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In Newfoundland, fishing villages are known as outports, and the outport where we were heading was Summerville, off the Indian Arm of Bonavista Bay.

Yolande Pottie-Sherman, a researcher and geography professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, said resettlement poses important questions: should remote communities and outport culture be kept alive, and at what – and whose – expense?

He ended the four-hour cruise at his own cabin built in the resettled outport of English Harbour, a creekside clearing of fallen sheds fronting a white-capped bay ringed in silent forests.

If you were to ask a fisherman of some remote outport what his flour was made of he would stare at you and be mute.

The government also planned the construction of a road, which would make communication easier between the northern outports and St. John's.