This exhibit captures a direct statement that, having already harmed Indigenous people, settler society should commit “one more wrong” and remove them from the earth to protect its own idea of civilization.

It is not framed as a private prejudice. It is framed as a civilizational necessity: Native peoples are described as untamed and untamable, and their removal is presented as a final corrective act.

In policy terms, this mindset sits beside the doctrine of erasure. Where the doctrine of erasure seeks to kill the Native identity on paper, the doctrine of elimination imagines a landscape where Indigenous people are no longer present at all — physically, politically, or in public memory.

Together, these doctrines explain why Indigenous families could be both reclassified and pushed off their land: the archive is cleaned, and the territory is cleared.

In Mi’kma’ki, the doctrine of elimination did not always appear as open declarations of mass violence. More often, it operated through policy and practice that made it difficult — and eventually impossible — for Native-rooted families to remain on their districts in recognizable form.

• Land removal and relocation: pressured moves, broken promises, and the concentration of Indigenous families into specific settlements while older districts were opened to other populations.
• Resource and labour control: regulations that restricted access to traditional lands and pushed families into precarious labour categories, making continuity on the land harder to maintain.
• Demographic thinning: disease, targeted neglect, and selective support policies that lowered Native population numbers in certain districts over time.
• Archival disappearance: once families were removed or displaced, later records reflected the new occupants, not the Native-rooted families who had been there for generations.

For corridor families in Kespukwitk, K’jipuktuk, and Chedabucto, this meant that surviving descendants could look back into the archive and see themselves as late arrivals or purely “Black” or “refugee” communities, even when the land record tells a different story.

The doctrine of elimination translated into practical steps that thinned Native presence without always naming it as such. The pattern can be summarized as:

1. Mark a population as a danger or obstacle. Describe Indigenous communities as wild, untamable, or incompatible with “civilization.”
2. Justify extraordinary measures. Frame further harm as a necessary step to correct past wrongs and secure the future.
3. Displace, concentrate, or absorb. Move families off key lands, push them into less visible spaces, or fold them into other categories where their original identity is no longer recognized.
4. Replace the population narrative. Present the new demographic map — and its racial labels — as natural and inevitable, rather than the result of policy.

Once this process is complete, the landscape appears to match the doctrine: fewer Indigenous people in the districts in question, and archives that explain their absence through new language and categories.

The Living Line treats eliminationist rhetoric as a lens, not a conclusion. It shows us what policy was aiming for, but the record of families tells a different story: continuity in the face of planned disappearance.

Surnames such as Simmons, Cain, Smith, Willis, Beals, Downey, Clayton, Roberts demonstrate that Native-rooted presence did not vanish simply because the archive and the demographic map said it should.

By returning to district anchors, land usage, and cross-generational presence, the Living Line identifies where elimination failed — where families remained, adapted, and carried forward identities that official policy tried to erase or remove.

If the doctrine of elimination imagines a land without Native families, the Living Line documents the families who are still here, and the routes by which they were written out of view.