In 1752, Governor Edward Cornwallis ordered a halt to bounty hunting in the province. At a Council meeting held at the Governor's house on Friday, July 17, 1752, it was resolved that a proclamation be issued to forbid hostilities against the Indians.

"Whereas, by the advise and consent of His Majesty's Council of this Province, two Proclamations were, by me, sometime since applied, authority and commanding (for reasons set forth in the said Proclamations) all Officers, Civic and Military, and all of His Majesty's Subjects within this Province, to annoy, distress, take and destroy the Savages called the Mickmack Indians, and promising a reward for each one of them taken or killed....

And whereas, for sometime past no hostilities have been committed by the said Indians against any of His Majesty's Subjects, and some overtures tending to peace and amity have been made by them, I have thought fit, with the advice and consent of His Majesty's Council to revoke the said Proclamations, and every part thereof, and further do hereby strictly forbid all persons to molest, injure or commit any kind of hostility against any of the aforesaid Indians...."

If by reading this document anyone concludes that Cornwallis had suddenly become a humanitarian they should think again. The government of the powerful Massachusetts Bay Province wanted peace with the Mi'kmaq, and therefore he had no choice but to halt hostilities. In fact, the Massachusetts Bay Governor was probably instrumental in pressuring Cornwallis to later resign.

Although Cornwallis's barbarity is well documented, much of it by his own hand, up to the year 2004, no White jurisdiction had ever condemned him for it. In fact, only honours have been given to the memory of the author of the 1749 scalping proclamation by authorities in Nova Scotia and Canada . A statue of him is displayed in a park located across from the railway station in Halifax, and schools, streets, ships, a naval base, and so on have been named after him. In view of this, I ask, and will continue to ask, how can my country, which claims to be civilized, award such honours to a man who authorized ethnic cleansing? In my estimation the only award such an individual deserves is the gallows. From a civilized point of view, only a person subscribing to the same White supremacist beliefs that Cornwallis and Hitler subscribed to would believe that killing "inferiors" is incidental.

What troubles me most about this terrible time for the Mi'kmaq is that not one Caucasian male writer who recorded it ever expressed any regret or remorse or shock about the horrors that were done. How could they read such works of evil and not react with revulsion? However, in modern times there appears to be some movement by males to take another look at some of the indefensible acts performed by the English back then and make some unflattering comments. For instance, Professor Jeffery Plank, states:

"...everyone involved understood the conflict to be a race war...During the 1750s the politics of Nova Scotia centered on issues of national identity. At various times during the decade, the British engaged in combat with several different peoples who inhabited, or passed through, Nova Scotia: The Micmac, the French... and the Acadians... The British governors of Nova Scotia generally believed that they were surrounded by enemies, that the Acadians, the Micmac and the French would soon find a way to cooperate and overthrow British rule. One of the principle aims of British policy, therefore, was to keep these people separated, to isolate the Micmac, the Acadians, and the French. To achieve this goal of segregation, the colonial authorities adopted two draconian policies. In 1749 the governor began offering bounties for the scalps of Micmac men, women and children. The aim of this program was to eliminate the Micmac population on the peninsula of Nova Scotia, by death or forced emigration. In 1755 the British adopted a different, but related strategy: it deported the Acadians, and relocated them in safer colonies to the west."

"Viewed in the abstract, these two programs, to pay for the deaths of the Micmac and to relocate and absorb the Acadians, represented very simple thinking. The colonial authorities who endorsed these programs placed the inhabitants of Nova Scotia into two categories, Europeans and savages, and treated them accordingly.

Cornwallis made it a capital crime "to be a Micmac."