By Tom Ayers - The Cape Breton Post

Sydney - The umbrella organization representing museums and heritage groups across Cape Breton Island is looking to gather together as many people as possible to agree on ways to make heritage programs and infrastructure sustain able.

The lona Connection Heritage Co-operative has received a provincial grant and hired a consultant to hold focus group meetings in each of the four counties next month, asking participants for ideas on the future of heritage protection and promotion.

An interim report is expected to be ready at the Iona Connections annual general meeting later in April and a final report is expected to be ready for implementation in October.

No understanding of the people of Cape Breton Island is possible without some awareness of its earliest settlers. Cape Bretoners today reflect the tenacity of those pioneers - whether their roots be Mi’kmaq, Acadian, Scottish Gaelic, Irish or Loyalist. The Island has shaped them just as they strove to shape the Island. Since then settlers have arrived from all over the world and have made their own distinct contributions to the Island.

But the monuments to the earliest settlers are the most evident. They lie in the steep hillside pastures so laboriously cut from forest; they lie in the direct gaze of men and women reared on the Atlantic shore; they lie in the ancient Mi’kmaq, Gaelic and Acadian languages; they lie in the music and dance, the lilts and airs with their echoes of Scottish Islands and Acadian hamlet, But they are most easily discerned in those tributes to their forebears that Cape Bretoners have built themselves - the museums and heritage sites in which Cape Bretoners have lovingly gathered the artifacts which hold dear memorial for them and which at the same time chart Cape Breton’s past - often tranquil, sometimes tempestuous, always hard.

It is too easy to visit Cape Breton Island and miss some or many of these special monuments to the Islands’ cultural and natural past. To do so would be to diminish your appreciation of this Island and the richness of your visit. It is for this reason that the lona Connection - prompted also by pride in its heritage - draws your attention to travel roads that will allow you to see the most; to see how the past has shaped our Island’s present and prepares us for the future.

There are few areas where people of such diverse background have so quickly acquired so unified an identity. Perhaps in your travels around the Island, as you meet the people and examine their heritage, you may begin to discern the reason why.

But whether you do or not the search will be its own reward.

We hope you will enjoy your journey to the past.