Masters of our own destiny

In 1939, Moses Coady of St. Francis Xavier published the book that gave the Antigonish Movement its slogan, Masters of Their Own Destiny. Eighty-seven years later it's still a remarkable document, a foundational guide to community-building through collective action. I think about it more than I expected to as I built the Reel.

It's worth remembering what eastern Nova Scotia looked like in the 1930s. This was a place where you could work hard your whole life while the price of your food, the wage in the pit and the interest on your store debt were all set by people you'd never meet. The coal mines and fisheries were struggling and people were packing up and leaving in search of better options. Everyone could see where it was headed, and nobody with the power to change it seemed to care, if they even lived anywhere nearby.

What the movement did about it sounds almost too plain to have worked. Jimmy Tompkins had been insisting since the early twenties that what ordinary people lacked wasn't ability, it was access to knowledge. His 1921 pamphlet was called Knowledge for the People, and the People's School he pushed into existence that same winter brought fifty-one students to StFX for three months of economics and agriculture. Coady took these ideas and put them to action. A public meeting in the parish, then a small study club through the winter, then whatever the club decided to build: a store, a fish plant, a credit union. By 1931 there were 173 study clubs going across 43 parishes. Nova Scotia's first two credit unions opened in 1932, and by the end of the decade there were about a hundred and fifty. That's what our communities did: built for ourselves what no one else would.

Notice that they always started with information. First the community had to see its own situation clearly, and only then decide what to do about it.

In 1930, the essentials a community needed to hold were the institutions and mechanisms of the economy. Think about what they are now. Today the problem is technological: over the last few decades we've allowed our local information to be controlled by algorithms and websites built far away. Those apps and feeds are designed to keep our attention, not to inform us. It's hard to know what's happening on Main Street when that information won't drive platform engagement.

The Reel isn't going to solve that problem, but I hope that, in the spirit of people like Coady and Tompkins, it's a part of the solution. But that's the whole thing, a community can solve its problems only when it works together. The Reel is being built and grown on a very simple idea: the belief that we can build a future for ourselves, because this community is too important to leave its future in anyone else's hands.