Celebrating the Cod "Makers"

Cod bless the Queen, but our money bills need another female face to represent our country.

Recent polls show there are  regional preferences  by Canadians as to which Canadian woman gets to grace the new bank note series which will be rolled out in 2018.

The Bank of Canada has settled on a list of 12 names that were submitted to make their final choice. 

You wont find any women's name from NL on that list; but many believe that there is a "woman" worthy of consideration. 

The piece below was prepared to send to the Bank's online submission site, but the  guidelines stipulated it had to be a "real woman". 

The "Makers of Fish" were all real.   These individual outport women had hundreds of names and dreams.  Day in and day out, they toiled through the "hard racket" of making fresh fish brought to shore by fishermen into a cured product sent around the world.  

According to Heritage.NL website, nearly 25,000 women (38% of the total), worked in the fishery in 1921. In some communities, the percentage of females working in the fishery was even higher.  The site also acknowledges an often forgotten reality: 

"In the inshore fishery, women's toil often made the difference between survival and starvation."

It is time these iconic women were collectively honoured for their singular effort in helping to build our province - if not by the Bank of Canada, then by our own people and government in some way or another.  

Our fisher-maker women ancestors deserve the credit they did not receive in their own lifetime, not just here in NL, but across the country.  

Collectively, across a number of centuries, these cured Cod makers from outports throughout NL changed the world! 

|KP

For centuries Newfoundland’s famous salted-Cod was cured  in hundreds of outport communities and shipped around the world to feed much of Europe and many in the Caribbean.  While history has traditionally afforded the men of the sea and the merchants the tribute of turning this fish into a commodity, it truly took a village to "make fish".

Newfoundland women made up the "shore crew" of this family-based fishery as they tended to the task of carefully curing the Cod. 

This labour-intensive process took a great deal of preparation, organization, time, knowledge and skill to ensure a good food product. And, it was primarily Women who were at the centre of the Cod Curing Community,  co-producers of one of the most valuable commodities in the world at the time.  

Long tiring hours were spent at the flakes, oftentimes with small children in tow or underarm. In between the "making of fish", these fish makers had family, domestic and community commitments.

These women were in essence the heart and soul of the Newfoundland Cod fishery across 500 years. Yet, the backbreaking work of our fishmaker-women ancestors was often credited to their husbands or fathers. 

Without their remarkable contribution, families and coastal communities would not have survived and thrived; and we would not be proud "People of the Cod" and a province of Canada; and nor would our society and our Cod have changed the world, as our history so aptly illustrates.

We invite the Bank of Canada to place an iconic woman  representing all "makers of fish" on the Canadian currency.

|KP