CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Fogo Island: The Outport That Stayed

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Off the northeast coast of Newfoundland lies Fogo Island, one of the largest of the province’s offshore islands. By the 1700s, fishing families from England and Ireland had begun settling in its sheltered coves, and for generations they made their living from the inshore cod fishery, salting their catch and drying it in the sun on wooden platforms known as flakes. The island’s dozen or so communities were scattered along its rocky coastline. Separated by distance, rough terrain and religion, they had surprisingly little to do with one another, and many islanders rarely visited villages only a few kilometres from their own.

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By the 1960s, this way of life was under serious threat. Large factory trawlers were taking ever-greater amounts of fish offshore, the price of salt fish was falling, and many households depended on government assistance to get through the winter. At the same time, the provincial and federal governments were encouraging people in small, isolated outports to resettle in larger “growth centres,” where schools, hospitals and jobs could be provided more easily. Households that agreed to move received a payment to help with the cost. Across Newfoundland, hundreds of communities were abandoned in this way, and many on Fogo Island assumed that their turn would come next.

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In 1967, the National Film Board, working with Memorial University, sent a film crew to the island as part of a new program called Challenge for Change. Rather than making a documentary about the islanders, the filmmakers recorded them speaking for themselves about the fishery, unemployment and their hopes for their children. The films were screened in community halls across the island, where residents discovered that their neighbours shared the same worries. Crucially, the films were also shown to government officials, whose filmed replies were then taken back to the island. These exchanges helped persuade islanders to form their own co-operative so they could process their catch locally. Fogo Island was never resettled, and the “Fogo Process,” as the method came to be called, has since been used by community groups around the world.

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The collapse of the northern cod stocks, which led to a federal fishing moratorium in 1992, brought new hardship, and the island’s population continued to shrink. A different kind of revival began in the 2000s, when an islander who had made her fortune in the technology industry returned home and, with her brothers, set up a charity aimed at building a new economy on the island. Its best-known project, the Fogo Island Inn, opened in 2013. Standing on stilts above the rocky shore, the building was designed by a Newfoundland-born architect, and much of its furniture and many of its quilts were made by island craftspeople. Profits are put back into the community, and small studios scattered across the island host visiting artists from around the world.