Long before Daniel McGinnis found a depression in the earth in 1795, long before the first French fishermen built cabins near Chester in the 1750s, and long before any European ship entered Mahone Bay, the land that includes Oak Island belonged to the Mi'kmaq. The L'Nu'k, as they call themselves, meaning simply "the people," have lived in what is now Nova Scotia for at least 10,000 years. The area encompassing Oak Island falls within the Mi'kmaq district once known as Segepenegatig, part of a vast territory they call Mi'kma'ki, stretching from the Gaspe Peninsula to Newfoundland. Whatever was built on Oak Island was built on their land.
Megumaagee
The Mi'kmaq understood their land as a living body. In the old tradition recorded by Marion Robertson in Red Earth, the Micmacs imagined Nova Scotia as a mighty giant with one foot at Yarmouth, the other at Gaspe, and his head the island of Cape Breton. They called the territory Megumaagee, derived from megakumegek, meaning "red earth country." This was not empty wilderness. It was a carefully governed landscape divided into hunting districts, each overseen by a chief who assigned territories to families each spring and fall. No hunter was permitted to overstep the bounds of his land, and each killed only what was needed. The preservation of fish and game was a matter of collective survival.
The Mi'kmaq lived close to the sea in summer, fishing for salmon and sturgeon by torchlight and spearing eels through wooden fences built across narrow rivers. In winter they moved inland to hunt moose and beaver in the forest. They navigated the coastline and its islands by birchbark canoe, following routes that had been travelled for thousands of years. Mahone Bay, with its roughly 360 islands, was part of this network. The Mahone Bay Museum records that the Mi'kmaq occupied the area for over 13,500 years, and the 1725 Peace and Friendship Treaty between the Mi'kmaq and the British Crown confirmed their continuing presence and rights in the region.
The Petroglyphs
The Mi'kmaq recorded their world in stone. At Kejimkujik National Park in southwestern Nova Scotia, over 500 petroglyphs have been carved into glacially polished slate outcrops along the shores of Kejimkujik Lake and George Lake, forming one of the largest collections of rock art in eastern North America. The oldest carvings are estimated at 800 to 1,000 years old. The images include caribou, bears, peaked caps traditionally worn by Mi'kmaw women, geometric patterns of double-curve design, and, from the period of European contact, detailed renderings of sailing ships, a French soldier, and a compass pointing in the four cardinal directions. Parks Canada identifies these petroglyphs as the Mi'kmaq history books, carved into rock because the culture relied on oral tradition rather than written language before European contact.
The illustrations reproduced in Robertson's Red Earth were traced from Kejimkujik petroglyphs by George Creed in 1887-1888, the first person to document rock art in Nova Scotia. Among the most significant carvings are detailed representations of Mi'kmaw clothing, canoes, hunting scenes, and spiritual symbols including the eight-pointed star. The Mi'kmaq also developed a hieroglyphic writing system, adapted in the late 1600s by French missionary Chrestien Le Clercq from symbols he observed Mi'kmaq children using on birchbark. This system, later expanded by Abbe Pierre Maillard, is considered the oldest writing system for an Indigenous language in North America north of Mexico.
Glooscap's Farewell
The figure at the centre of Mi'kmaq oral tradition is Glooscap (also written Glous'gap or Kluskap), the embodiment of the Great Spirit who walked among the people as a teacher, warrior, and healer. According to the tradition recorded by both Robertson and RunningWolf, Glooscap's departure from Mi'kma'ki took place on the shores of the Minas Basin in the Bay of Fundy, less than 150 kilometres northeast of Oak Island. In Robertson's account, Glooscap held his farewell feast at Cape d'Or, then travelled to Spencer's Island where he ate his last meal, overturning his cooking kettle and transforming it into a small round island. His two dogs, still sitting on their haunches, he turned to stone. From Spencer's Island he stepped across the water to Blomidon, where he called a great whale to carry him across the ocean to the far land in the west.
In RunningWolf's telling, Glooscap gathered the people and animals on a beach of the Sunrise Ocean and delivered a prophecy. He foresaw three invasions: warriors from the south, raiders from the northwest, and finally, arriving in enormous canoes from across the Great Waters of the Sunrise, bearded white men who would take the land away. He promised to return and to raise the people from their burial mounds. The assembled crowd listened carefully, knowing they must remember every word, and then Glooscap paddled north in his white canoe, which sometimes appeared as an ordinary canoe and sometimes took the form of a whole island. The whale Bootup swam alongside him for a time, then fell back, and Glooscap disappeared over the horizon.
Oak Island and the Mi'kmaq Record
The question of whether the Mi'kmaq used or visited Oak Island itself remains open. One source, a Clio heritage review, states plainly that there has been no evidence of Indigenous activity on the island and no myths about it in Mi'kmaq culture. The island was apparently left untouched before European settlement. Yet in Season 9 of The Curse of Oak Island, archaeologist Laird Niven recovered a fragment of pottery from the swamp area that he identified as Mi'kmaq in origin, potentially 500 to 2,500 years old. The discovery triggered an immediate halt to excavation under Nova Scotia heritage regulations, and the Acadia First Nation Council sent representatives to review the site. Work in that section of the swamp was suspended until the matter was resolved.
The pottery find raised a possibility the team had not previously considered in a serious way: that the island's history may extend further back than European contact. If the Mi'kmaq were present on Oak Island centuries before 1795, they may have witnessed or recorded activities on the island that predate any European arrival. The Mi'kmaq oral tradition is vast and ancient, and much of it remains within the community rather than published in academic sources. Whether stories exist that relate specifically to Oak Island, to unusual activity in Mahone Bay, or to structures built by unknown visitors on the islands of the southern shore is a question that only the Mi'kmaq themselves can answer.
Jimmy Kaizer
One Mi'kmaq name does appear directly in the Oak Island story. Jimmy Kaizer, a local Mi'kmaq man, worked as a labourer for Robert Restall during his ill-fated treasure hunt in the early 1960s. When the Restall tragedy struck in August 1965, killing Robert Restall, his son Bobby, Cyril Hiltz, and Carl Graeser in a shaft filled with carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulphide gas, it was Jimmy Kaizer who retrieved the bodies. He subsequently worked as a night watchman for Robert Dunfield. In late 1965, while sleeping in the Restalls' old cabin, Kaizer reported waking to the sound of the cabin shaking violently. He felt a heavy weight pressing on his chest and saw a pair of red eyes staring down at him. A voice told him to leave the island and never return. In the morning, he found himself covered in bruises, one pattern resembling the impression of a hand.
The story is typically presented on the show as a ghost story, part of the island's curse lore. But it sits within a broader Mi'kmaq spiritual tradition in which the land itself communicates with those who listen. Glooscap's world was one in which animals spoke, stones held power, and the boundary between the physical and the spiritual was thin. The petroglyphs at Kejimkujik were carved at sites the Mi'kmaq considered places of power. In the oral tradition, fairies called megumoowesoo lived in the rocks near water and were said to be the creators of the carvings. Whether one interprets Jimmy Kaizer's experience as a paranormal event, a Mi'kmaw spiritual encounter, or the lingering trauma of a man who had just pulled four dead bodies from a hole in the ground, it connects Oak Island to the Mi'kmaq world in a way that the treasure narrative rarely acknowledges.
The Land Before the Treasure
The Mi'kmaq did not need Oak Island to contain treasure for it to hold meaning. Their relationship with the land was not extractive but reciprocal, governed by customs that had been refined over hundreds of generations. They buried their dead in round holes four or five feet deep, lined with fir and cedar, accompanied by bows, arrows, snowshoes, and beads, so that the spirits of these things might travel with the departed into the land of souls. They read the stars as stories: the four stars of the Big Dipper were Mooin the Bear, fleeing across the northern sky each summer, pursued by seven hunters, three of whom (Robin, Chickadee, and Moose Bird) always kept the trail while the other four dropped away as autumn arrived. When Robin finally caught the Bear, her blood stained his breast red, and the falling drops coloured the autumn leaves below.
For over two centuries, the story of Oak Island has been told exclusively as a European story: pirates, Templars, Freemasons, Bacon, the French Crown. The Mi'kmaq, when they appear at all, are a footnote. But they were there first, and they were there for 10,000 years before anyone dug a pit or built a flood tunnel. Whatever Oak Island's secret turns out to be, it exists within a landscape that the Mi'kmaq shaped, named, governed, and held sacred long before the first European set foot on its shores. Their story is not a footnote. It is the first chapter.
