The culture of nature
in Cape Breton
What does it mean for a small island at
the edge of
Canada to colour its nature 'Celtic'?
Click for Pdf.
The Cabot Trail
winds its rollercoaster-like way along or near
the coastline, offering views of mountains, cliffs, stunning drops to
the shore
and its expanse of ocean, and of roadside gift shops and hints of the
(now much
quieter) fishing villages that still span much of the coast.
As the road’s
eastern arm crosses northward across the park boundary, an interesting
transformation occurs, as all traces of ‘lived culture’ disappear and
are
replaced by what Alex
Wilson (1992) referred to as ‘the culture of nature’: signs
directing visitors to scenic overlooks, roadside parking areas, and
numbered
trailheads, all stitched together by the familiarly minimalist semiotic
of
yellow-on-brown National Parks signs – a question mark indicating an
information booth, an upside-down ‘V’ for a camping area, a
stick-figured,
circle-headed, binocular-holding ‘man’ indicating a lookout point, and
so on.
As the highway winds through the area of North Mountain and South
Mountain,
both the lookout points and the cars in their parking lots increase in
number,
and, at the height of fall, the foliage blazes in remarkable colours
from the
wall of highlands facing the cars and onlookers.
A dozen or so scenic viewpoints later,
as
the visitor departs the park’s western boundary, the landscape
seems
suddenly ‘real’ again, with the white and pastel-coloured Acadian
homes, with
their gently-pitched, seaward-sloping roofs, straddling the road, and
the
hardware stores, doughnut shops, and bed-and-breakfasts of the seaside
village
of Chéticamp. It is
almost as if a black-and-white – or green – screen has
suddenly burst into living colour, abounding in the lived culture of
human
livelihoods being made, with even the
optimistic economic sign of fishing boats
in the harbour. Or is it the other way around, with the national
park’s muted
signage highlighting the living colour of its scenery, while this
thoroughly
‘cultured’ world outside it serves as its black-and-white foil?
A puzzled islander
Cape Breton as a
New World Scotland:
Historian Ian
McKay (1992, 1993, 1994) has exhaustively documented
how urban-based cultural producers and government tourism managers,
during the
second quarter of the twentieth century, produced the image of Nova
Scotia as a
‘New World Scotland’ and a ‘timeless’ place of rugged, hearty, but
simple
‘country folk.’ . . . With the steel and coal industries centred around
Sydney Harbour and its vicinity, Cape Breton at the time housed the
largest
industrial complex in the Atlantic Provinces.
Following
his ascent to the premiership, Premier Angus
MacDonald vigorously pursued this vision of
Nova Scotia as the ‘last great stronghold of the Gael in America’
(MacDonald
1937) and ‘greatest outpost of Celtic Scotland in the whole world’
(MacDonald
1948). To make Cape Breton more attractive to that ‘whole world,’
MacDonald
developed the Cabot Trail highway, deeded a part of the northern cape
to the
federal government for the creation of Cape
Breton Highlands National Park, and
presided over the founding of St
Ann’s Gaelic College (with its
nostalgic-romanticist Hall of the Clans) and the construction of the
Lone
Shieling, a replica of a Scottish Highland crofter’s cottage designed
after one
mentioned nostalgically in the anonymous poem ‘Canadian Boat-Song,’ a
poem
which had already been recited by generations of Nova Scotia school
children.
MacDonald went so far as to suggest to his minister of mines and
resources, J.
A. McKinnon, that Cape Breton Highlands National Park foresters wear
Scottish
kilts and replace the green forester’s bonnet with the ‘Scottish blue’
(McKay
1992:29). Nature was thus to be firmly associated in the visitor’s mind
with
the tartan and the kilt, the cultural trappings of an ethnicity
reconstructed
in response to the pressures of tourism (McKay 1992:45).
Paradoxically, while a
‘merry tartanism covered Nova Scotia,’ the official neglect of the
needs of
Gaelic speakers led to a near-disappearance of the Gaelic language in
the
province (McKay 1992:34). As McKay puts it, MacDonald wrote the ‘saga
of the
Scottish soul into the province’s collective memory – on its roads and
signs,
its festivals and gatherings’ (19).
Celtic Colours
International Festival:
Celtic Colours is the
third largest Celtic festival in the world, topped only by
Glasgow’s Celtic
Connections
and the Festival
Interceltique de Lorient in Brittany, France. The ‘colours’
are a play on the implied interpenetration of the island’s cultural and
natural heritage, both of which will greet visitors to the island in
full bloom
at this autumnal harvest of artistic events, ceilidhs (gatherings),
square
dances, and celebrations.
Celticity I:
But what makes the music 'Celtic'? The instrumentation, its tonal
qualities and sonorities, its vocal
delivery, its lilting, dance-like rhythms and repetitive variational
forms, or
by the ethnic affiliations, languages spoken or sung, or ‘temperaments’
of its
performers? If instrumentation, is it the bagpipes, tin whistles, and
fiddles,
or the strumming guitars, electric pianos, and synthesizer washes that
increasingly fill in its textures?
The festival is a place where
Celticity and pan-Celtic identities are displayed,
performatively enacted, and transformed. ‘Celticity’ is redefined both
more
tightly or centrifugally – with pride of place given to Cape Breton
traditions,
with their unique and localized fiddle-playing styles, pianistic
accompaniment,
and step-dance traditions that have disappeared even in the Scotland in
which
they ostensibly originated – and, at the same time, more expansively,
extending
outward into the Latin Transatlantic (e.g., via Spain's bagpiper Carlos
Nunez, who claims to have met Celtic bagpipers while traveling in
Cuba), the American South (through
the Acadian Diaspora, whose musical culture shows mutual influences
with and on Gaelic musical traditions), the multi-ethnic world of
‘Aboriginal music’
(through such artists as Mi’kmaq Cape Bretoner Lee Cremo), and into the
by-roads of ‘world music’ through the various collaborations of such
‘Celtic
music’ giants and crossover artists as The Chieftains and Afro Celt
Sound
System.
Cape Breton Island is thereby repositioned
from being a ‘rural backwater’ or, at best, a peripheral outpost of
cultural
conservatism to what is now a lively and progressive cultural
crossroads – a
place that seems on its way to becoming what Bruno Latour calls an
‘obligatory
passage point’ within the transnational networks of Celticist cultural
marketing. What were once local, family- and community-based
performance
traditions have been extended or mutated into global networks of
musicianship,
fandom, style, and commerce. Renamed ‘Celtic,’ the music of Cape Breton
performers, from the vocal stylings of Rita MacNeil to the rocked-up
performance antics of Ashley MacIsaac, comes to signify the ‘timeless’
tradition, expressive energy, and natural and cultural ‘colours’ of the
island
itself.
See Cape Breton Music.com
The
Red Shoe Pub in Mabou (above right) had been one of the hottest
gathering spots for Cape Breton's fiddlers and dancers. It closed a
couple of years ago.
"Before we
were Celtic," writes Frances
MacEachen, editor of the English-Gaelic quarterly
Am
Braighe,
we were Scottish.
Not so long ago the
promoters wanted us to adorn kilts and bellow clan cries. Now, it
seems, we are
more photogenic with fiddles and perhaps a less ethnic look:
cosmopolitan
rhythms linked with ancient tunes… world music… now we’re talking. Of
course,
the almost-fallen-down barn makes a nice backdrop now and then. The
point is that all
these images are based in myth and marketing, nothing real."
(MacEachen 1997b; italics
added)
See more on
Gaelic
cultural initiatives.
But what is real
and what isn't? The pre-Columbian Mi’kmaq population maintained trading
networks extending down the coast and into the interior of the
continent. When
they entered into trading relationships with Europeans, their fur
trapping
activities became nested within an international network that resulted
in
substantial reduction of fur-bearing species and in other ecological
transformations. Nineteenth and early twentieth century Cape Breton
rural life
was similarly integrated into larger market networks. Livestock,
butter, crops,
and timber from more prosperous ‘frontland’ farms were sold to markets
supplying the coastal fishing and mining settlements (as well as
Halifax and
St. John’s, Newfoundland), which in turn supplied international markets
with
cod, coal, and other staples. Farmers and squatters on the less
prosperous
‘backlands’ barely eked out a living and regularly resorted to seasonal
migrant
labour in coastal fishing towns, coal mines, or as far away as Halifax
and
Boston. Beef farmers faced competition from the American Midwest, just
as local
fishing and mining industries responded to the rise and fall in world
prices
for their goods (Hornsby 1992; Donovan 1990; Pryke 1992).
‘Myth
and marketing’
may seem less real than the musical and cultural traditions passed down
from
generation to generation because those cultural traditions were never
marketed
to larger consumption networks the way the staples of Cape Breton’s
economy
have been. Today that situation has changed: song and dance have become
the new
cod and coal for many Gaelic Cape Bretoners. This point is perhaps
neatly
underscored by the fact that the current Minister of Tourism, Culture,
and
Heritage for Nova Scotia, Rodney Macdonald, happens to be an excellent
young
fiddler from Inverness County.
Fiddler Rodney MacDonald, who doubles as
the Premier of Nova Scotia
Cape
Breton includes islanders of
French or Acadian, English, and Irish ancestry, as well as an
indigenous
Mi’qmak population and a potpourri of South and East Europeans,
Lebanese,
African-Canadians, and other ‘hyphenated Canadian’ ethnicities centred
in the
urban areas around Sydney. Not surprisingly, there is competition for
scarce
state resources among these different groups, and potential contention
around who speaks for the island.
The Mi’kmaq have the
longest-running claims to Cape Breton Island, or Unama’ki, as it is
known in
their language. With a population of some five or six thousand
concentrated in the island’s interior near the
saltwater Bras d’Or Lakes, the Mik’maq have played a disproportionately
visible
role in a series of recent environmental struggles. In an alliance with
non-Native environmental groups, the Mi’kmaq played a critical role in
a
campaign against the forestry practices of Swedish multinational Stora,
and
later mobilized decisive opposition against a proposed granite quarry
on
Kelly’s Mountain (Kluskap Mountain) (see Hornborg 1994, 1998; Mackenzie
and Dalby
2003; Stackhouse 2001). Attempts to reinscribe a Mi’kmaq identity onto
the
landscape, outside of their reservations and towns, have included the
proposed
construction of Kluskap Kairn to memorialize those who had fallen in
the four
centuries of ‘protracted holocaust’ since the arrival of white Europeans
(Mackenzie and Dalby 2003:319)
For more on the Mi'kmaq, see the
Mi'kmaq
Resource Center.
Islands at the Edges of
Canada:
Heritage, Landscape, and Identity in Cape Breton and Haida Gwaii
(grant project in development, in cooperation with the Institute of
Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island)
How can peripheral
island regions like Cape Breton (Nova Scotia) and Haida Gwaii (the
Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia) make the transition from
being primary resource providers (timber, fish, coal) to sustaining
themselves in the turbulent, globalized economy of late capitalism?
This comparative
study of post-industrial
transformation will focus on the
role of
natural and cultural heritage tourism development and regional identity
processes. It will examine the transformation of island
communities in
Cape Breton Island and the Queen
Charlottes as
resource-extraction industries are disappearing and attempts are made
to
develop tourist and post-industrial economies in their place. It
focuses
specifically on the intersection of discourses of nature (in the
identification
and conservation of natural heritage and conservation programs) and of
culture,
ethnicity/race, and identity (in the identification, management, and
promotion
of cultural heritage), with particular attention to the interplay
between outsiders’ representations of these regions/landscapes and
islander
appropriations and responses to these representations.