a child with homework — a math problem explained in French is its own kind of puzzle for an English-speaking parent staring at it at the kitchen table.

Chez DesLauriers and the Friday Lunches

If the school is Pomquet’s anchor, Chez DesLauriers is its calling card to the outside world. The property — an old homestead belonging to one of the founding Acadian families was purchased by local journalist Kingsley Brown and then, in an act of considerable foresight, sold to the provincial government so that the entire coastline from Pomquet Beach to Antigonish Harbour is now permanently protected. The Pomquet Development Society leases an acre and the old farmhouse for a nominal fee, and over twenty years has turned it into a tea room, interpretive centre, outdoor stage, and wedding and events venue.

The Friday Acadian lunches held there each summer are now something of a regional institution — traditional Acadian cuisine at reasonable prices, drawing people from across the province. They started with 35 people, which felt like an enormous success at the time. They now regularly serve over 200 each Friday. The problem became too many people rather than too few, and they stopped advertising. COVID took a significant toll on the volunteer base, so the lunches now run on four Fridays in late July and August rather than the full summer program they once had. The view from the site — looking out over St. George’s Bay toward Cape Breton — is worth the drive on its own.

The Salmon Suppers Are Back

The centrepiece of this summer’s news is the return of the Pomquet salmon suppers as part of Pomquet Come Home Days, running August 14th to 16th. The suppers were once a full community institution, run by the Pomquet Ladies Club for decades, drawing over 1,200 people on a single Thursday evening at their peak. The last one took place in 2006. The Ladies Club has since disbanded; many of the volunteers who made those suppers happen are no longer with us.

Last summer, the Pomquet Development Society brought the supper back for the first time in nearly twenty years, not knowing quite what they were getting into. They served over 420 people. The surviving members of the Ladies Club, who had spent decades working those suppers, got to sit down and eat salmon themselves for once. Charlie describes it as one of the more meaningful moments of the whole initiative.

This August, the supper returns on the Sunday (August 16th), with Saturday featuring a full day at Chez DesLauriers — live music, fireworks, bouncy castles, fricot, and barbecue as part of Acadian Day celebrations – le 15 aout. The Friday kicks off the weekend with the last Acadian lunch of the season. People from Halifax have already called to reserve spots for the supper.

The Community Centre

Justin admits he had no idea the community centre existed before today, which is probably true of a lot of Antigonish residents. It’s attached to the school and houses a large hall with a stage and full kitchen that seats up to 200, two meeting rooms, a gym with memberships available to the public, and a museum being opened this summer with the help of a hired summer student.

The building came about through an $800,000 community capital campaign, supported by the federal and provincial governments and the CSAP. The CSAP covers the operational costs — heat, lights, plowing — which means the community organizations that use the space don’t have to fundraise just to keep the doors open. They can put their energy into culture instead.

Crib tournaments run every two weeks in summer. Chase the Ace happens weekly. The winter carnival events are held here. Weddings, birthday parties, and community fundraisers fill the calendar.

Where It’s All Going

Asked about the future, Charlie and Colette are honest: assimilation is real, it’s ongoing, and it can’t be stopped by willing it not to happen. What the school has done is delay the process and give the community a generation of young people with roots in something. The goal now, as Charlie frames it — and as the museum project reflects — is to keep the stories alive for people who may never speak Acadian French but who are still part of this place. Colette points out that the definition of community in 2026 is different from what it was in 1726, and that might actually be a beautiful thing rather than something to mourn.

The closing advice from both guests is simple: come for a Sunday drive. The lawns in Pomquet are notoriously well-kept. The harbours are beautiful. Stop and talk to whoever you see walking. Stop for an ice cream on your way to Pomquet Beach. Visit Chez Deslauriers and take in the breathtaking views. And if you want to get involved, you don’t need to be Acadian, or French-speaking, or even connected to the place by family. You just need to show up.

For more information visit pomquetcommunity.ca or find Société Saint-Croix and Centre historique acadien de Pomquet on Facebook.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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